Crawling Ahead

Sara is on the move. Below is a video clip that depicts her progression of ability and confidence from the summer until a couple weeks ago. Now, she is big on pulling up and wants to stand a lot. She is quite mobile and gets around our apartment easily from room to room. We have a new level to attain in keeping items out of reach.

It is also worth noting that this is my first adventure with iMovie on our new Mac...so a steep learning curve right now.

Painting

One day last week we were trying to think of something to do in the afternoon. We are at this stage with Kacy where we do not want her to take a nap (because she will be up to late at night) however it is sometimes challenging to keep her awake. So we are trying to come up with creative things to do with her in the afternoons. We had a lot of fun doing chocolate pudding finger painting. Basically we made some chocolate pudding together and then pulled out some wax paper and I let her "finger paint" on it. Kacy was quite good at it and made some cool designs. We also really enjoyed licking our fingers as we painted. However by far the most entertainment came from Sara...who thoroughly enjoyed this activity.

1st Step--Investigation...what is this stuff? She is testing out her sense of touch.

Ohh...this is fun to play with...still touch!

Getting slightly more adventurous...we are starting to make a mess...it is beautiful art though.

Continuing on to the sense of taste...look mom it is fun and it tastes good.

Oh happy day! We are having fun now!

At this point we are into full indulgance and loving it.

So the last picture here should be the one of her in the bathtub getting cleaned off, but it didn't turn out that well. As I said Sara was the true entertainment for Kacy and I and she couldn't figure out why we were laughing so much! Fun times!

Sara's awake, again!

So perhaps it was payback for my happiness with the sleeping abilities of our girls. Ironically, Sara refused to sleep last night. She was happy to be up and play which she did for an hour in the middle of the night. She was not happy at all to sleep. So she stayed up almost all night from 1-6 with a couple short (very short) naps of 20 minutes or less. Pretty unbelievable. Hopefully tonight will be better.

Despite her lack of sleep she was quite cheerful at lunch today.



Laura and I disagree at times at how intentional Sara is, but she is definitely communicating and understanding more. For example, she does NOT want baby food anymore. She wants yogurt and real food (despite the fact she only has 1 tooth). She is quite expressive about this. She came around the corner the other day and looked at me and smiled with a "dada" (which I have been claiming to hear for a couple weeks). She also does "mama" and seems to say "ba-ba" for ball although we may argue on this one. She seems to understand bottle pretty well. She is fun and developing fast.

Sara's Awake!

We have been blessed with 2 girls that are great sleepers. Sara is definitely more sensitive to light and noise than Kacy, but given fair conditions of darkness, familiarity and quiet, she does great. The other night, she made a random 10:30 pm wake up. So we pulled her out of bed and sat down and played with her a bit before putting her back asleep. She was quite funny...and photogenic during this session. She is a cutie...at least in our opinion.

Playing peekaboo!
And for next trick, I'll show off my wave!

And here is a family photo from the National Zoo in DC over the summer.

Summer Highlights

So, it seems that as the summer goes we didn't do that great a job of keeping out blog updated. However hopefully with school back in session we will keep it up. So, here is a list of summer highlights including some pictures.

• Sara getting to meet all her relatives including a set of grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles. She loved playing and Grandma and Grandpa's house.
• Spending about 3 days in Pigeon Forge, TN at Brent and Jo Fraizer's cabin with Darren's parents and his brother, sister-in-law, and their daughter Emilee.

(Sara was less than pleased with the grass on her legs...)

• Attending Larkin Stokes' wedding and seeing Kacy and Hayley enjoy the dance floor!
• Laura, Kacy, and Sara spent most of the summer with Grandma and Granddaddy Penland and Carre, and Aunt Lesley. Thanks for all the help!
• Helping Aunt Lesley get ready for her baby, shop, talk, and have a baby shower.
• A trip to Pennsylvania and then over to D.C. to see Darren and then to see the Denny's.
• Spending time with my Grandma Penland...a true woman of God!
• Shopping, eating, and generally enjoying America, for better or worse!
• Calah, Kolaya, and Mikaya Ronzheimer coming down.
• Needless to say, Laura got a lot of quality girl time in this summer . Here's a picture from DC.
  

Well, with school starting on Monday it seems that our summer is coming to an end! We hope that you had an enjoyable summer.