Hard to believe, but Juliette is 9 months old now! As I may have blogged before, my favorite picture place went out of business after her 3 month pictures and so we tried JcP for her 6 month pictures, but I was unhappy with that experience. So a good friend of mine recommended Portrait Innovations and we decided to give it a try...and we liked it a lot! The lady was great with Juliette in getting her to smile, which was not easy at first because she would cry every time the lights would flash and make that popping noise! So it took a while to get going, but eventually she warmed up (with some added silliness provided by Daddy) and we got some great pictures! I definitely plan to go back here for future pictures and at some point will try a picture of all 3 of them here. Thanks for the recommendation Kelley!! Here are a few of my favorites...

As for an update on Juliette, she is not crawling yet, but I think she is close. She gets up on all 4's and rocks back and forth, but then gets on her tummy. Abbey did this at first but crawled pretty quickly after that (as opposed to Ben who scooted on his tummy for months before getting up on all 4's to crawl). Once she is on her tummy, she either moves in a circle, rolls to get where she wants to go, or pushes herself backwards. She is eating some table food, but not too much. I give her some of our dinner every night, but she doesn't eat a ton of it and still seems to prefer her baby food. But it's getting better - we must keep working on it so she can eat birthday cake when she turns 1!! She is doing great though and is constantly entertained by her siblings! We are so blessed!

Garden 2010

After a very successful first year of gardening last year, we decided to expand our garden this year to see how we do. Last year we got a ton of tomatoes and cucumbers, but our strawberries and peppers were eaten by bunnies. So this year Paul put up a much better bunny fence (hopefully), with the help of Theresa, Mama Kay and Papa, and almost doubled the size of the garden (it is about 10 feet x 6 feet). After about 2 weekends worth of work (thank you Paul for all the hard work you put into this), here is the final product!

 

 

Paul planted 8 tomato plants, 3 watermelon plants, 2 summer squash plants, 2 green pepper plants, 2 zucchini plants, 1 hot pepper plant and our 2 strawberry plants from last year came back. We also have oregano that came back from last year and Paul added cilantro to our herb garden.

Staying at Home

Sorry for the lack of blogging lately, but we have been busy! People always ask me what we do all day long now that I have quit working and I must admit, that is one question I wasn't sure the answer to until we stayed home together. But somehow, our days fill up rather quickly and time is zooming by. So I just thought I would take a few minutes to share some of the things we do at home all day long, in case you are curious.

We learn how to help take care of each other...

We can meet our cousin and go to the zoo on a random Thursday...

More fun at the zoo...

Playing together at the zoo...

We have playdates with friends on any random day of the week...

Juliette is still learning how to enjoy play dates...

We bake cookies...

Or eat the batter anyway...

Or find other fun uses for mixing bowls...

We work on sharing...

And we just have fun with the chaos that comes from being home all day with 3 kids...

We're having a blast!!

Kurby Play Date

We had a great weekend! On Saturday, we went over to Aunt Domi's to drink mint julips, eat Derby pie and oh yeah, watch the Kentucky Derby! No pictures of that, but definitely a good time so worthy of a mention even without pictures to post.

On Sunday we had Uncle Phil, Aunt Sandy, Joey (4 days older than Abbey) and Jillian over - it had been way too long since we have been able to get together! Jillian is now 4 months old and getting much closer to Juliette's size - they are sure to be best friends! Here they are sharing a toy.

And Ben and Joey had fun on the bikes!

Aunt Sandy shows she can handle multiple kids at once!

Juliette and Jillian sharing another toy later on...

And here they are deep in conversation...or a staring contest...

As it got later, we put PJ's on the kids and Joey and Abbey decided to take a little rest on Chien (who did not seem to mind, let alone notice, that the kids were using him as a pillow - good dog!!).

We had so much fun - hope it isn't that long before we can see you all again!

Another Juliette Update!

Just another quick update...we noticed this morning that Juliette is finally getting some teeth. She is 8.5 months now and her front bottom two teeth just broke the skin. As with her brother and sister, she took it like a champ. We had no indication she was teething until the teeth actually came in. We have been extremely lucky so far to not have any teething issues with any of the kids - hope it continues!