Banana yogort skin care

Haven't you heard? It's all the rage in Europe.

Even Onyx wants in on it. Ok not really. She didn't have a choice. She would have rather licked it up.

The meatball incident

When Mike was Cole's age he was asked by someone what his dogs name was and he responded with"Barker" which was no where close to what his dogs name was. The golden retreiver they had at the time was named "Ski". Mike new that. Fast forward to this week at Trader Joe's. Cole was at the sample counter with Mike when Siena and I walked up. The girl commented on her and then asked Cole what his sister's name was. With out hesitation, Cole looked at her and said "meatball".

Physical Therapy - Day one

Siena had her first physical therapy visit this afternoon. She was a great sport and only got mad at Dan (her therapist) a few times. The good news is that Siena does NOT have Torticollis!!! He said that her problem is lack of muscle strength in her shoulders and trunk. I was so happy to hear this. He thinks the head tilt happens when she gets tired which does make a little sense and would explain why the head tilt changed directions.

So this "lack" of strength comes from her "limited" amount of tummy time. That of course is my fault but Cole has always been pretty unpredictable when is comes to sudden movements and after he stomped her a few months back it made me scared to leave her on the ground. Anyways, Dan gave us some different things to work on with her to help build strength and loosen up her legs. She is 2 months or so behind on consistently rolling over. She can do it but chooses not to. The reason she is not rolling over is because she is actually making it difficult for her to get over because she is not using her top arm to direct her body. Instead the arm is going the opposite direction limiting her movement.

To experience what she is going through sit with your back up straight and try to pinch your shoulder blades together. Now try and turn and reach for something while keeping your shoulder blades in the same position. Not to comfortable huh?

Her therapy routine at home so far will consist of no less than 3 hours of tummy time a day with exercises on getting her to roll over both directions and getting up on to her knees in an all fours position. She is already loving the all fours stuff. He said we should be seeing results pretty quickly!

Tall tales

Cole went to bed looking normal. When he woke up from his nap he looked like this (the red under the eye). We asked him what happened to his eye and he said "Lizard do it. Lizard from moon"

Pear Apple Oatmeal

One of her favorite so far! Siena has done a 180 and now despises Peas.

More reasons why I love this kid

He finally gave me a normal smile for a picture!!!

He can put his own shoes on. He gets extra points when he gets them on the correct feet and matches the pairs together. Obviously he missed on both of those is this picture. The green lego sheet is his skateboard. He came up to me and said "mama, skateboard" and then put it on the ground and rode it around.

This is also a skateboard. Siena thought it was tons of fun.

He farted the other night and jump up shocked and said "butt....it tooted"

No word is too big for him to repeat -"frustwerated" (frusterated) and believe me he repeats EVERYTHING!

Anytime he sees mike eating ice cream he has to run and get himself and I each our own spoon

He loves to get "new ones" of anything he is eating. apple slice, cereal bar - before his has finished the "old one"

He says diaper like he is from France - "die-pierre"

He actually tells the truth. There was a ball in the bath tub with a bunch of "bites

taken out of it and Onyx usually destroys his toys so when I asked him who bit the ball I fully expected him to blame Onyx, instead he says "Cole. Yum!". I asked Mike and he claims truth to that.

The other morning he told Onyx "No ah-knee. trouble!" Apparently Onyx was in trouble.

When ever he goes in a time out he says he is in "big trouble"

Meet and Greet

Believe it or not, Siena and Onyx have not had an official meeting since Siena arrived on this planet. Finally last weekend when Cole was snoozing and Onyx was actually home and not wandering around the property we decided to formally introduce them.

Onyx starts with a sniff of Siena's feet.
Then she licks her feet which causes Siena to laugh and grab Onyx's head.

So then Onyx does what she does best. Licks Siena right in the face. That means she approves of Siena.

Now this is just getting weird

How does she go from straight to tilting to the left to straight to tilting to the right? Something about this does not sit well with me.

Airplane

He built it. He calls is an "ape-plane" (airplane)

My future replacement

ok, so my baby has formed a love affair with the bottle. She still loves nursing but when the milk runs dry she demands a bottle and when you give it to her she shoves it in her mouth and then she laughs at it. Laughing is an understatement. She cracks up belly laughing at it.

Siena's new carseat

The time has arrived to switch Siena into her big girl car seat. Being that her infant carrier goes to 20 pounds you would think she could still fit in it but between the cloth diapers and her chunky thighs things have been getting pretty tight, hence the new (to us) carseat.

The old car seat

Cole was a little protective of the new car seat. He buckled himself in it (good thing we don't rely on him to buckle him self in). He kept saying "Cole car seat. no Sea-ah-na"

This picture cracks me up. Look at how small she is compared to Cole in the same seat. What a peanut!
This look kills me. I wonder how much I will see it when she is in high school. :-)

One smart cookie

We have had Siena in the walker for only a week now and boy has she mastered this thing! She cruises all around the house and if she wants you she will stalk you until she runs into your feet and then raises her arms to be picked up.

Yesterday morning Cole left his food on his table and went outside. Siena seized the opportunity to attack when he wasn't looking. I grabbed the camera and Mike and I watched the show. She is so sneaky!

She wheeled herself right up to the table.

And then she reached,
and reached.....
until she got it. Then she flung it on the ground. I stop taking pictures at that point because we tried to catch it before it hit the floor. No such luck. Man was it funny and she was so proud of her self.

Nightmare naptime

Starting on Friday, Cole has been freaking out at nap time. He starts crying "no nap, no nap" and then when you leave his room he screams and hits the door for up to two hours. Now we go in there every 10 minutes or so to calm him down but he went from 3 hours naps with no problem to a sudden meltdown. We approached nap time a little differently today. First we took down his bug night lights because he kept pointing at them and saying "no bug, bad bug". Then we tried our normal routine which of course failed. So the next step was to leave his door open. I told him that it was nap time and he needed to get on his bed. I also told him that I would leave the door open but he could not come out of his room. I stayed on the couch where I could keep and eye on him and it took about 30 minutes but he finally fell asleep. He looked at some books before making an alligator bed and passing out. He was super quite the entire time so I was surprised when I peeked in and found him asleep. I closed the door so we could watch a movie and about an hour and a half later he woke up crying "open door, open door". Poor guy. The only other thing we can think of that may of had an effect on him was that his current favorite movie is Monster's Inc. And basically that movie revolves around monsters, bedtime, closed doors, and scaring kids. So "Monsters" as Cole calls it, has been shelved right next to Ghostbusters. Lets hope we can get back on track with nap times this week.

Sweet Potatoes

She seemed to like them, however she was super uncomfortable that night. I don't know yet if she was uncomfortable from them or the onset of the chicken pocks.

There's an alligator in our bed

Lately Cole has been waking up in the middle of the night and sneaking into our room. He doesn't come alone though, he brings an alligator. This particular time I was awake (2am) before he was so I saw him get out of bed, pick up the alligator, drag it over his shoulder and around the back of our bed and toss it up. Normally after that he waits to be lifted into bed but this time he turned around and went back into his room and grabbed the second alligator and brought it into the room. He tossed it on the bed by Mike and then walked around to my side and waited for me to lift him up. I found the whole thing pretty comical. He would only fall asleep if he was lying on my stomach. When I woke up this morning I was in between them. Looks like Mike won on space that night.

Stay away from the Fredy House

Siena has the chicken pocks. Yup! Blisters, fever and all. Fun times for us!

It always starts out sweet...

4 year anniversary

Yup! That's right! We've been married for 4 years now. And about 15 hours ago I realized that I had almost forgotten our anniversary. Yes you read that correctly, the wife forgot the anniversary. The only reason it even occurred to me is because I was asked at work yesterday what the date for tomorrow and after I said it, I stopped to think about why that date sounded familiar.....But don't worry, Mike forgave me. But secretly I think he forgot too.

So to celebrate our four years I am going to share pictures from our honeymoon in Italy. We took 29 rolls of film - yes film. We did not bring our digital camera (at the time the digital rebel was way out of our reach and we didn't want to lose the one we did have). The 35mm took better pictures. But I had the negatives put on cd and lets just say that 4 years later the pictures don't transfer as well. There are a lot of pictures of just us because this post is about us. Plus I hardly ever put up pictures of the parents. Some day I will post individual pics of the different towns we went to on our two separate trip to Italy. Maybe I'll even do Ireland and Scotland....that's when I have free time. :-)

Enjoy the pictures of me pre baby (10 pounds lighter) and Mike with hair!

Rome: our first stop on our two week trip

Venice - great memories, we stayed in an attic of a Venetian families house.

Lake Como - Bellaigo - I was keeping an eye out for George Clooney

The view from our hotel room. One thing about the least expensive hotel on the lake - bugs in the rooms!
Benno and Lukas drove down from Zurich and stayed a few days with us.
Lukas thought the lighter made for a romantic picture. :-)

Lake Como is an amazing lake! I can totally see why celebrities have secret homes here. Also it is such a rough, sometimes single lane road that a lot of people stay away.

The train. We took many trains. I refuse to drive in Italy. We took a taxi in Rome to Vatican City and it scared me half to death. Buses and trains are the way to go!

Cinque Terre - One of our favorite places in Italy. It is a costal area in north west side of the Italian Riveria. There are 5 towns lining the coast and you can either hike, take a train, or a boat to get to each town. Cars can not access the towns! We choose to hike after taking the train in from La Spezzia. The hike from the top town (5th) Monterosso al Mare to the Vernazza (4th town) and from Vernazza to Corniglia (3rd town) is like hiking in the back country of Yosemite. It is a very hard hike and isn't for the weak or wimpy. It will kick your butt so if you think you will wimp out halfway through take the train or boat, the only way out is to hike. No one is coming to your rescue!

This is the view of Vernazza on our way to Corniglia. Just breath taking! We had lunch down by the water before continuing on to the 3rd town.

We ate lunch at those little yellow umbrellas.

Vernazza
San Gimignano - one of the hill towns in Tuscany. Our first trip to Italy we went to Siena, Pisa, Lucca, and Viarregio so we wanted to check out another town. This town is known for their towers and still is preserved in it's midevil look. We ate at a bruschetteria. It was AMAZING!

Florence - This was our second time in Florence. We love this city. It has the best gelatto! Here is a picture of us from atop the Duomo.