Uncle Andrew and Aunt Liz Visit

We were so happy to have Aunt Liz and Uncle Andrew visit for Memorial Day weekend (pictures here).  The night before they came Nicky kept asking to get out of bed and would run to the front window to see where Uncle Andrew was.  When we got home from school on the day that they arrived Nicky jumped out of the car and ran into the house asking “where’s uncle Liz???”  Both of the kids loved all the extra attention.  We spent some time at the California Academy of Science (where Nicky accidentally dropped his pacifier into the alligator cage…oops!), walking the Dish and playing at the park. Lots of fun!

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Nicky really enjoyed Uncle Andrew’s (aka Uncle Horsie’s) boundless energy and responsiveness to the word “giddyup”:

Finger Foods

We started Kate on some beginner finger foods recently. She loves “eating” with the family. The first couple days she had a hard time getting them in her fingers to eat easily and they kept getting stuck in her fist. At one point she figured out she could pry her fist open with her other hand so she can get the little goodie that’s stuck on her palm. Precious.

Trip to Virginia

We had a big cross country trip a couple weeks ago to go to Grandad’s funeral at Arlington National Cemetery.  It was a sad occasion but so good to be able to see the whole family and to introduce little Kate to everyone.  We’ve been home for over a week now, but have finally recovered enough to upload the pictures (here).

The kids were perfect on the flight out, we didn’t even have to break out the electronics and got lots of compliments on how good they were:
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They were adorable and very well behaved the first couple days. We managed not to get any pictures of Kate that were worth posting after we got off the plane, but I promise she was with us and was a sweet, cute little princess:
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Nothing can last forever though and we paid for all the good behavior many times over on the flight back. Not surprisingly, there are no pictures and we did not make any friends on the plane… Now we’re back in our routine and everyone is well rested and back to normal.

Pedaling

Nicky learned how to pedal recently. As with all things developmental, one day suddenly he just started pedaling out of the blue. I would guess he’s been working on this at school. I certainly wasn’t teaching him at home…I had a cherry cheese cake bet running with Sam that he would learn to pedal after he turned two so my incentives were not geared toward teaching him to pedal too early. Nevertheless, he learned and is ready to start zooming around the neighborhood!

Manners

IMG_0578 Kitty’s manners have really gone downhill since we had kids (i.e. since we stopped paying attention to him). After Nicky was born we started seeing evidence that Hugo was occasionally getting up on the counters. But since Kate was born he’s realized that he has even less supervision and has taken to climbing up on the tables to eat food that’s been left behind and has even been known to jump up on the table to try to eat right off our plates before we’re even done eating. While this is horrible kitty behavior, it has inspired Nicky to develop an excellent defensive habit. He (rightfully) hates it when Hugo gets his food, so instead of leaving tempting treats around for the cat he clears his own plate. Voluntarily. Awesome.