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

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

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

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

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

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

And a video.

Shaving cream from Tara Milligan on Vimeo.