My, Oh MY, Do We Have Some Pictures to Catch Up!

Bean at 4 months

Sissys...snuggling to some Dinosaur Train. :)

Christmas cuties!

Love her smiles.

Baby girl at 5 months!

baby sneeze...so cute!

Oh my... just perfect :)

Stella and her favorite bedtime bear! Appropriately named "Beary" - thank you Ava :)

Well, what happened here? Anyway - milk and cookies for Santa...and Ava didn't want to forget her letter to Santa...that never...got sent...ooops! ;)

Ava got a fishtank for Christmas...and a lovely new blue fish named "Glowey" :) She can name 'em!

Oooh, lets try some cereal Stella!

Pretty serious about that lil guy...

Glowey - up close and personal. :) After we put Ava to bed the other night, she came out of her room 20 or so minutes later and said, "Glowey did not yisten to me, daddy" Eric and I looked at each other and said, "what do you mean glowey didn't listen to you, Ave? What did you tell Glowey?" At this point, Eric went up to investigate...hoping to not find a fish in her bed. ;-) Well, what had happened was Glowey got stuck in that tube in the middle with the bubbles. Ava was telling Glowey to get out of that tube, and he wasn't listening to her. Silly Glowey.

Smiley Face!!

Stella lives most everyday with Ava in her face. Of course the pink headband kept her occupied this time, usually its Ava's hair that she's going after.

The Pink Bandit Sisters

Stinkerbelle trying to figure out the sitting up thing.

Stella's grandma face. Cracks us up! I need to get a better picture, because when she makes this face she looks exactly like an old toothless granny!!

I couldn't leave out the best part of Glowey's habitat...it GLOWS!! Imagine that! :-)

Shutterfly

Click here to view these pictures larger

A Stella-bean Update...

This blog is our life book...our family journal...my only written memories of my babies (baby books are hit and miss around here...and they don't capture the feeling of the moment anyways). So it looks like I need to post an update of my baby Stella bean!

Stella will be 7 months old next week! So big...yet so little. :) She really is so little. My petite lil princess. At her 6 month well visit, she weighed in at 15 lbs 4 oz...putting her in the whopping 25th percentile and her length was 27 & 1/4, putting her between the 50-75th percentile. Long little string bean!

Rewinding a little, she began rolling over (controlled & consistently) at 5 months and she popped 2 bottom teeth at her 6 month mark. I'm wondering what 7 months will bring - sitting up alone perhaps? She is eating like a champ nowadays. Still nurses about 5 times a day, eats a breakfast of oatmeal + bananas or peaches and for dinner she has had any combination of avocado, sweet potatoes, peas, and pears. It took a little while for her to get the hang of food. We started out with cereal, and have s-l-o-w-l-y made our way to real food. She has just in the last week or so, really decided to take off with eating.

Our baby has been sleeping straight through the night for a week or so now. Happy or sad? I can't decide. Happy to be getting solid sleep again, but sad to miss out on the once a night feeding. She sometimes wakes up and stirs a bit around 3 or 4am, and if I reeeaaallly wanted to I could probably go to her, but she's back to sleep in 5 minutes...just long enough for me to think about getting out of bed. ;) The video monitor is so neat...I love looking at her cute baby bum high up in the air and her legs tucked under her body.

Her naps are sporadic and inconsistent, but whatever, she's happy to be awake playing with her sissy. ;) love these kids...

Now, let's see if I can post some pics from my iPad on here. Blogger is not iPad friendly, so this may not work. A blogger app would be nice!

Back From my Hiatus!!

It feels like just yesterday when I made my last post ...clearly I've missed a couple months of our lives, but I'm making a comeback!

Since the new year began, I've taken on the daunting task of reorganizing our life a bit. Nothing major, but I felt like things were getting away from me...my house keeping, Ava's preschool, my fitness (listen, skinny does not mean healthy...cardiovascular fitness and tone muscle equals healthy...both of which I've been lacking for a long time), my other job, meals, this poor BLOG!...I just kept jumping from task to task and nothing was getting finished. Not to mention my kids are growing and I strive to drown in their giggles and get lost in their hugs and kisses everyday of our lives. Hard to do when other things are lingering over your head. Needless to say, I think I'm almost there...so close to the land of balance and it feels so good! The first thing I had to realize is that, brace yourselves here, I AM NOT SUPERWOMAN! ;) So some things I just can't add to my plate...like P90X...good lord I was working out 6 days per week for 45-90 minutes! Gimme a break!! It's a nice plan for those who don't have 800 other things to do on top of working out. Now, 30 minutes 4 days per week is so much better - and needed! Anyway, it's good to have my priorities reorganized to include all those things important to me - like this blog! My hope is to post once a month. At the very top of my list is spending quality time with my kids and baby daddy. ;) Everything else falls from there. If I'm faced with housework and requests from my daughter to "pway wif me mama!" then you better believe I am stopping everything to "pway"!! And I'll be taking full advantage of any opportunity Stella gives me to nap-nurse with her or rock her to sleep, nestled up on my chest. Bad habits or not, those moments give motherhood meaning!! Lord knows I will miss these days when they're gone, but I will never miss those chores. I encourage all you overwhelmed moms to remember this everyday:

"Good moms have sticky floors, dirty ovens, laundry piles, and HAPPY kids."