The one with Granny and Grandad

We've had lots of visitors up here for the past few weeks. Granny and Grandad came up for T's birthday and Nora's blessing, then Gigi and Poppie joined us later in the week. The girls have been loving all the attention - I'm sure they'll be bored with just me to entertain them after all the grandparent lovin they've been getting.

Grandad wanted to visit the Naval Academy, so we headed down to Annapolis for a day while they were here. Annapolis is a totally cool city, if you come visit us, we'll take you there ;).

Nora looked totally cute waiting to go, she's just over three months here.



Granny and Grandad and the T outside the Naval Academy visitors center. Way cool place, we learned lots of new stuff about the Navy here.



And in front of the Navy Ram



After the Naval Academy we took a little cruise of the Annapolis Harbor. T wasn't a huge fan of sitting on the top level of the boat, so we all sacrificed and sat down in the air conditioned cabin instead :).









We also went to Mount Vernon. Totally cool place, we'll have to go back sometime, because we didn't do or see half of what we could have. Teresa was cute wearing her leash, we called it her tail, and she was NOT pleased if we dropped her tail.





That's George Washington's mansion house, way back behind Tressa







They had an awesome little play area for kids T's age, she loved playing with the doll house. In case you can't tell, it's a replica of Mount Vernon.





Granny and Grandad impersonated George and Martha Washington for a while...



Poor Marc was working all week, so he didn't get to go with us, which also meant that I had to drive everywhere we went. I have to say, I've ended up having to drive in D.C. WAY more than I ever planned to when we moved here. Our awesome totally lame GPS got all confused and ended up sending us straight through downtown D.C. on the way home from Mount Vernon, which was definitely the last straw for our GPS. I guess that's what we get for buying a TomTom.

Happy Birthday Teresa!

Today Teresa turned TWO! I can't believe it, time flies, etc, etc. But, seriously, I'm amazed that I have a two year old. She has changed so much over the past year, we were looking at pictures from her first birthday, and I think she changed almost as much from one to two as she did from birth to one. We had her little party and celebration yesterday, and eventually I'll sort through the 600+ pictures from that, but for now, here's a picture of our little two year old:





Okay, that was two pictures. She's having a ball this morning, playing with some of her birthday presents.

Here she is last year on her birthday:



And the year before:

Some Tressa Stuff

Tressa is a riot. She keeps us on our toes, for sure. I finally found my ipod again, and was planning to start using it during our morning jogs. T had other ideas:





I guess I should look for some more Tressa-friendly ear phones, because she has no plans to give it back any time soon.

She is talking up a storm lately, she's just always making us laugh. She adores the cat (who we finally named Pepper, but we still just call her 'the cat' all the time). She was trying to play with a ribbon with the cat today. She was doing a really good job, and the cat was actually playing with her, but then T got over excited and made the cat too nervous.



Here are some videos. The last one isn't very exciting to watch, but I wanted to get all of her giggles on camera, and she was sitting in my lap, so...most of the visuals ended up being the carpet and our table legs, but at least I got the cute giggling. So if you watch the last one, be sure to crank up your volume.

TandCat2 from Tara Milligan on Vimeo.

TandCatagain from Tara Milligan on Vimeo.

Giggles from Tara Milligan on Vimeo.

She also wanted to try taking a picture, so here are T's first pictures with only a tiny bit of help from me:





Being almost two (nine days!), she wants to do more and more things all by herself. Today as we were leaving to go visiting teaching, she wanted to climb up into the car by herself. She's done it before, but I usually help boost her up at the end, because she can't quite make it all the way. Unfortunately, today she lost her footing and fell back down to the ground. And on the way she smacked her chin on the step of the car and bit her lip. I could not believe the amount of blood that came pouring out of her lip! It was awful, by the time I got her back inside and upstairs to the bathroom, there was blood all over her face as well as her hands and arms. Luckily, Marc is off school this week, so I didn't have to deal with it alone. It looked really, really bad at first, and between sobs she kept saying "car, owie, car, owie". It wouldn't stop bleeding, especially because she kept scraping her teeth over it again (which was really making me squirm, it looked so painful). This was our first slightly-major-ish injury, so we weren't really sure if she needed to go to the doctor or not. We called her doctor's office and they told us to go to the emergency room. I didn't really think that was necessary, but we figured it wouldn't hurt. By the time we got there, T was acting perfectly fine, and she'd stopped bleeding. Her cut looked a lot better with out all the blood on it, and the ER was packed, so we decided to skip it. We went to CVS instead and got some orajel to numb the pain, and a mickey mouse balloon, and those plus a nap have her almost as good as new. Anyway, here's a pic of the injury:



She was not a fan of how numb the orajel made her mouth.

Matchy-matchy

Just ignore all the laundry in the background...













Love these two!

A Cat and some Eggs

We got T an early birthday present this past weekend, in the form of a cat! T adores kitties (or, as she calls them now 'titties'. Awesome.), and we've been debating trying to get one for a while now. We found one for free here on base, and decided to try her out. Marc is allergic, but he's on zyrtec right now, and it's working really well. She is a super nice cat, she's less than two (so about T's age :) and is surprisingly patient with Tressa chasing her around all the time. T loves her bunches already, and I love how busy she keeps T during the day. Anyway, here are some pics:





She came with the name Lizzie, and we're still trying to decide if we should change it or not. Name suggestions are welcome.

This was originally supposed to be a video of T with the cat, but it turned into just a video of T's awesome hopping skills:

hopping cat from Tara Milligan on Vimeo.

This morning while I was nursing Nora I could hear Tressa rummaging around in the fridge. I called to her to stop, and she came running in to the living room with an egg in each hand. She then pulled me to the stove and kept saying 'Pease, Mommy', so I cooked her up an egg for breakfast. Foolishly, I put the eggs back in the same place she'd gotten them from. And I showed her how to break open the one we cooked. So I shouldn't have been surprised a few hours later when I was nursing Nora again, and T came running in with one egg in her hand this time. One egg in her slimy, slimy little hands.



At least she was nice enough to break about half of them into that container. It was actually really funny, because the floor was all slippery and eggy, and T could not get up. She was just sliding all around the floor saying "oh no, eggs, oh no, eggs" over and over again. Now that I think about it, I'm a little worried that I wasn't clear enough on how naughty she was. She heard me telling Marc about it later and came over to tell him "I fall down on eggs", with a little grin. Also, how cheeky is this, she only brought that last, unbroken egg in to me because she needed help breaking it open! She even asked me for help once I got over to her and the rest of the eggs. Little rascal. Here she is trying to stand up on the slime.







And here's a video of her trying to stand up.

Fall down eggs from Tara Milligan on Vimeo.

I didn't feel guilty at all about laughing at her when she fell. At least, I didn't feel guilty until Marc commented that I was lucky she didn't break her arm or something after I encouraged her to stand up on the dangerous, slippery egg slime. Then I did feel bad. Thanks a lot, Marc.

And some more Texas stuff

Let's see, where were we? Oh yes, we went to Austin to visit some cousins!



T and Nora adored having so many little people to play with them. Below are Teresa, Declan, and Ciaran, followed by Nora with Maire and Aine.







T loved their play kitchen and all the cool accessories so much, she was crying and complaining when we left. Little did she know we were leaving to go to an awesome bounce house.

(click to enlarge)








As you can see, they all had a blast. The next day we went to Aislinn's neighborhood easter egg 'hunt'. The eggs weren't so much hidden, as they were strewn about the grass to be picked up as quickly as possible. Teresa, Ciaran, and Rowan were all in the same age group, and they all had a great time getting eggs and candy. Uncle Curtis was nice enough to help T out, so I could take some pictures.

(click to enlarge)




After the egg hunt we got to meet the Easter Bunny! Tressa has definitely gotten over her fear of people in bunny/santa/whatever outfits. The bunny was relieved to hear that all those kids weren't from the same family. As if a bunny has much room to talk about stuff like that.







We had a blast in Austin, but we loaded up and went back to Boerne for the rest of our visit. T started getting sick on Sunday, and we ended up taking her to Urgent Care the next day for an ear infection diagnosis, but she still had fun doing an egg hunt in the backyard. She even found two of them with no help!

Before church:



The hunt:



This was cute, after we emptied out all the eggs, T grabbed some of her candy, hopped off the patio chair and started looking around. She held out her arms and said "where meow?". When she couldn't find the cat, she put some of her candy in the cat food bowl, to share.



(click to enlarge)


And then here are some more pictures from the rest of our time at Granny and Grandad's house:













If you want to see the rest of the pictures from our Texas trip, I put them on Facebook. Here's the link:

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/fbx/?set=a.10150168409976205.300807.532436204&l=b3c280294e