big shoes

Lately the girls love playing with my shoes. I don't know how they're able to walk around, but they do a pretty good job.Obviously I photoshopped extra clothes on the girls. I think they were supposed to be getting ready for bed, so Madilyn was in her underwear.

what yard?

This post is mainly to show our "yard." As you can see there's not much to it. Our garage is in the back of the house, so instead of having a backyard all we have is a skinny side yard. Luckily that doesn't stop Madilyn from enjoying it.

my cute grandparents

wet walk

We wanted to walk to the top of the property, but the ground was wet from all the dew. Never one to be held back by a little water, my mom wrapped all of our feet with plastic bags to keep our shoes dry. Madilyn thought it was pretty neat and danced around the kitchen after she got her bags on.Abby wasn't so sure at first...
but decided the bags were okay after they were securely on.
My grandpa found walking sticks for the girls, which they thought was pretty neat.


It was so nice to enjoy all that land! Especially in contrast to our own non-existent yard.

evening walk...in Pennsylvania!

My parents came to visit us and our new house at the beginning of September. It was way fun having them around! We spent a week hanging around Indy, then we drove to Pennsylvania to visit my grandparents at their farmhouse. We loved going on walks around the farm, and down to the pump station at the bottom of their property (they have 70+ acres I think).My grandma pulled out some old toys and the girls fell in love with these ones. Abby chose a dog and Madilyn chose a hippo. She clarified to me that it was the hippo who loved her (even after we got back to Indy she said we needed to go back because the hippo missed her and wanted to see her again).
This picture kinda shows Abby's scratched up forehead. She fell a few days earlier and didn't get her hands in front of her to break the fall, landing her flat on her face.
The farmhouse. My grandparents estimate it's over 80 years old. We LOVED the huge front porch, especially when it was raining and I didn't want to keep tabs on the girls inside the house.
We walked on the train tracks and enjoyed a beautiful sunset.

family picture

We haven't had a professional family picture taken ever since I was pregnant with Abby. Here's the next best thing taken before church at our new ward.

btw, we bought a house

Way back in May we decided to take advantage of Obama's $8,000 giveaway to new homebuyers and began looking for our first home. We found crappy houses in the best area/schools, and perfect houses in crappy areas/schools, so we negotiated by getting a pretty good house in a pretty good school district. The house would be just about perfect if it just had a little bit more of a yard to it. I love our floorplan and all the space (2,000+ sq/ft after living in under 1,300), but the garage is on the back of the house so we only have a narrow side yard. The search was really stressful and not quite as fun as I had anticipated, but in the end I think we got a good place. Here's what it looked like the first day we saw it when we went with our realtor. We closed on August 10, and moved in on the 22nd. Madilyn absolutely loves this house, it's kind of funny. Shortly after we closed on the house and were sure it was ours Madilyn randomly gave me a huge hug. When I asked why, she said it was for buying the house. She did the same thing with Eric, and has said she wants to stay in this house forever. I don't know about forever, but it's nice to feel a little more settled for a while.

little mommy

Abby has always been very maternal and loves to play with baby dolls. Madilyn has never shown much interest in dolls and prefers to play with animal toys, often putting them in families. That changed, however, when Abby got a Water Baby for her birthday. Madilyn loved Abby's new doll so much (and I wanted to cultivate her maternal instincts) that we got her one too.It's been so fun to see her taking care of her baby. For a couple of weeks she kept it with her all the time, even sleeping with it.

good day for a trip to the zoo

We had an almost perfect trip to the zoo. As we walked in the entrance the seals were barking, so we ran to watch that. Then we went to see the sharks and had many swim close enough to touch (you're allowed to touch their sides, but DO NOT touch their fins or a zoo worker will let you hear about it, I know from experience :P).The polar bear was swimming laps in front of the viewing window, as were the enormous walruses (didn't get their picture though). Sad note, the polar bear died of old age shortly after our visit.
A penguin swam right up to the glass in front of us.
We walked by as an elephant show ended, and we snuck in and touched the elephant! Very cool and really strange feeling.
Also, as we walked by the giraffes they were letting people buy food to hand feed the giraffes. We didn't buy the food, but the giraffes were so close we could have reached up and touched their weird long blue tongues. All in all it was a good zoo trip, especially because we got to go with Eric's mom, little brother and sister-in-law. Brian and Kelli have a video on their blog of the polar bear swimming. Abby liked to imitate the bear's paddling with his feet.

abby is 2!

Abby is officially a toddler now, no more babies in this house! Eric's sister Laura literally brought a party to our house, bringing a pinata (Madilyn called it a pree-esta), balloons, and presents. I can't believe this girl is already 2!Abby got a ladybug cake, which was very popular.

Although the girls loved the cake, I don't think black icing is the best idea. Madilyn chose to eat the ladybug's head.

sweeping

Abby LOVES to clean. Which is great because it's nice to have at least one other person in this house cleaning (JUST KIDDING ERIC). But is not so great because she often makes more of a mess than she started out with. I'll just have to wait until her skills ripen and then harness her amazing cleaning potential.

4th of July wedding

Eric's nephew got married on the 4th of July in the Nauvoo temple. It's such a beautiful temple.Eric recorded all the wedding highlights and I was on kid duty, so I have some really random pictures. Also, it rained the whole time they were taking pictures so the girls were trapped on the porch of the temple and did pretty well, considering how long it took.

Madilyn found someone's umbrella and used it to entertain herself.

The happy couple with the groom's parents. I managed not to get a single picture of just the bride and groom, and somehow didn't get the group shot of entire family either.

driving to nauvoo ...we love technology!

We drove to Nauvoo for Eric's nephew's wedding over the 4th of July weekend. On the ride there Madilyn and Abby each enjoyed their own personal screen to the DVD player to watch movies.
I played games on Laura's (Eric sister) ipod touch until the battery ran out.Eric played games or worked on his laptop.While Laura navigated the drive on her Tom Tom GPS.It sure made for a much easier drive!

spice girl

Abby has become very adept at pushing chairs around to reach things that would otherwise be off limits. After changing her into her pajamas for the night, I went to help Madilyn change and came back to find this:
She had pushed a chair up to the kitchen counter top, pulled out as many spices as she could reach on my spice rack, and poured my freshly made potato soup over the lids of the spices in between helping herself to the soup.
I guess it's time for me to rename this blog All My Kids Messes.

early birthday present

This is what I encountered about 5 minutes before I planned on leaving to meet some friends at a park. I had run upstairs to finish getting ready to go when I noticed the girls were being way too quiet downstairs.That's 5 lbs of hot chocolate mix dumped all over the couch! Madilyn poured it in her hair (so now I know how she'd look with slight highlights!) and Abby grabbed handfuls to sift through her fingers and onto the carpet.
I was able to scoop most of it back into the can, and then I sucked all the rest into the vacuum, providing a lifetime supply of cocoa to all the spiders I've ever sucked into there.
That afternoon while I was working on dinner Madilyn found the only bottle of nail polish in our house and painted her arm and dripped polish on the computer desk. Either I'm the most negligent mother ever, or these girls are especially skilled at mischief. Or a combination of both.

stair sleeper

Madilyn has clearly outgrown her crib, but we are waiting until we move to a new house before we buy her a new bed. In the meantime we took the side off her crib, since that's pretty much what a toddler bed is, but she won't stay in it. We usually put her to bed on the floor (her choice), but when we go to bed we've found her in our bed, on the floor in our room, and 3 times she's been asleep at the top of the stairs.Silly girl!

spaghetti-o's

I read that spaghetti-o's are a better meal for kids than mac n cheese because they have much less fat. They also take 7 less minutes to make, because you don't have to boil the noodles, so I thought I'd give them a try. Madilyn turned her nose up after 2 bites (and she only got 2 down because they were princess shaped), but Abby enjoyed them a little too much.She wasn't happy when I took the bowl away.

bee

I found one of those huge fuzzy bees in our kitchen. I have no idea how it got inside, but it freaked me out for a minute. I thought up a brilliant plan to trap it under a cup, then slide a piece of cardboard under it so I could lift it and take it outside. Once it was outside I realized I had very little to fear; it barely moved and died a few hours later just a few feet from where I set it down. At least the girls were pretty fascinated with it while it lasted. btw, Madilyn loves to match with Abby.