The adventures of Chompy and Snora

At The Harbor

2012-01-28T21:57:00.009-06:00

Marc wanted to take some pictures this morning, so we loaded up the girls and headed down to the Annapolis Harbor. The girls loved running (and crawling) around, and T loved looking at the "lovely water". Every thing is 'lovely' with her lately.

The wind made it a little chilly, but lucky for us Nora loves the wind, she gets so excited when she feels the wind on her face, it's cute.

T with "the best cat ever". She talks about getting that cat for Christmas all the time. "Mom, remember, I open up my kitty and I'm so excited" etc. The other day she kept saying "Mom, is this the best cat ever?". She can't settle on a name for him though, she goes back and forth among Ozzy, Black and White, and 'my cat just like Brigit's'.

Getting chased...

Both girls were surprisingly patient and obedient, so we got them some ice cream.

T said "Mom, did that man give me some ice cream". I said yes, so she said "Oh, that was so sweet of him!".

And then this random group of older people stopped to take pictures with us. T completely ignored this man the whole time he was sitting by her, it was kind of funny. I guess there's no coming between a two-year-old and her ice cream.

If you want to check out some of Marc's street photography you can go to marcmilligan.com

He used to be pretty good with those old school film cameras, and he's just now really getting in to digital photography, but I think he's gotten some great shots ;). He also has some cute pictures of the girls there too.

The one with the bath tub coloring

2012-01-22T18:35:00.006-06:00

Our girls got totally spoiled by all the aunts and uncles and grandparents at Christmas time, and one of the fun little gifts they brought back was a pack of tub crayons. We opened them up last night and let them go to town with them, and they just had the best time. Teresa didn't want to get out of the tub, and it kept her from splashing most of the water out on us, so it was pretty win-win all around. Marc was able to get some cute shots of the girls.

Teresa very generously let Nora use only the green crayon.

She didn't seem to mind too much...

Nora has only recently started coloring (and by coloring, I mean making marks on paper with her crayons), so I wasn't sure if she would be able to figure out the tub crayons, but she didn't have any trouble.

She did all the green. She seems to be using her left hand quite a bit more than her right, and Marc is getting his hopes up that he will get a little lefty like himself. She was even able to give herself a green eye!

Teresa was really great about putting each color back when she was done using them. She's surprisingly organized for a two-year-old with our genes.

And then I just love Nora's little shifty-eyed look in this picture:

Enchanted Springs

2012-01-16T20:49:00.010-06:00

A few days after Christmas we went to Enchanted Springs Ranch, a cute little tourist-y spot a few miles outside of Boerne. It's a little cowboy type village, with gun shows and exotic animals and the like, and it's also a movie set. We dressed T up in her brand new cowboy boots (from Santa) for the occasion. (Also, here's where I tell you there are going to be A LOT of pictures in this post. What can I say, there were just too many cute little nieces and nephews there for me to narrow it down anymore than this.)

Nora was pretty excited!

The kids all played on this cute little playground while we waited for the puppet show to start.

Nora the cowgirl (with some help from Aine)

Locked up!

Declan was able to escape, though.

I love these horse tire swings. One day I'll have somewhere to hang one.

They had a cute little puppet show talking about the history of longhorns and cowboys and stuff in Texas, Nora thought it was pretty exciting.

So did the Smiths.

And poor T, she loved the puppet show, and the subsequent tractor ride to see all the animals, but the gun show was just absolutely awful for her. She hates loud knocking sounds, and I guess the blank gun shots also qualified. I took her out to walk around after she freaked out at the beginning of the show. I made the mistake of taking her back in for the bull whip demonstrations - turns out the crack of a whip is even louder than fake gun shots and she was off my lap and scrambling for the door faster than I'd ever seen her move before. Poor little thing, she was so upset by it, she asked to go back in to the little church, and then fell asleep in my arms - I guess she really was quite traumatized by it all.

She did wake up in time to sit on the real live longhorn they brought out.

Too bad they put him in such terrible lighting!

The one about Christmas

2012-01-12T20:12:00.003-06:00

Teresa was so into Christmas this year. She still didn't quite get everything about it, of course, but she thought all the preparations and Santa stuff, etc, were so great. She was actually really excited about Santa each time we went to see him, although she still got really timid once she was actually near him. It was so cute the way she would barely whisper what she wanted to him. (She asked for a baby doll each time, but, sadly, he didn't come through this year).

The children all got to pick one gift to open on Christmas Eve. T opened a little stuffed cat. Brigit brought a cute little stuffed kitty with her from home, and Teresa just thought it was the best thing she had ever seen. She was always begging to hold Brigit's kitty, and B was always so generous with letting her. But as soon as T had to give her back, she would ask to hold it again, she just really, really loved it. So I hopped on Amazon and was able to find the same exact cat - and it just happened to arrive on Christmas Eve, just a few minutes before present time!

Opening it up...

I think she liked it ;)

The girls with their kitties - not T's best picture :)

Oh, she was so thrilled about it. Ironically, the tag of the kitty says its name is Pepper, just like our poor kitty we recently re-homed!

Nora's first Christmas reactions were kind of a bummer, she wasn't really that interested in opening presents, or the wrapping paper, or even what was inside, at first.

She would pretty much just tear off one little strip of paper, like in the picture below, and then would just not be that interested in finishing it off.

She did really love Aoife's ball pit though!

She did come around eventually, and really got into her stocking - I think it helped that it was mostly full of baby snacks.

Nora helped T open her very own laptop:

T enjoying some of her presents:

Strutting her stuff...

And some more Christmas randoms:

The ball pit really was such a huge hit with all the kids. It's definitely in the running for one of Nora's first birthday presents.

Teresa was also so interested in all the Cars toys that Colin got. I'm super mad that my little camera went missing while we were there because I had some awesome videos of the car racing action. Colin got an awesome race track with some Cars cars that you can charge up, and T just thought it was awesome. When they would start racing she would say "Oh my goodness! What's happening" over and over, and it was really funny. The Smith kids were so good to let T play with all their awesome Christmas presents too. Too bad those pictures will never be seen :(.

After all the present festivities we got to go to church and enjoy a beautiful Christmas program. Afterwards we had a little cousins/Granny photo shoot. (Nora was barely able to stay awake through church, so she went straight to bed as soon as we got home and missed all the pictures).

Aoife, Brigit, Liam, Colin, Teresa, and Granny:

And then some of Granny and the T:

And, sadly, all the rest of the Christmas pictures were on my camera. Marc did make a delicious turkey, and Rob made some delicious potatoes, and my Dad made his delicious stuffing-that-I- always-thought-was-a-special-family-recipe-but-really-turned-out-to-be-from-Better-Homes-and-Gardens. (Don't think I wasn't crushed when I found that one out). We all did our best to enjoy Christmas dinner despite the fact that half of us were barely over the stomach flu and the other half would soon be enjoying that particular Christmas blessing...

In more recent news, Nora turns ELEVEN months old tomorrow!

Do you know what that means?!?!?

It means I really can't use the 'I just had a baby' excuse for why my house is a mess/I'm so tired all the time/none of my clothes fit/etc anymore. Bummer.

Week 2 - Boerne and Austin

2012-01-09T20:00:00.013-06:00

Winter in Texas is so awesome. It's kind of the big payoff for suffering through the 100+ degree weather all summer (plus May and September, of course;). I'm sad to admit that we had been wavering on our desire to move back to Texas once we're done with the military, but we were totally won back over on this trip. HEB helped too, of course.

Anyway. After a week at 'Bayissa's' house we packed up again and headed to Boerne. The Smith's got there a few days after us, so it was definitely a party and Granny and Grandad's house.

Marc entertained the troops - unbeknownst to them, the littler ones were only pretending to play:

Nora practiced stair climbing some more:

One of my favorite moments - we had told all the Smith kids that if they saw Nora on the stairs they should stop her and let us know she was there. A little while after that warning, we heard screaming coming from the stair area. Little Aoife (she'll be 2 in Feb.) had taken our instructions to heart and had tried to stop Nora from climbing the stairs. The only way she could figure out how - with a foot placed firmly on Nora's back, holding her in place. It was pretty hilarious (and effective!), I'm just sad we didn't get a picture of it.

The city had recently completed a nice little walking path behind my parents house, so we took all the kiddos for a walk.

Nora and Aoife in the stroller:

T, Brigit, and Granny:

Colin and Aoife are so cute! I couldn't resist getting a picture of them. They were just walking along holding hands, both sucking their thumbs:

And then with their dad, although Rob did not participate in the thumb sucking...

T had to be just like the big kids and cross the rocks. That's her curly little head in the bottom corner.

After a few days in Boerne, we took another little trip up to Austin, to see some more cousins. Marc wasn't about to let us visit Austin without getting a Mighty Fine burger, so we braved taking all 12 of the kids there for lunch. I hate how much T looks like a 'big kid' in this picture :(.

They were actually all really well behaved for the meal. Pleasant surprise. There's brand new little Ryan in his car seat. He's such a cutie.

Brigit wasn't about to be intimidated by the size of her burger :)

In the same parking lot as Mighty Fine was a place called Gigi's Cupcakes. Marc's mom is 'Gigi' to her grandkids, and she calls T cupcake, so of course we had to snap a picture for Gigi. Just ignore T's burger residue all over her face...

And then it was time for bouncing! Auntie Aislinn has an awesome bounce house right near their house, and of course the kids all had a great time. Nora even got in on some of the action:

T was trying to be a big helper, but Nora was not super interested in being helped.

Let's see...top to bottom that is Declan, Teresa, Liam, Aoife, and Rowan.

After our short Austin trip, we were back at Granny and Grandad's for Christmas Eve caroling (and the stomach flu!). All the kids thought caroling to the neighbors was a total blast, here they are coming home from all the fun.

T had some trouble with her Santa hat:

But she figured it out after a bit.

T with cute little Aoife, and Aoife's pacifier that T totally snatched when we left, little rascal. Sorry Aoife!

Up next: Christmas!

Texas trip - week 1

2012-01-06T21:22:00.002-06:00

We learned a lot of things on this trip. First, 30 days of vacation is overrated. And B, we're never traveling over Christmas again.

Besides that, we had a great time on our trip to Texas. The two and a half days in the car weren't as horrible as they could have been, and it was so fun to see so much family and friends over the course of our trip. It had been a whole two years since Marc was in Texas, so there were lots of things to do and people to see while we were there.

We spent the first week in Baytown and Houston, visiting with Marc's family. T and Nora had a blast with all the cousins! Nora took a while to warm up the first week, but then she got the hang of all the changes and new faces. Here are just a few of hundreds of pictures from the first week.

T had fun hanging out with Gigi. (And Poppie too, though he's not in this picture)

And with Aunt Melissa (or, Bayissa, as T called her). Aunt Melissa came up with these fun Santa hand print t-shirts. Teresa normally won't make handprints because it is too messy, but after watching her cousin do it, and since someone besides her mom was involved, she thought it was great. Nora was surprisingly cooperative as well.

Who doesn't love naked time?

T doing some tandem rocking with Uncle William.

I snapped her picture while she was saying "stop takin my picture!".

We went to see the Bass Pro Santa again with Melissa's family. Their Santa was much jollier, and T actually smiled this time around. I don't have the digital copy of it though, so just picture T sitting on Santa's lap, smiling.

Waiting in line:

I told T to go stand by the snowman, but I guess she decided the trashcan was photo worthy as well?

Nora loved seeing the fish again, she gets so excited every time, cute girl.

And all the kids loved the toy trains and coloring they had set up.

(had to blur their sweet little foster child's face)

I just really like this picture of Teresa in front of the tree:

While we were in Houston, Marc got to play around with his camera a lot, I think he is getting quite good at taking pictures. I couldn't narrow these down any more, so collages it is!

The Teresa:

The Nora:

Both girlies:

And some cute cousin shots. These two are only a month a part, they had such a fun time together.

We were lucky enough to be there for little M's adoption! He is such a special little guy, I'm so glad we were able to be there when he became an 'official' member of the family.

That's a good looking family, right there :)

T loved the water at the temple, of course:

Nora is standing and practicing her walking, but I think it will still be awhile before she takes any steps on her own.

Me and my girls:

Okay, and one more of the Nora, because she's so stinkin' cute:

And this concludes the posting for our first week of Texas vacation. Stay tuned for weeks two and three, featuring our trip to Boerne and Austin.

Santa picture

2011-12-06T18:59:00.006-06:00

Here's the picture with Santa - I know you were all losing sleep waiting for it, so here ya go:

So, yeah, at least no one is screaming this year. Also, Nora is wearing the same boots T wore in her first picture with Santa.

Christmas-y stuff

2011-12-04T20:07:00.008-06:00

We took the girls to see Santa this past week. T has been talking about him a ton, before we left to see him she made us sing the happy birthday song to him. She was really excited about going to sit on his lap and tell him what she wanted, so I was feeling good about the experience going better than last year. Santa was the same guy as last year (skinniest Santa ever...), but I'm sure he didn't remember the poopy diaper she leaked all over him last year. She got super shy once she actually saw him, but was still willing to go up and see him. He suggested that she lean against his knees for the picture instead of sitting on his lap, which she found to be an acceptable solution. Nora started to cry a little, but that might have been because I forced her to wear shoes. He asked her what she wanted for Christmas, and she whispered a barely audible answer. After a bit of prodding from us she finally made her request for a baby doll just slightly louder than a whisper.

Bass Pro is being lame, and still doesn't have the digital copy of the picture online, so if they ever put it up I'll get it on here. Neither of the girls are smiling for it, but nobody is screaming, either, so I'll call it a win.

Saturday we took T to two different Christmas celebrations here on base. Marc took her to the first one while N and I went to a baby shower, and they met up with Mina and her dad. (T has such a little crush on Mina's dad, when we were getting ready to leave she kept saying "lets go see Mina's dad!")

(Yes, that's a bandaid on T's eye, no she doesn't really have an injury there)

They ate some snacks and did some crafts and stuff. Miss Maryland and Miss Teen Maryland were both there and Marc said T was pretty excited to see some real princesses. She asked to take her picture with them, but then wouldn't smile when she got up there, silly girl.

Later that afternoon we went to another Christmas celebration, where T was thrilled to get to ride in a horse drawn carriage (much less scary than riding an actual horse!) and a train. Nora actually really, really loved the train, she loves having the wind in her face. (These pictures aren't the best, my camera died right when we got there, so we had to use the ipod)

Waiting for the train...

Mina loving on the Nora

Me and Nora, obviously ;)

And some randoms - Nora loves to eat, she was making us laugh one night with two big fistfuls of food and a bunch more spilling out of her mouth.

I stole these two from my friend's facebook - T and Mina having some fun a few weeks ago:

Silly girls.

Adventures in straight hair

2011-11-23T19:41:00.007-06:00

Last week I asked T if she wanted her hair straightened and she agreed to let me do it. It helped that Mickey Mouse was involved. It actually wasn't too much work, I had put her hair in braided pigtails the day before, so when I took them out the next morning all her curly-ques were gone and her hair was mostly just crinkly.

I think it made her look soooo different! And older. And just different - her hair is so long, and it looked quite a bit blonder when it was straight. I was jealous of her gorgeous natural highlights. We thought she looked cute, but Marc and I agreed we were ready to have our curly girl back when it got washed that night.

We tried to take the girls to a park for some pictures, but T is very anti-picture taking right now. It was apparently really traumatic for her, and frustrating for the rest of us. It was pretty chilly out but T refused to wear a sweater and cover up her "pink dress".

At least Nora was happy most of the time.

Luckily there was a see-saw to make up for all the photo drama.

The straight hair kept getting in her face a lot more than her normal hair, she was getting annoyed about having to push it out of her eyes so much.

I love this little Nora sequence:

And of course they both love the swings.

Things she says: 5

2011-11-22T16:53:00.001-06:00

- Yelled from the backyard while Marc and I were inside: "Hey guys, I'm making the wrong choice!".

- T is so contradictory. All. the. time. One day in the car she was all decked out like Tinkerbell, and we had the following conversation:

T: "I'm Tinkerbell"

Me: "Yep, you're Tinkerbell"

T: "No, I'm not Tinkerbell, I'm a kangaroom" (kangaroo)

Me: "Oh, are you a kangaroo?"

T: "No! I'm a kitty cat"

Me: "Okay, you're a kitty cat"

T: "No! I'm a fairy!"

And so forth.

-If she's dressed up like a princess she will call me "Princess Mama", and if she's dressed up like Tinkerbell she calls me "Fairy Mama". For some reason, Marc doesn't love it when she calls him "Fairy Daddy". A few days ago we were all "Punzels", as we left the house T said "come on you three Punzels" (Rapunzel), and then after Marc buckled her in she said "thanks Punzel Daddy!".

- One day when we came in from running errands Nora was complaining and crying a ton because we couldn't get her out of her car seat right away. T was trying to calm her down by telling her a story, and it was so cute I had to pull out my laptop and record it as she was talking.

This is what I got:

"Mama, I'm telling Nora a story about Daddy and Jesus, the Prophet, and the father goes outside and it's raining, and he SPLASHES in the rain. And splashes. And Jesus and the Prophet, and I love you SO much Nora. And the Father, and Jesus and the Prophet have some fun and SPLASH and have so much fun and I love you so much Nora. And Jesus and the Prophet and come on pretty girl, jump, and clap, and hop like a bunny rabbit. And shhh. shhh. Mmmm, I love you so much (gives kisses) and the Prophet, and Jesus! Mama, get Nora out Nora's stuck!

Nora was giggling her little head off while T told her this.

And then later during N's diaper change "and Mama, Heavenly Father and Jesus help Nora not be sad and stop crying and get a bandaid"

- We frequently call Teresa 'Tressa B' in reference to her middle name being Brigid. I called her that the other morning and then went in the kitchen to do some dishes. A few minutes later she came bounding in to the kitchen saying "Mama! Mama B!"

-When she's frustrated about something she'll put the back of her hand over her eyes and say "This is essasperating!" (exasperating). Thank you Donald Duck.

-Last week she called me "little lady" pretty much all week. She would hand me something and say "here you go little lady".

-She calls her purse her "person" and her slippers her "slippery-s"

And just a few pictures of N - Nora got herself under the slide - she looks a little awkward, but I promise she was having fun.

Some things about Nora

2011-11-16T20:29:00.001-06:00

Nora turned nine months old this past Sunday. I can't believe she's been out as long as she was in! We love her so much, and are so very blessed to have her in our family. She had her nine month check up today and passed with flying colors.

We had her in to the doctor about two weeks ago for a diaper rash and found out she had dropped to the 10th percentile for weight, she was only 16 lbs 1 oz. The doctor and I had a little chat about fattening her up, so operation 'chunk Nora up' commenced. I was hoping to get her up a pound by this appointment, but we only made it up to 16 lbs 12 oz. Still pretty good. She's 27 inches long/tall.

Some things about our nine months girl:

She has four teeth. The two on bottom and now two on top - the ones on either side of where her front teeth would be.

(She wore T's first Halloween costume when we went trick or treating, it was warmer than her Piglet outfit)

She's working on climbing the stairs. She's only made it up three in a row so far, she keeps trying to sit and turn around when she's on them. But she's very determined, I think we'll probably end up finally getting a baby gate there.

She can stand up! Holding on to things, but also on her own for a few seconds at a time. She likes to stand up while leaning on me, and then will tentatively let go until she loses her balance and has to grab me again.

Nora is an all or nothing kind of baby. She's the happiest, smiley-est little thing, until she's not, then she's just screaming. Usually with no build up. And she screams much louder than I ever remember T doing. The same with food, she will be totally fine and then all of a sudden decides she is starving, and yells and complains and eats like she never has before until she's full and then she just stops.

She is so smiley. When we're in church I will catch her staring people down until they look at her and then she will bust out a huge smile for them.

She wakes up screaming. I always hear about babies that wake up cooing and babbling and being all cute, but that is definitely not Nora. She wakes up and immediately starts shrieking for us to come get her. It's pretty effective.

Nora thinks Teresa is just the funniest person in the whole world. She adores her and always wants to be wherever T is.

She loves to be right in the thick of things. When we go to playgroup or romp n stomp, or anywhere with a crowd Nora has to be in the middle of whatever is going on.

She still has a big ol' mop of hair just on the top of her head. The sides and back are all normal length, but the top of her hair just keeps getting longer and longer. It seems to have some curl to it, so it's looking like we might end up with two little curly girls.

She's full on crawling now, unless she wants to get somewhere fast, then she reverts to her army crawl.

And a picture of Teresa, because we love her too!

Highlights from this week*

2011-11-07T19:17:00.006-06:00

This is a terrible photo, but our two girls were so cute tonight. T had been promised an ice cream cone, but had been instructed that she had to eat it at the table so Nora wouldn't see it. But after a major meltdown about being ostracized from the rest of us (you know, she was waaaay over in the "dining room"), I let her come eat in the living room. It was just too sad seeing her sobbing at the table holding her ice cream.

Anyway, she was really good about sharing with Nora, but after Nora would get a bite T would say "where's my ice cream?".

I also like this picture because there is absolutely no way I would have let one drip of that ice cream in T's mouth when she was Nora's age! Nora has definitely been introduced to refined sugar way before Teresa was. One of many differences in second children. But honestly, there was no way of keeping her from it once she set her sights on it. Little persistent rascal that she is.

And, in case you weren't sure, here's some evidence that I'm pretty much the awesomest mom ever:

Sometimes when I see Teresa doing things I'd rather she didn't I pretend not to notice so I don't have to make her stop. She was having so much fun stripped down to her diaper decorating herself with highlighters the other day. When she came over and wanted to do my face I decided to let her. And then almost forgot about it when it was time to leave the house a few hours later. Good thing we have a mirror right by our front door...

*because sometimes puns are too hard to resist

Kindermusik and Things She Says 4

2011-11-02T20:56:00.001-05:00

We enrolled the T in a Kindermusik class here on base for the month of October. Basically it's just a little half hour class of singing and dancing and making some noise. Right up Teresa's alley. She surprised me a bit by getting all shy when we first got there, she just sat on the floor and folded herself up, but after a few minutes she decided it was fun. There were probably eight kids in all, with half the class being all her little friends from church. Nora loved it, too, she loves to be right in the thick of things. Marc was able to go with us to one of the classes so we got some cute videos.

(the pictures aren't the best quality b/c they're from Marc's iTouch.

Each week they would have different little shakers or instruments to play with. I was pretty bummed I didn't have my camera the last week because one of the 'instruments' was a little bell attached to a clip. T immediately grabbed two of them and clipped them right to the front of her shirt and ran off jingling around the room. Her placement of them was just...awkward. It was pretty hilarious.

In Things She Says news, T has been keeping us amused, as usual.

-A few weeks ago, picking Marc up from work we had this conversation:

"Mommy, you tink Daddy is a bunny?"

"Yeah, I do think he's a bunny, do you think he's a bunny?"

"Umm, no (laughs) I tink he is a pony."

-In response to Nora crying about something "Shh, Nora, be patient!"

-During family prayer this week "And please bless Mommy and Daddy and Nora and Teresa to go to Texas"

-When Marc brings me Nora in the mornings T will say "here's your little baby Mama!"

-She's in to all things princess-y now so when she's in dress up mode she calls me 'Princess Mama'

-She calls Nora 'precious baby' and 'sweet girl' all the time, and today when Nora was nursing Teresa came up a kissed her a bunch and said "I need some baby kisses!"

Tigger and Piglet

2011-10-29T11:45:00.009-05:00

Teresa has been in love with Tigger since her first introduction to him, so he seemed to most logical choice for a Halloween costume. I suggested Belle, Tigger, or Minnie Mouse to T several times, and I was actually a little surprised she kept choosing Tigger. But, she does love to have me sing the Tigger song while she bounces around the house, so I guess it was about time she got some good Tigger dress up clothes to go along with it.

For some reason I decided it would be a good idea to make her costume myself, and honestly, I'm pretty shocked that it turned out as well as it did. I just drew up a pattern based loosely on some of her footed pajamas and went from there. As with all of my sewing projects, it was pretty frustrating most of the time. Especially when my machine and I had a big misunderstanding where I thought we were threading it wrong and spent 2+ hours trying to figure it out. I put in my first ever zipper, which actually turned out to be a ton easier than I thought it would be. Way easier than attaching the sleeves, that's for sure.

(That's part of a slinky in her tail, to make it all spring-y)

Teresa loved it. We went to Marc's company trunk-or-treat on Thursday and after T was all dressed and ready to go I walked in on her in my room looking at herself in the mirror and saying "BOUNCE!" over and over again while she jumped up and down.

And of course since we had a Tigger we had to have a Piglet as well. Nora's outfit was a million times easier to put together since it only involved a sharpie and a few stitches to her ears.

The next night we had our church chili cook-off and trunk-or-treat. There were a ton of people there, and tons of yummy chili's to choose from. I got T a bowl of some mild chili and got my bowl from a pot labeled "very hot, do not feed to children", and of course when we sat down T refused to eat hers and insisted on eating mine instead. She made it through five whole bites before deciding it was pretty hot and freaking out about it. Silly girl.

She loved the trunk or treating, of course, and brought home so much candy we probably won't even bother going out on Halloween.

We found some awesome Tigger colored hair spray at Wal-Mart. Doesn't she look like the Mad Hatter? (Johnny Depp style)

I promise she liked it, she was just mad about having to go back outside for a picture. She's transitioning out of naps this week, so she's pretty grumpy in the evenings, and any little thing can set her off. It's fun.

Suckers fix just about anything, though...

I combed the color out of her hair before bed and it looked even more awesome once it was brushed out. Who knew her hair could get even bigger than it usually is?

Happy Halloween!

The one where we visit a petting farm

2011-10-24T19:58:00.010-05:00

This weekend we went to a cute little petting farm up here with T's little bff and her family. These two girls are so cute together:

We laughed when we realized how matchy they were - right down to their sparkly shoes. T is always asking to go play with Mina, so spending a whole day with her was pretty awesome. This was such a great little farm, there were tons of things to play on and do. Pony rides cost two bucks, though, so Teresa was spared this time around. When I asked if she wanted to ride one she immediately responded "nope!".

She was willing to sit on the fake horse though.

We went on a hay ride that Nora absolutely loved. She really liked the wind in her face and was super smiley the whole time - unless Marc had the camera on her, of course. T was skeptical about the hay ride but ended up loving it, especially because it took us to a cute little mini pumpkin patch.

Sigh. I should have learned by now to have looooow low low expectations for taking pictures of Teresa. She's a little stinker and her belligerent side comes out when the camera does. At least Nora is still at the age where she's pose-able and happy to smile for the camera:

Um, I'm pretty much in love with that last picture.

We did actually get some cute shots of T, just no smiley ones:

A picture with Mom? Oh, the horrors. Actually, this pic was right after she got her diaper changed. In a pumpkin patch. On an incline. She didn't love it, but it had to be done.

And then we attempted some sibling shots:

Yeah, not so much.

After the pumpkins we got to feed some goats! T was pretty excited, because we could hear the sheep baa-ing while we were looking at pumpkins, and she couldn't wait to go see them.

The girls and their Dads:

Nora's bum:

Teresa LOVED riding on this cow train. She was so cute, waving at us most of the way around the little trail.

During the cow train Nora was chatting it up with Marc. She was jabbering at him and gesturing emphatically with her little arm, she totally reminded me of cousin Maeve.

As soon as T was plopped up there next to Humpty Dumpty she started saying "get Teresa down!". Once she was safely on the ground she was still really concerned about Mina's safety and kept asking to get her down too.

That's Mina's little sister up there with them in the pic below - she's two-ish months younger than Nora.

Didn't I tell you they were cute together?

Camping

2011-10-16T19:16:00.006-05:00

Marc has been wanting to take Teresa camping for a while now, so this weekend he decided to do a little beta testing in our backyard. T was pretty excited because Mickey Mouse goes camping in one of her favorite episodes, so all she could talk about was going camping like Mickey.

They set up the tent in our backyard and both girls loved playing in it. Nora was so funny, I put her down in the tent and she just started wriggling and crawling all around and squealing with delight.

Sorry about the sideways video here:

It was all we could do to get T back in the house for dinner and to let Marc set up their sleeping bags. I went out to tuck Teresa in while Marc got some juice for her and she couldn't stop chattering about camping "and Daddy go inside and get some juice and come out and sleep in tent and go camping like Mickey and catch some gooey fish (like Mickey does when he camps) and sleep all night" and on and on, with a big smile on her face.

When Marc got back out they watched some Mickey Mouse and then tried to go to sleep, but T just couldn't do it. After about thirty minutes of her having to keep asking what every little noise she heard was, she declared that it was "too scary to sleep outside" so they came back in for the night. So, baby steps on the camping thing. Actually, I do think if she didn't have the option of going inside to her bed that she would go to sleep eventually, but I guess we'll just have to find out when they take a real camping trip...

On Saturday we went to a little open house at the Fire Station on base. T got to put out a fire:

She tripped on our way out to the car and one of the nice firemen tried to make her feel better by letting her sit in the truck, but she just couldn't get over the injustice of her fall, so this was her reaction:

Priceless.

This week

2011-10-09T20:46:00.003-05:00

I chopped off most of my hair:

It's the shortest I've ever had it, I can't even put it in a real ponytail! I have to use pigtails to pull it back...

Mostly I like it, but sometimes I hate it. So, we'll see. But seriously, since I had Nora my hair has been growing crazy fast and was so hot and yucky feeling all summer. I kept getting it cut a little bit, and finally was able to commit to really cutting it short. You know, just in time for winter.

Marc tried to grow a mustache:

He's also growing out his eyebrows:

The girls were cute as ever in some matching jumpers:

And Teresa actually took a picture with me without crying and screaming through the torture:

Tinkerbell

2011-10-05T19:34:00.005-05:00

So, a month or so ago we took a trip to the dollar store and found some fabulous wings that Teresa wanted more than just about anything else in the world. We bought them on the condition that she couldn't have them until she went poo in the potty. So they came home with us and have sat up on top of the fridge ever since. She would catch sight of them now and then and beg for them, and go sit on the potty in hopes of getting them.

And then today I totally caved and just gave them to her even though she hadn't really earned them yet.

Because I could only say no to her sweet little face saying "please, my wings Mama" so many times.

She was almost shaking with excitement to get them on and immediately proclaimed "Look Mama, I'm Tinkerbell!", followed by "Lets go fly to the park!".

She accessorized with an awesome pink head band and her princess shoes.

Now that the weather is getting cooler we've been spending more evenings outside. T was having fun flying around the yard.

Showing off her Tinkerbell skirt:

You know what she's saying here? "I NE-FER (never) get to play catch". She's so dramatic, she just NEVER gets to do anything. Anything I tell her no about is followed by her throwing her head back and saying "I ne-fer get to fill-in-the-blank". Umm, we play catch every. single. day.

Much happier now that we're playing catch.

And I have to include a picture of Nora. We got these little overalls for free at the Airman's Attic, and I just think they are the cutest things ever. Seriously, I probably make her wear them way too often, but I just want to squish her when she's wearing them!

Grocery carts, crowns, and crawling

2011-09-24T22:03:00.005-05:00

Nora can sit in the shopping cart now! T loves it. We think they're the cutest.

Teresa is really in to princess stuff lately (shocking, I know), and after watching Tangled for the eleventy billionth time, kept asking where her crown was. After she went to bed I made this little felt one for her. It was supposed to look like Rapunzel's, but with colored 'jewels' but when I got it finished it totally ended up looking like an Indian feather/headdress/thing. Oh well, at least T thinks it looks like a crown.

Right after this picture she put both hands up and started yelling "Stop takin my picture Mom and Dad!". Darn paparazzi...

And here's a video of Nora scootin around. She does mostly army crawling still, but gets some hand and knee action in there too. She's sleeping a lot more lately, and I'm pretty sure it's because she gets such a workout moving all around the house.

I love this video because you can really see her curl-hawk. She has a ton of hair, but it's all on the top of her head. The back and sides are your normal short baby hair, and then she has piles on top.

Sisters

2011-09-16T19:57:00.003-05:00

Swinging and giggling from Tara Milligan on Vimeo.

Can you guess what T had for dinner tonight? Ten points for the first correct answer...

Seven, twenty-seven, and some other stuff, too.

2011-09-14T07:59:00.009-05:00

Seven:

Nora turned seven months old yesterday. She finally started doing some army crawling a few weeks ago, and is trying super hard to get up on her hands and knees lately. She can manage it for a few seconds, but that's it. She's been keeping us on our toes now that she can get around as well as she does.

She is such a little giggler, especially if Teresa is involved. They love each other so much, it's fun to watch them together. Nora was crying in the car the other day, so T started singing her a song "I love you, Nora, don't cry, Nora, I love you" etc.

She's a petite little thing, too. That outfit above is 0-3 months. Her top says "world's cutest little sister", which is true.

Twenty-seven:

Teresa is 27 months this month, and is such a big helper (usually)

She keeps us laughing, and scratching our heads....

She outgrew all of her summer pajamas, so we've just been sending her to bed in whatever she was wearing that day. Lately she has been a little jealous that Nora had "dress-up jamas" for wearing to bed and she didn't. She kept asking where Teresa's dress up jamas were, so I took her to Kohls this week and let her pick out some special jamas.

She chose these horse jamas, and is in love with them. I made her try them on at the store, and she absolutely didn't want to take them off. I love them because the footies make her look a little more babyish to me :)

The other stuff:

After we went to Sesame Place last week we stayed the night in Philadelphia so we could cross that off our list-of-places-to-go out here. We soon realized we would need more than a day to see all there was to see in Philly, so we definitely have plans to go back sometime soon.

Possibly T's favorite thing of the day was this globe display at the visitor's center:

Nora was pretty eager about the day too, and sat forward in her stroller the whole time:

We saw the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall. Marc and I are both kinda history nerds, so we were really excited to see the place where the Declaration was written. Here are the girls outside Independence Hall, with all its beautiful scaffolding (T was done being in pictures at this point, so she wouldn't look at the camera.)

This past weekend we went with some friends to the Renaissance Festival in Annapolis. Lots of weirdies there, but it was still fun. T ~~was forced to~~ was lucky enough to ride a pony again:

She didn't love it, but I made her do it twice anyway, since it was free. The whole time she was saying "Get Teresa down! Get Teresa down!" over and over again. She did admit afterward that it was both fun and scary, and she said she was glad she did it, so there you go.

T and her cute little buddy Mina had some fun - Mina picked up T's leash and they were leading each other around for awhile. Kind of a blind-leading-the-blind sort of thing. They are so cute together.

Watching a juggling act:

A rare smile for the camera:

The Y Song

2011-09-07T20:49:00.002-05:00

When bedtime rolls around we let T pick a couple of songs for us to sing (it actually usually ends up being a lot more than a couple), and along with all the normal little kid songs she'll also request some random songs. She'll throw a topic out there like "Pink song!" or "Birdie song!" and if we don't know a song on that topic we'll just make one up. Example: last week she wanted a song about a bug, so we sang "I'm a bug, I'm a bug, I'm a bug, I'm a bug", etc.

Try not to be overwhelmed by our creativity.

Actually, some of them are much better than that, but she's always happy enough with even our lamest songs.

Anyway, tonight while we were singing she hopped up and said "Come on, guys, get up, lets sing the Y song!". We asked her what song she was talking about and she said "The Y song!!". We asked her to sing it for us, and it was pretty awesome. She would sing her little song and then say "one more time!" and then sing a totally different song. By the time I got the camera out she was stuck on a bunny theme, but usually when she makes up songs they go something like this: "princessess na na na and daddy na na na and Teresa's a princess na na na and Mickey Mouse" etc.

The first video is a little shaky because Nora kept trying to grab the camera from me.

The Y Song from Tara Milligan on Vimeo.

The Y Song Again from Tara Milligan on Vimeo.

Sesame Place

2011-09-04T19:10:00.007-05:00

We took the girls and went up to Philadelphia this weekend. Mainly to go to Sesame Place, which is a Sesame Street themed amusement park out that way. Turns out there's a pretty sweet program called Here's to the Heroes that gives up to 4 free tickets to military members to Sesame Place, Busch Gardens, or Sea World. Of course T loves her some Sesame Street, so we decided to go to Sesame Place. It was only about a two and a half hour drive from here, and was about 30 miles out of Philadelphia. Teresa loved it, she couldn't stop talking about it when we got to our hotel that night. I was holding her foot, trying to help her go to sleep and she was just chattering about meeting Elmo and all the rides and giving me a run down of our whole day.

She really loved all the rides. She was very nervous at the beginning of each one, but ended up enjoying them and when they were done she kept repeating "So much fun on the ride".

Here's her first ride:

Teresa was so excited to climb on this net, but once she actually got on she didn't like it and just froze like this until Marc was able to carry her back to safety:

We went on a few more rides, and then we met Elmo! She was so excited. The line to meet him was ridiculous, but she toughed it out.

After that we went to a live Elmo show. T and Nora were both totally enthralled by Elmo and Mr. Noodle and all the dancing. Teresa really got into it and was up dancing on her bench a ton.

We tried to ride the carousel when we first got there, but it was having mechanical difficulties, so we didn't end up getting to ride it until the end of the day. So I'm totally blaming the following pictures on how tired Teresa was.

Win.

I just think their carousel horses are so cute! Nora, at least, loved the carousel, but Marc ditched with her pretty much before it stopped moving, so I didn't get a picture of them on their cute bench :(.

We also saw Bert and Ernie, but T wasn't interested in standing in line to see them. I was pretty bummed we hadn't seen Cookie Monster while we were there, he is T's second favorite character, but we lucked out and he came out right when we were headed out to the car. (Marc had seen him earlier - he literally ran right into him when he was getting Nora's bottle from the stroller before Elmo's show)

While we were taking the picture T was saying "Cookie Monster NOT have any cookies?" She was pretty bummed, and kept mentioning that fact the rest of the night, too. We couldn't find Big Bird at all, and we heard about that the rest of the night too. "See Elmo, and Cookie Monster, and Cookie Monster NOT have any cookies, and not get to see Big Bird..." etc.

Tired Nora on the way to the car:

They were both asleep before we even got out of the parking lot:

So, despite having to pay SIXTEEN dollars in tolls in order to get there, it was a pretty fun day.

Six

2011-08-17T20:10:00.007-05:00

Can you believe this little girl is six months old already?

Neither can I.

Here she is in the same dress at six weeks old.

Yeah.

It still fits.

She had her six month check up this week and weighed in at 15.5 pounds and was 25.5 inches long. At six months T was 17.9 lbs and 27.5 inches, so about 2 lbs and 2 inches bigger.

They love each other.

And one of just T:

This next one is for Grandad:

Not the greatest picture, but T discovered basketball last week. We were playing in the gym at our community center after arts and crafts last week and there was an older boy (and when I say older, I mean seven-ish) there playing basketball with his grandmother (or mom? Hopefully grandma). T watched him for a little bit and then went after the extra ball and started trying to dribble it and shoot it like he was. She did a pretty good job with her dribbling and was so cute shooting the ball. I wonder if she honestly thought she would be able to get it in the basket?

Anyway, I shouldn't have been too surprised, because she loves all sorts of balls, we spend half our day playing catch.

Nora was a cute little spectator:

'Matoes

2011-08-09T20:12:00.006-05:00

We decided to try our hand at a little bit of gardening this year. We didn't have a ton of room to work with, so we just planted some tomatoes and peppers. The pepper plants had an unfortunate meeting with a weed whacker, so it was all up to the tomatoes to make our gardening dreams come true. They didn't disappoint.

This was about a month or so ago:

And today:

Wow, I'm so embarrassed about all the weeds! Well, mostly its mint. Turns out mint never, ever goes away. I've cleared that mint out more times than I can count, and it returns again and again. In fact, I think it comes back stronger each time. Not cool. Anyway, we've had an awesome crop. We planted four cherry tomatoes and four regular (big boy? I can't remember the exact type) plants. T LOVES the "matoes". We actually don't usually get to pick too many because she eats them as soon as they're any shade of red. And sometimes when they're green too. I love when she'll come in from playing out there and be covered in little tomato seeds and chomping away on another one. We did get out to pick some before she got to them yesterday:

Totally worth having to drag our hose through the house every day to water them.

Right after this picture I had to go change and feed Nora, and when I could finally investigate why T was being so quiet I found this:

Every day I regret buying her that stool. And the aftermath:

Here's T modeling both the tomatoes and her new dress today:

I got some Mickey pajamas a few months ago because I thought T would like if I wore them, but she seriously couldn't have cared less. And I never, ever wear the shirt, so I decided to make it into a dress for T instead. She loves it! It was super easy, it only took about 45 minutes to do. The sleeves are a little tight (sleeves are totally my nemesis when sewing!), but the rest of it fits, so I'll call it a win.

The one with all the shaving cream

2011-08-02T20:12:00.002-05:00

And a video.

Shaving cream from Tara Milligan on Vimeo.

Visitors, hair, etc. Basically, the rest of July

2011-07-25T17:31:00.008-05:00

We were so excited to have Fiona and her cute kiddos come to visit us last week. Teresa had so much fun with her cousins and "Auntie Tara" as she insisted on calling Fiona. Every time we asked her to say Fiona she replied "I can't". So. I guess because Bran and Nuala were calling me that? Who knows. It was insanely hot and humid and nasty weather wise, but we still had fun at the park the first day.

The heat just sapped all of Nora's energy, and she fell asleep in the swing

We went on a fun pirate cruise in Annapolis. All the kids had been excited to go on a boat, and the pirate part was supposed to be a fun surprise. Too bad we couldn't get reservations until 5, and then all the kids fell asleep on the drive there. Also, there was jet lag involved. The first half of the boat ride involved a lot of crying and refusing to participate. Eventually they all warmed up and really enjoyed the rest of it.

Bran and Nuala helped haul up the pirate treasure:

And then they each got to fill a bag with treasure.

T immediately started lining up each piece of treasure. She's been doing it all week at home too, I keep having to step over lines of treasure on the stairs.

It was a pretty cool cruise, the kids got to be pirates and help find where the treasure was buried in the water. They got to shoot water cannons at another 'pirate' and pull up some pirate 'grog' (ginger ale) from the water as well. The only lame part was that Nora had to pay full price, too. Really, guys? She's five months. We totally should have demanded a bag of treasure for her.

The next day we did some backyard swimming. This was around 9:30 in the morning. While we were out there sweating, Marc came out of the air conditioning to let us know it was already 100 degrees, with a heat index of 120 or something. It was pretty ridiculous. But, the kids were having fun, so we suffered through it ;)

We were going to go to a real pool on base as well, but they don't open til 11, and by then there was a lot of napping going on. Turns out it's kinda hard to coordinate leaving the house with 5 kids!

Maeve is so cute! Seriously, she is just so happy and cute, I loved sitting at the dinner table with her, she would just randomly wave at people, with a big, cute smile. Love her.

And she looooved holding Nora. Nora did not love it so much.

They're just about exactly a year apart.

I know they'll absolutely love this picture one day:

We had to get some last minute cousin shots. These were the best we could come up with.

Auntie Fiona inspired us to be more adventurous with the girls' hair:

And Nora's just cute here:

And here too:

T was coloring this morning, and was just absent-mindedly singing to herself while she colored. Of course we thought it was so cute, so Marc tried to get a video of it without her noticing.

Monday morning from Tara Milligan on Vimeo.

And, one last picture of T. That's her little hair accessory holder, it's supposed to have three little drawers in it. I have no idea how she got in there, but she was freaking out about not being able to get out. I couldn't get her out either, so I had to carry her down like that to get help from Marc. We got her out eventually (obviously), but it definitely took some work. She's a crazy girl.

Leave

2011-07-15T20:47:00.001-05:00

Once Marc finally finished his last training class he took a week of leave, and we had a little 'staycation'. Teresa loved, loved having her dad around all day everyday for so long. We had a lot of fun just doing stuff around here.

She likes to wear those ears to look like Pepper. My friend Claire inspired me to make some finger paints for T. She loved them, of course. The paint was super easy to make, just flour, water, dish soap and food coloring. And it washed off really easily (probably because of the dish soap?), so that was a plus.

Nora sat safely (and happily!) out of the way on the other side of the porch.

During Marc's time off we also took a quick trip down to Roanoke, VA to visit some friends from our BYU days. We were both amazed by how gorgeous that part of Virginia is! Once we got past D.C. the drive was just so nice and beautiful. Lots of hills and green and little mountains in the distance. Here's the view from their house, try not to be too jealous...

We were so excited to get to see the Bohons! We were neighbors in Springville, and we were way bummed to leave them when we moved. T had a blast with their little girl.

Nora chilled as usual.

The day after we got back from VA we went to an Irish festival in Annapolis. Because when would be a better time for an Irish festival than July, right? Anyway, the best part of it was that there was a ton of free stuff for little ones. T got to ride her first pony! I'm not sure who was more excited about it...

Okay, it was me. Poor T, Marc just plopped her on the horse and then started to walk away. She wasn't pleased.

She was a little happier when Marc went back and walked with her and the pony, but she looked pretty solemn the whole time.

After, I asked her if it was fun, and she said yes, and then I asked if it was scary, and she said yes to that too. She did agree that it was more fun than scary though. And she's been talking about it all week too ("Sessa ride horse!"), so I'm pretty sure it was a success.

And here's a picture of Nora, because we love her too :)

4th of July

2011-07-11T14:41:00.001-05:00

You guys, seriously, I LOVE the 4th of July. We had so much fun this year. We bought tickets to a Nationals baseball game a month or so ago, and it was a blast. We almost decided not to go, but I'm so glad we ended up going. We only lasted for 5 innings before T was asking to go back to the car (innings 2-7, because it literally took us 2 innings to walk from the car to the stadium - T insisted on walking herself and she was going as slow as molasses). We were in the cheap seats, but our seats ended up being a set of three, so it was nice that we didn't have to shuffle past a bunch of drunk people with all our kids and kid accessories :). T really had fun although I'm not sure if she registered the fact that there were people playing baseball way down below. She just liked being outside, and all the music they were playing and stuff like that.

Getting ready to go. She was mad about having to get her hair combed:

We brought peanut butter sandwiches to eat in the car...T decided she didn't want the second half of hers. I'm just glad she waited until after she'd chewed it up to make that decision...

Self portraits...

Teresa taking her sweet time walking to the ball park:

Nora was doing okay, until Marc cheered for a good play. Poor little thing got so scared :(

Me and Teresa. And Nora's in there too...

Here's something awesome - we were sitting in front of two really friendly guys, and when they were talking to T one of them referenced the fact that I was nursing Nora, and I totally realized that the stadium seating pretty much made it possible for them to see straight down my nursing cover. Awesome. But, I'm pretty sure they were gay, so that somehow made it less awkward for me.

Anyway, Nora was a little happier later on in the game:

Sisterly love...

Teresa and Daddy.

Luckily T agreed to be carried back to the car, so we made much better time on the way back.

When we got back on base after the game we realized the big festival/celebration/thing the base was putting on was still going on, so we decided to walk over to that, even though it was well past nap time. They had a bunch of bounce houses that Teresa loved, of course, and we were surprised that she didn't want to bounce for very long.

Hmmm...T looks a little creepy in this picture. Oh well...

Tired girl

I had to post this pic of T's outfit. I made her skirt and belt, and it was a headache and a half! My wonderful Aunt Darlene gave me a sewing machine a few years ago, and unfortunately I don't get to use it as much as I would like to. Mostly because we live in a tiny little house and the only space I have to sew is our dining table. Anyway, it should have been a super easy, quick little project, but some two-year-old induced mishaps (and some 25-year-old ones too, I guess...) made it take way longer than it should have. But, we got it done, and it fits, and T loves it, so I guess that's all that matters...although, someone did ask me if she was supposed to be a pirate. Umm. No.

Anyway, once T was done bouncing we headed back home. Even though Teresa was super exhausted she had no interest in napping, so after we got home we headed over to our neighbors house for a little barbecue. Teresa's friend Mina was there, and they were too cute feeding each other berries.(I didn't have my camera, so I stole these off of facebook)

We didn't stay for the fireworks because T was soooo exhausted, but they woke her up, so we let her come down and watch them in the backyard. At first she kept saying "oh no", then when she was a little more awake she kept saying "oh, wow!".

It was probably my favorite 4th of July yet.

Musical

2011-07-08T19:24:00.003-05:00

Here's a little video of T playing the drums. She loves music, as she'll tell you on the video, and is always playing on the piano and drumming on anything she can get her hands on. As usual, please ignore the laundry waiting to be folded in the background :).

Sessa music from Tara Milligan on Vimeo.

And, in case that one wasn't long enough...

Sessa music 2 from Tara Milligan on Vimeo.

Solid

2011-07-02T21:21:00.001-05:00

We fed Nora her first 'solid' foods this week. Just some brown rice cereal. Marc did the honors, since he missed out on Teresa's first food experience. And, of course, T had to help as well.

What's that? You wish you could have seen it all go down?

Well. It's your lucky day, because we just happened to take some videos of it.

Here they are.

Very first bite:

Nora's first eats from Tara Milligan on Vimeo.

And a little later on in her meal:

Nora eats some more from Tara Milligan on Vimeo.

And some pictures, of course:

All the classic 'first food' faces that are so cute. She seemed to like it well enough. At least, she kept accepting more 'bites'. I'm not sure how much of it she actually swallowed, but it was good practice, right?

Teresa kept wanting to try it, but then when I offered her some she covered her face and said "I can't do it!"

In other Nora news, she can roll both ways now. She is super chatty and smiley, and still loves T so, so much. She always zeroes in on Teresa and has tons of smiles for her. She is wanting to be sitting up or standing a bunch now, and typically sleeps from 7:30-3:30 or 4, and then from 4 or 4:30-7:00ish. So, much better in the sleeping department than Teresa :)

There was a little girl

2011-06-30T22:30:00.001-05:00

There was a little girl

Who had a little curl

Right in the middle of her forehead.

And when she was good

She was very, very good.

And when she was bad

She

was

horrid

It's a good thing we love her so much...

Things she says: 3

2011-06-29T20:34:00.007-05:00

- "Not like dat!" or "I no like dat Mommy" - She says this one whenever we do something she doesn't like or approve of, so we've been hearing it a lot. We've been swimming a lot lately, and I hear it at the pool all the time. T is pretty bold in the water, she'll just keep walking in until it hits her bottom lip, but if I take her in the deep end, no matter how tightly I'm holding her, she just repeats this over and over.

-She's started complimenting me whenever I wear a skirt or a dress. Cute little compliments like "Oh, I love that dress Mama".

- "Sessa do dat too" and "Sessa helper" - Of course she loves 'helping' us with any and everything we do. She is actually starting to be pretty helpful with stuff. Which is nice, cause, you know, that's pretty much why we had children...

- "Yee Haw!" - I have no idea where she learned this one, but she says it all the time. Especially at the park, or when she's jumping off the stairs.

- "Bummer" - she says this a lot, like when it's time to go home from the park or the pool. We were at a friends house last week, sharing a piece of cake, and every time I took a bite instead of giving T one she would say "bummer!". That same night she spilled a little boys drink, and was totally embarrassed about it. I went looking for her to make her apologize and she had her head buried in the couch and kept saying "I can't talk, I can't talk". :)

Life stuff

2011-06-20T19:47:00.011-05:00

Look, I've been taking a TON of pictures lately, and I need to do something with them. We've just been doing normal life stuff lately, nothing out of the ordinary, but it seems like almost every day T does something that has me running for the camera.

Sooooo, this is a big long blog post, mostly for journaling reasons, so read on at your own risk ;)

T has a definite fashion sense of her own. She picks her own clothes most days, and accessorizes a ton. She loves shoes, when we're looking at shoes in a store she'll get all quiet and awestruck almost, and just keep repeating "so pitty, so pitty" (pretty). It's pretty cute. She makes some interesting choices:

And a close up:

On Saturday she chose to wear one leg warmer on her arm:

She loves her hats, and tea parties now:

We're dipping our toes in to the potty training pool:

Uncle Zac stopped by to visit. We were super excited to get to hang out with him for a few hours, and can't wait to see the rest of his family next month. T wanted him to lay on the floor with her and he was a great sport about it - she made him use her tea pot as a pillow:

Nora has been being cute and growing bigger and more interested in the world every day. These first three pictures are from about a month ago:

These ones just make me smile:

Teresa loves horses right now. I'm pretty excited about it, cause I was a total horse nerd when I was a kid. She needed to ride both of her horses at the same time:

Nora fell asleep when I was finishing T's room. Isn't she cute?

Speaking of T's room, I finally got it all put back together and organized after switching out her crib for a toddler bed.

(can you find Nora in this picture....?)

This is the cleanest it's ever been, and that's only because T was down helping Daddy get the Durango cleaned out and washed and ready to sell. We bought a new car, and this one gets way more than 13 miles per gallon. The car payment and gas for this car combined will still be less than what we were paying just in gas for the Durango each month, so we're pretty excited about that. It's just your standard Toyota Camry, like pretty much everyone else has:

Marc and I ran our second 5k this past Saturday. It still took me forever, but I did shave 4 and half minutes off my time, so I'm calling it a success.

The girls did quit crying eventually...

And one last picture of the Teresa, for the road:

Sisters, Princesses, and Babies (Oh my!)

2011-06-16T20:11:00.006-05:00

I'm so excited for T and Nora to be best friends. Nora adores T, she just grins and grins at her whenever she is in sight. And T feels the same way about her. Teresa got a toddler bed this week and Nora moved in to the crib, and T just so badly wanted Nora to sleep in her new bed with her, it was so sweet. She cried and cried when we took Nora out.

Don't they look so much alike in this picture? This pic is the first time I've really thought they looked a ton like each other.

Love that cheesy grin :)

I wanted to get some cute pictures of the girls before church on Sunday, but this is what T was giving us:

Nora was more cooperative:

Teresa has started to show some interest in princesses lately. Not so much the Disney ones yet, but just in general. The other day she came in with a blanket on her head saying "Sessa pincess", so I told her she was a very beautiful princess, and then she kept walking around with the blanket repeating "bootiful pincess".

I found this Snow White dress for super cheap at Ross a few months ago, and T has just now been wanting to wear it. This is her doing a princess dance.

One drawback to having a super tall two year old is that she can reach way too much stuff on the counter! She filched the juicer and a juiced lemon and kept bringing me 'yemen juice'.

T keeps coming up with the most creative way to wear her babies. Today it was her apron, and she wore her baby most of the day:

Things she says: Part 2

2011-06-12T21:16:00.000-05:00

Teresa is talking more and more, almost on a daily basis. I love listening to the things she says, or attempts to say ;)

-Recently she started requesting the 'Tinkle shtar' song. I was surprised to find that she knew all the words to it, since we hardly ever sing it. I guess she learned it in Nursery at church? Anyway, she can sing pretty much the whole thing, but her version of the first line is "Tinkle tinkle little shtar. How I wonder are are are". I love it.

-"Open da doors". She says this about just about anything she wants opened. Doors, windows, a box, snacks, water bottles, my glasses case, whatever, they're all "doors".

-"Good job Sessa". We hear this one a lot. Anytime she does anything she's proud of, she claps and says 'good job Sessa!". Last week we were coming downstairs in the morning, and T really wanted me to carry her down, even though I had Nora too. So I picked her up in one arm and had N in the other. When we got downstairs T clapped and said "Good job Mommy!" It totally made it worth it :)

- "Oh no, happened?" T's version of asking what happened. If something is broken, or if N is crying, or when she notices her fingernails aren't painted anymore - anything like that, T puts up her little hands and says "oh no, happened?". It's pretty cute, she always sounds so concerned when she says it.

-"Yook at Sessa". She loves to pretend to take pictures, and always says "yook at Sessa" when she does. Probably because I'm always saying "look at mommy" and following her around with a real camera...

-Ever since she saw a Tinkerbell movie where Tinkerbell gets captured she'll randomly say "oh no, Tinkabell stuck!". She was excited to wear her green dress the other day because "is a Tinkabell dress".

-She has recently dubbed orange juice as "yemen juice". I drink lemon juice in the mornings sometimes, and I thought she knew the difference, but, yeah...maybe not. Actually, I think it's because we switched to frozen o.j., and it definitely tastes more sour than the stuff in the cartons.

-She really likes frogs right now. Only she pronounces 'frog' the same way as you would pronounce a different, less desirable four letter word that also starts with 'f'. Awesome

The one with Gigi and Poppie

2011-06-10T10:14:00.002-05:00

After my parents left, we got to spend a few more days with Gigi and Poppie. These two little girls of ours have been so spoiled with grandparent love recently! We went down to Annapolis on Memorial Day, so this time Marc got to come with us.

Nora waited patiently for us to leave:

T loved the boat ride again, and I loved how the humidity made her curls even cuter than usual:

Remember how T used to love bananas? Well, she quit eating them. We were shocked. But Gigi brought one along on the boat and T decided to give them another try:

Success!

She entertained us all with her hopping:

I have to get all the ruffle bum pics I can, before T gets too old for it:

We ate dinner in Baltimore that night, in Little Italy. I'm bummed I didn't get any pictures, because it was a really neat part of town.

The next day Marc and Poppie both had to go to work (Marc's dad was able to combine this visit with a business trip), so Gigi filled up the pool for the girls. It was Nora's first time in, and she seemed to really like it. At least until someone started splashing water right in her face...

Teresa really loved having Nora in there with her, and she barely let Gigi sit down the whole time.

T had to 'water' the slide to cool it down.

We definitely had some sad little girls when they left!

Nora's blessing

2011-06-06T21:03:00.001-05:00

The main reason we had all our visitors recently was for Nora's blessing in church. We decided to do it on the weekend of Teresa's birthday so we could celebrate them both together. She actually was blessed on T's birthday, the 29th, so that was pretty neat. Marc gave her a wonderful blessing, I could really feel what a special little spirit Nora is during the blessing. We are so grateful to have her in our family!

She wore the same dress T was blessed in, which is also the same one I and all my sisters, and many of T & N's cousins, were blessed in.

(click to enlarge)

This little noodle loves to have her fingers in her mouth! She gags herself pretty frequently cause she tries to shove as many as she can in there.

We just love Nora so much! Tressa is always asking to hold her and giving her kisses. She is showing us more and more of her sweet little personality every day, and we just can't get enough of it!

Teresa's Birthday Party

2011-06-03T19:51:00.003-05:00

Look, I'll just tell you now: this post has a lot of pictures in it. Like, A LOT of pictures. We took over 600 pictures of T's birthday party. But don't worry, not all 600 of them are in this post.

Only, like, 4-something.

Ha ha! I'm kidding, it's way less than that.

Anyway, for Tressa's second birthday, I wanted her to just have an awesome day of doing whatever she wanted to. We decided to take her to Greenbelt Park, which is a national park up here, between us and D.C. We'd been there twice before and T loved it. It is the perfect place for Tressa-like children, it has several playground areas and tons of open fields. It was so nice to just let her run and play and do whatever she wanted without us ever having to tell her no about where she could go or play. We had a picnic there, but of course T was not too interested in eating much, there was too much fun stuff to do!

Teresa and Granny had fun on the slide:

She did some swinging with Daddy:

Nora snoozed through most of the party:

Love it. This girl has endless energy and this was the perfect place for her to run some of it out:

She did finally take a break to eat some chips:

And Nora woke up near the end, so we took some pictures of her too :)

Both sets of grandparents got to come to T's party. Man, was it nice having six adults to two children!

With Granny and Grandad Ricker:

And Gigi and Poppie Milligan:

Ha! T is totally picking a diaper wedgie in this pic...

I can't believe she is two already! She can't believe it either, apparently. She's the best.

After two hours at the park (she still cried when we left, she would stay outside all day if she could) we headed home for cake and presents. She did not love getting sung to before opening presents. But then, wouldn't you cry if someone put a huge pile of presents in front of you, and then made you sit through their mediocre singing before you could open them?

I guess I should have flipped that picture. She was leaning against Marc's legs, and he took it looking down at her, so that's why it's upside down. Now you know :)

After last years cake, I swore I would make a much simpler cake this year. But then a friend offered the use of their Mickey Mouse pan, so how could I say no? I knew T would love it. I was soooo nervous it would stick and not come out of the pan right, so I shortening-ed and floured that baby three times before I put the cake in to bake. And it came out perfectly! Seriously, I was shocked.

T loved it, she kept asking to "open da Mackey".

We sang to her again before the cake, and she liked it a little better that time:

We sing happy birthday to T from Tara Milligan on Vimeo.

Nora didn't get any cake, but she did get to hang out with Grandad!

This one is the best, too. She is closing in on the four month mark already!

Just in case you wanted to see even MORE pictures from T's party, you may look on the facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150195268916205.308248.532436204&l=db5ab4dc2b

The one with Granny and Grandad

2011-05-31T12:17:00.004-05:00

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!

2011-05-29T06:52:00.003-05:00

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

2011-05-20T13:27:00.006-05:00

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

2011-05-15T19:28:00.004-05:00

Just ignore all the laundry in the background...

Love these two!

A Cat and some Eggs

2011-05-09T18:58:00.009-05:00

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

2011-05-01T19:30:00.018-05:00

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

We went to Texas and now we're back

2011-05-01T08:27:00.001-05:00

The girls and I just got back from two weeks in Texas. We went down for my
cousin/roommate/bff's wedding in Houston, which was so awesome. Marc was supposed to go with us, but ended up getting into some more training, so he had to stay behind, poor guy. We flew into San Antonio, and then turned around and drove to Houston the next morning for the wedding. It was so wonderful to get to see Sarah getting married in the temple!

Sarah and her new hubby with all her cute nieces and nephews

She wore some awesome green socks and white vans with her gorgeous dress

Sarah and Angie. You should be totally jealous if you didn't get to live with these two at BYU. We hadn't been all together since before Sarah left on her mission, I was sad we only got to hang out for one day, but glad that I at least got to see them for a little while!

After the wedding Teresa, Nora, and I hung out in Baytown with Gigi and Poppie for a few days. The girls had a blast, especially T, of course. She loved playing with Scout in the backyard (she called her "Stout"). She thought it was absolutely hilarious when Scout would play fetch. She also had fun playing with some cousins and seeing lots of other family. Nora hung around looking sleepy and cute a lot.

Cute hat right? This is the same hat she screamed and cried about being forced to wear the first time we saw it at Target. Now she loves it, she wears it pretty much every day, silly girl.

Nora met her great-Granny Milligan

And T kept Gigi on her toes quite a bit...

After our adventures in Baytown we headed back to Boerne for the rest of our trip. Teresa found some of Granny's shoes and pranced around the house in them for awhile. She's pretty stylish, they exactly matched the stripe of pink in her dress.

Nora lounged around and soaked up some sun.

After a few days in Boerne we loaded up again and went to Austin to visit Aislinn's family, and for T's first Easter egg 'hunt'. T fell asleep in the car:

How do kids sleep like that? It looks totally uncomfortable. Anyway, we got to Austin, and to the cousins! T and Nora both adored all the attention. But, seriously, this blog post is long enough already, I'll have to post about the rest of it another day...

Things she says

2011-04-20T21:54:00.003-05:00

Teresa's vocabulary skills have really taken off in the last few weeks. I don't want to forget any of these cute little things she's saying! So, for journal-ing purposes:

Her first full fledged sentence was "I yuv da slide". She's been doing a few two word sentences, and then a week or so ago we got her a little slide for our backyard. We ate dinner on the patio, and let T go to town playing on her new slide. The whole time she kept chanting "I yuv da slide" over and over again. We loved it. Video here, if you're interested.

Ever since then, she just 'yuvs' everything. "I yuv da car", "I yuv da Nora", etc, etc. We were listening to some Mother Goose songs in the car this week, and each time a new song started she would pipe up "Oh, I yuv dat shong".

We took her out to play with Scout at Gigi and Poppie's house this week, and she kept alternating between "I yuv da woof woof", and "I yuv da Stout!".

Gigi and Poppie have a deer head mounted in their living room, and every time T passed it she would look up and say "Oh, dear".

A few weeks ago we were driving somewhere and I could hear her in the back seat going "yeah...yeah...yeah...COWS!". I have no idea if she heard that somewhere, or if she made it up herself, but she says it pretty often, like she's quietly singing it to herself. Funny girl.

Any time I go to stop her from doing something rascally, she announces "I'm not done!". Well, okay then Tressa, I guess you can keep doing it...

She loves to jump and dance, and she keeps commanding us to "stand and jump!" with her.

I can't wait to hear what she comes up with next...

Sessa and Nor

2011-04-10T15:40:00.008-05:00

Okay, I know I just posted yesterday, but I had to put up these pictures of the girls. As I got Nora dressed in this cute green dress this morning for church, I remembered us taking about a billion photos of T wearing the same thing. So I looked them up and realized that Nora is the exact same age Tressa was when we did that little photo shoot. So we recreated it. Same dress, same blanket, different baby. Here are some pics of both girls...both three days shy of their two month birthdays. I think they look quite a bit different, what do you think?

Teresa on left, Nora right (or, as T would say, "Sessa on left, Nor on right")

T left, N right

T top, N bottom

T top, N bottom

T definitely had better head control at that age, poor Nora gets hardly any tummy time, thanks to the rambunctious toddler we have zooming around our house all the time. And Nora has more hair than T did, I think. Also, N's hair is getting lighter faster than T's did.

And here are a bunch more from today:

Nora smiles

2011-04-09T15:15:00.002-05:00

Here's a little video of Nora smiling...most of the "action" is in the first 11 seconds. Then she got the hiccups, so it kinda ruined things :(. Anyway, she's a little smiling machine now-a-days. Teresa gets her biggest smiles, it's sweet to watch them together.

Untitled from Tara Milligan on Vimeo.

Tressa asks about Nora first thing every morning and after her naps. She wanted to be tucked in next to Nora after her nap the other day.

Love it.

Gigi's visit

2011-04-01T09:23:00.007-05:00

Marc's mom came to visit, and to help us take care of our two little rascals. Teresa had tons of fun with all the extra love and attention, and I loved getting some extra sleep in the mornings ;). Gigi brought a cute little green outfit for Nora, and T was thrilled that she also brought a matching outfit for one of T's dolls. I put Nora on the floor, and T lined her other babies up next to her.

Once Gigi rescued Nora after this photo, T picked up one of her dolls and brought me the other so we would all have babies to hold.

Teresa got to go on her first carousel ride while Gigi was here, too. She wasn't thrilled about it, but she was a good sport and did it anyway.

Nora has been smiling for several weeks now, but it's taken us awhile to get it on camera. Poor little second child...

Marc wanted a picture with his mommy too...

Gigi also introduced T to the joys of ice cream cones.

And Nora celebrated her six week birthday by rolling over from her tummy to her back! We thought she had quit complaining about tummy time because she fell asleep, but when I went to check on her she was happily on her back. She's only done it once, but that is possibly because she only gets to do tummy time if she happens to be awake during T's nap. It's too dangerous otherwise. Here she is right after the roll:

Tressa and Nora both had such a great time with Gigi, we're so glad she was able to come!

Some Nora pics

2011-03-28T20:27:00.004-05:00

I got Nora this cute hat on etsy, so of course we had to take some pictures!

Yep, she's even cute when she's crying!

Some things about Tressa

2011-03-25T20:14:00.009-05:00

Tressa is changing way too fast these days, and I figured I need to document some of this stuff before I forget it all.

- She calls herself "Sessa". When we point to a picture of her and ask who it is she either says "Sessa!" or "You!". I guess we weren't too clear when we would show her pictures and say "that's you".

- She can count to two! The other day she pointed to the pictures on our living room wall, and proc'aimed "two Sessa's!". After giving Gigi a high five at the store, she held up both hands and said "two high fives". She also has eagle eyesight. She pointed out a plane in the sky today, and then said "two planes!". I could barely make out a second plane way high up there, but she could see it perfectly.

- She found this cute little ride-on horse at the thrift store here on base. She just loves it. The first week we had it she would ride him through the living room, and then let herself fall off him. Then we would have this conversation:
T: Oh no, faa! (fall)
Mom or Dad: Oh no, did you fall?
T: Yeah. Neigh.
Mom or Dad: You fell off your horse? Are you okay?
T: Yeah, Kay.
She seriously wouldn't get up from her "fall" until we asked her if she was okay. Every few minutes we would go through this same routine. Luckily she did it often enough to be cute, but not so often that it got annoying.

She loves taking her "Neigh" for a walk, she'll ride him down to the park in our neighborhood. The downside to that is that Teresa hates going home from the park, so whoever takes her ends up getting to haul a kicking and screaming T, as well as her horse, all the way home.

-Today she saw a picture of a cookie online and pointed to it and said "Cookie!". It made me sad, because she used to call them "Cookoos". More evidence of growing up :(.

-When we come in the gate on base, T loves to say hi to the guards. She insists on having her window rolled down as well so she can talk to them. Luckily they are (almost) all really friendly, and talk to her. She likes to show them whatever toy she's holding, or a lot of the time she'll point out "No-a" (Nora) to them. Tonight she had gotten a little frog toy while we were out, and it was cute how she was anticipating the guard talking to her. She was leaning forward all eagerly, waiting for him to get near her window. As soon as he looked her way she held her "fwog" out and was telling him about it.

-She looooves her daddy. Any princess movie or show we've watched she always points to the prince and calls him "dada". Sessa is usually the princess. (She did label Anita from 101 Dalmatians as "mama", so at least she doesn't completely forget me, I guess.) I think it's cute how much she loves him, she's had a really hard time with him going back to work after his paternity leave.

-She loves, loves to be outside. She doesn't care what the weather is like, she would spend all day outside if she could. This morning the first thing out of her mouth once she got downstairs was "ousside".

She's a little spitfire, she just goes about a hundred miles per hour starting the second she wakes up. We love her so much, I'm constantly amazed by what a little smartie she is, she learns things so quickly, and picks up on so much stuff that I'm not even aware that she is paying attention to.
I feel like she changed from a baby to a full-fledged little girl overnight!

Zoo

2011-03-19T19:56:00.006-05:00

Marc had Friday off, so we all went to the National Zoo in D.C. Teresa loves her some animals, so I was excited to take her. The big cats were kind of lame, the tigers were all lying flat, being all camouflaged in their habitat, I'm not sure if T was even able to spot them. The lions were a little better, they were at least walking around enough to be seen. And to be waved at by Teresa.

Teresa was more interested in running around than the animals. In fact, one of her favorite things about the zoo were these:

Every time we saw a recycling bin she had to go inspect it. But she did like the animals too. We were super glad to have Gigi with us to help, I never realized going to the zoo could be so exhausting! Here's T imitating a monkey (or one of those other primates that we all mistakenly call monkeys anyway).

Getting T to look at the camera is even more impossible when there are animals to be looked at instead.

This is what Teresa looks like most of the time. She just goes at warp speed from morning to night.

Her favorite animal was easily this little mongoose. It was so cute, when she saw him she ran right up to the glass and said "I want him!". Then she proceeded to chase him back and forth through the glass. He would run to one side, and as soon as T caught up with him he would take off the other way.

Here's a little video. T kept bonking her head on the glass when she would have to stop suddenly and change directions. She's just coming off a bonk when the video picks up. They actually amassed quite a little audience while she was chasing him, you can hear some of the spectator comments on the video. She wanted to keep chasing him, but we figured we had held people up long enough.

Untitled from Tara Milligan on Vimeo.

Shortly after we saw the mongoose Teresa was pretty tired and started crawling, so we popped her back in the stroller, which is why she's crying in the next pic. Marc wore Nora the whole time, so she slept through all the excitement, poor thing ;).

Nora's nice long nap at the zoo made it possible for her to stay awake the whole way home! This is how T coped with all the screaming:

Here's some pics of the babe during calmer times.

Green

2011-03-17T19:09:00.006-05:00

Happy St. Patrick's Day! We had some cute little girlies around here that wanted to show off their green. Aunt Melissa made this cute little dress for Teresa last St. Patrick's Day, and it still fit this year!

T had so much fun 'holding' Nora like this. She kept complaining any time we tried to move Nora away.

Granny's visit

2011-03-11T17:56:00.009-06:00

We had lots of fun having Granny here to visit for two weeks. Teresa was so sad when she left! Having two kids is such a breeze when you have a live in helper ;). Luckily we will only be on our own for a few more days, and then Gigi is coming to visit! We are so lucky to have such willing Grandma's to come help us.

Sorry this post has so many pictures, but we stayed pretty busy while Granny was here. We went to Romp n' Stomp on Tuesdays - it's a little play thing they do on base, just a big gym filled with all sorts of awesome toys and things to climb on and ride on. We hadn't gone at all the last two months I was pregnant, so T was really excited to go back.

She loves these little cars. She used to only be able to push herself backwards in them, but as of our last visit she can finally go forwards as well!

She usually splits her time between the cars and pushing around the little shopping carts, and filling them with random stuff.

We also went for plenty of walks with Granny. And took lots of trips to the park. Again, those two things had kind of fallen by the wayside with being 8/9 months pregnant, and all the cold weather, so Teresa was thrilled to get to start spending so much time outside again.

Nora hung out in the shade while Teresa got out some of her seemingly endless energy on the playground.

We also took a trip to Annapolis. Marc was still recovering from his eye surgery, so he ended up not being able to go with us. Turns out it is waaaaay easier to drive to Annapolis than to Baltimore or D.C. It's a pretty cool city, did you know it was founded in 1649, and used to be the capital of the U.S.? Well, you do now. Teresa loved seeing the boats and the ducks. Nora expressed no interest in either.

Of course, we did lots of shopping, too.

I really wish T would let me put more hats on her.

Thanks for coming, Granny, we had so much fun with you here, and are so grateful for all the yummy meals and all the cleaning, and most of all the getting up with Tressa you did!

Aaaaaannnd...just a few more pictures, in case you haven't had enough yet ;)

An exercise in futility

2011-03-08T19:40:00.006-06:00

What's the point of having two little girls to dress in matching dresses if you can't even take cute pictures of them? T is getting harder and harder to catch on camera these days. Occasionally she will look at us when we want to take her picture, but mostly she just flat out ignores us. And good luck getting her to smile! But, we keep trying. One of these days she'll switch back to being the little camera ham she was just a few weeks ago (I hope). We did manage to get a few pictures with her at least looking at the camera.

Here's what most of them looked like. Honestly, we have a whole camera full of Teresa either not looking at us, or just a blur of her running out of the shot. Silly girl. At least Nora is still pretty cooperative ;).

Sharing

2011-03-01T20:10:00.007-06:00

T is pretty good at sharing her toys with Nora. We'll see if that keeps up when Nora can actually grab at her toys, instead of just lying there passively. The other day Teresa was showing Nora each of her little bedtime buddies, and dancing them over her tummy.

And T just looked so cute after her bath tonight, I had to take some pics of her. Which is easier said than done these days.

She is having sooooo much fun with Granny here!

Newborn pics

2011-02-27T16:43:00.005-06:00

We had some friends take newborn pictures of Nora this past week. We tried to get some of the girls together, but T burst in to tears when we put Nora in her lap. I guess that's what we get for doing it after Teresa's bedtime. The pictures are done by Lloyd Photography, I think they did an awesome job, especially since Nora wasn't the most cooperative little photo subject.