naked pizza

Sarah carefully pulls off the cheese and meat from her pizza. Afterward, she picks up the slice and hands it to Tiff and says "It's too naked for me. It's because the cheese is all off."

10 months

Ryan is 10 months old as of last week. Where has the time gone? We took him in to the doctor on Wednesday for his 9-month check-up and he's a healthy 24 pounds and 29.5 inches. We have a referral to see an allergist next week to figure out his food issues. Ryan loves to eat... he's just limited as to what he's allowed at this point. The preliminary blood tests only revealed allergy to egg whites (and negative on the peanuts). His diet consists of cereal (as long as there's no fruit added), rice Chex, Cheerios, homemade bread (no eggs), beans and formula. Pretty boring diet if you ask me! Hopefully we can figure it all out and get him eating more.

Ryan at 10 months is:
Pulling up on everything and cruising along furniture.
Loves to push the little push-toy bus around. He almost gets giddy when he's doing it.
Climbs up and down stairs very well. It's a relief that he's figured out the "down"!
Yells and screams right along with his sisters. I'm trying to break that habit!
Is very snuggly and loves to give kisses. He doesn't bite as much as he used to :)
Has 7 teeth.
Is amazingly content. Even when he's exhausted he's a good baby. I love that!
Still eats anything and everything he can find off the floor. I have to sweep the kitchen floor multiple times a day to keep him from eating something he's not supposed to (aka: something the girls dropped)!
Loves his daddy. Always lights up and crawls over when Steve enters the room.

I love my little guy!

At this same appointment we weighed Sarah and Katie and found out Sarah weighs 2 1/2 pounds more than Katie! We were very amused.

More from Sarah

Sarah just says funny things.

Sarah comes down crying... "Ellie being mean." pause... "Mommy- you have a big nose."

After she wakes up this morning (the last one) she's sitting on the stairs and I say, "you were a tired little girl, weren't you?" "No! Not a little girl!!!" She does not like being called little these days. She's a big girl!

Random Thoughts

Here are just a few things that have been running through my mind lately...

It always amuses me when I have friends complain about going shopping/ running errands with one or two of their kids. Oh... it's just soooo hard. Picture this: it's pouring rain, the wind is gusting up to 30 mph, temp is hovering around 30 degrees and I have 3 places I need to go. I could wait, but the next day it's supposed to be colder and even windier. So of course, I take all 4 kids and we run in and out of the stores. Sometimes we're out for 2-3 hours running errands. Is it always ideal? Ha! Far from it. But mostly they're really good and that makes me happy. Oh- and today, when it would have been ideal to stay inside all day, I have had 6 kids to run around. I guess you never know your limits until they're tested?

Cooking. How can a girl reach the age of 14 and not know how to cook? I hope I don't offend anyone by telling this story, but it's really taught me the importance of letting my girls be in the kitchen with me. Our babysitter is usually solicited over dinner time so we can do a dinner date. In the past I've just let her do mac & cheese or frozen pizza. But my kids had eaten both within the week and I wasn't going to feed them that again. So I put out pancakes and sausage. You know- add water and cook the pancakes. Defrost and heat the pre-cooked sausages. When we got home Steve said, "what's that smell?" Needless to say, she had charred both the pancakes and sausage. I think my girls were less than gracious about it, but it looks like they ate it anyway. And maybe she just never cooked that kind of food before? Or maybe it was my stove? I hope so. But again- I plan on having girls that can cook the basics by the time they're that age.

And finally, what is it about turning 30 that made my metabolism stop? I've picked up exercising again lately (finally am healed well enough to actually get a good workout) But alas, all this exercise is not giving me the desired results!

asleep...asleep...

Tiff was tucking in the girls last night and was singing the Christmas carol "away in a manger" to and got to the part where the song goes "asleeeep, asleeeeep, asleeeeep, asleeeep..." and Sarah interrupted her showing great concern and said "nuh huh! and then proceeded to sing "awaaake, awaaake...."