Happy Birthday Katie

*This post has been sitting as a "draft" for practically a month now. Might as well post it.*

Katie turned 3 years old right before Valentines Day. I have discovered that I buy toys too often for my kids. This is because I generally buy toys that have already been used by someone else from thrift stores or garage sales or Craigslist - so it's easy for me to just bring them home and hand them to my kids to enjoy (or else they are there with me when I buy them and they are excited to play with them). Problem is, when it comes to birthdays or Christmas time, I just don't know what to get them. We go to the toy store or Target and everything just looks like useless JUNK. I already have enough clutter - I really don't WANT to add junk to my house.

So, this year, we got Katie this tub of letter beads to string (lower case letters) and 10 books. She was as happy as can be - and we didn't feel like we were adding useless junk to our collection.

I have never thrown an actual birthday party for any of my kids yet, but my good friend who has a Disneyland Annual Pass took Katie to Disneyland for two hours so she could go on "It's a Small World" and get a birthday button. I asked her what kind of cake she wanted and she said, "No cake." And she meant it. I asked her multiple times and she always replied with the same answer, so "no cake" it was. We took her out for frozen yogurt instead and she had a great day.

A few days later she picked out this little kitty family with the birthday money from Grandma Cookies and Grandpa Cozza. She definitely loves kitties. (And doesn't her hair look awesome?)

Happy Birthday Katie.

p.s. 3 year-olds go potty in the toilet every time. Well, almost every time.

Blue

Jodie, she is getting up on her hands and knees and moving forward now, but it's not like she is at full speed. The bigger babies have more poundage to move around. ;)
Her eyes are blue.
Like, but don't LOVE the teether. I put frozen bananas in it or frozen baby food and she seems to enjoy it, but I only use it before I bathe her because it makes a huge mess.

She has an unsightly runny nose in this picture - so I cropped it to avoid the "what gross pictures" comment. Ha!

A Few Milestones

Millie decided to start crawling on all fours last night. No longer just a worm. And today those two little teeth finally decided to break through on the bottom. Two milestones in two days. 6 months is a pretty busy age.

Give a Cat a Bone?

So, I have a random chicken bone sitting in my fridge right now. Just sitting there on the shelf. I felt like it was a reasonable, though silly, compromise.

Ryan loves all things fast; space shuttles, race cars, jets, Blue Angels, the French TGV trains, and of course, cheetahs. He pretends to be a cheetah pretty much all the time. He is always on all fours (hands and feet, not knees) and races all over the place. He's actually pretty fast at it. He often scares Katie with his "mean cheetah" faces. He is learning that "mean cheetahs" have to go outside. Only nice cheetahs are allowed in the house. He tries to keep the mean faces to a minimum. The cheetah play has also caused many a hole-in-the-knee of his pants, but that's a story for another day. I digress.

He has recently started asking me - no, BEGGING me for a dog bone. We go to the pet store to buy food for our bunnies and he asks me if I will buy him a dog bone. I ask what he wants to do with it and he tells me in an exasperated tone, "Chew on it." I have tried to explain how disgusting that is (he LOVES the word "disgusting" right now), but he still insists that he needs one so that when he is pretending to be a cheetah, he can chew on a bone.

So last night when we ate a roasted chicken, he asked for the drumstick. Then he cleaned the chicken off of the bone and went and washed it off. Don't think I didn't see it coming. At least it doesn't have weird dog stuff on it. I told him it would NOT be okay to keep it in his room or else it would get gross and start to smell awful. He declared that he could keep it from going bad if he just put it in the fridge. *sigh* A good compromise? You tell me.

Response to Gina

Maybe I shouldn't mention that last week alone, all three of our children fell off of a bed and hit their heads. All three. In one week.

Ouch!

She fell off of the picnic table bench at the park.

This is what the outside looks like.

Here's the inside. Her tooth pretty much went through to the other side. That's what the outside wound was. Ouch!

Can't Get Enough

Here is my new eat-it-at-every-meal, wish-they-sold-it-by-the-gallons, I-just-might-clean-Costco-out favorite food.

Millie Sits Up

Pears Update

Apparently, Millie got a virus that lead to congestion that lead to a double ear infection.
The virus caused the rash a few days later, not the pears.

And the diaper rash is a separate issue. Something in Huggies reacts with her skin. So we have to use a different brand of diapers.

Now, hopefully she's on the mend.

5 months

14 lbs 6 oz
26 inches

• Eats some solid foods - rice cereal and applesauce mainly.
• Her hair is growing up top so it doesn't stick straight up as much anymore - much to her father's dismay. He says that was her trademark.
• It also doesn't appear to be curly anymore.
• Gets up on her hands and knees and rocks back and forth (belly completely off of the floor).
• Can scoot but is still not completely controlled about it.
• Has started to sit up on her own.
• Will now voice her displeasure over things - usually when the baby food is all gone.
• Has the tiniest bit of stranger anxiety when things are moving too fast or too loudly.
  
• Can sit easily on my hip.
• Can ride in a shopping cart.
• Still doesn't have her ears pierced.
  
• Thinks kids are SO funny.
• LOVES when I sing to her - even right in her face.