Month Four (and a whole bunch of other stuff!)

Missed a bit of blog time, I know! Since it has been so long, and there is not really a coherent way to make all these pictures come together, I am just going to comment as I go. May or may not be in order. Definitely will be cute!

Miss Big Girl Charlie, in her t-shirt that Titi Pat (or Titi Pap, as Emily says) brought her from Italy.

A rarely allowed ponytail on Emily. She hates for us to mess with her hair in anyway - some days we can't even brush it!

Chatting with Grandaddy.

Trying out the bouncy chair for the first time.

Our morning routine these days: Charlie wakes up at 5 (ouch), we feed her in our room and then take turns getting ready and watching her. We wake Emily up at 6:30 and they watch Mickey Mouse Clubhouse together while we finish getting ready and get them dressed.

On this day Emily was feeling generous and let Charlie hold her beloved "puppy".

At her 4 month doctor visit. She is perfectly healthy and growing like a weed! She has been hovering around the 15lb mark.

We have made quite a few visits to the doctor's office with this gal in the past month or so. She was diagnosed with bronchiolitis and had to do about 2 weeks worth of breathing treatments. Then she got a sinus infection, which led to two weeks worth of antibiotics. She was all snotty, with a rough sounding cough, and she was refusing bottles occasionally - we were really worried about her, but she seems to have turned the corner finally!

Emily loves to play with our phones and she loves to take pictures of herself making silly faces.

Again with the hair bow hate!

Attempting to get in at least one picture with my girls!

This is the face we get most of the time when we try to take her picture.

She loves to stick stickers all over her face!

We took a family outing to the pumpkin patch! Emily wasn't too sure about alot of the activities - no hayride or playing in the giant bin of corn. But she loved being able to run all over the place and she LOVED picking out pumpkins!

Charlie was indifferent about her pumpkin.

More stickers on the face.

I threw Emily's "owlie" on to Charlie, just to see what would happen. This captures it perfectly! Check on the smirk on Charlie's face, and Emily's little hand in the corner, reaching in to immediately snatch that dirty old owl away.

I asked her to try on her jacket, and apparently that required crawling.

In late September, I traveled by myself for a weekend wedding in NC. Mikey took the girls to Kentucky for his sister's retirement ceremony.

I missed them all like crazy! But it seems like they got along just fine without me!

Another exciting recent event - the birth of our niece, and cousin, Anna Katherine Scarbrough!

She snuck in to the world about 3 weeks earlier than expected!

She is the tiniest little baby I have ever held, and just as sweet as can be. I am so excited for my sister and I to have girls about the same age. 

While I was meeting AK, Mikey and the girls went ahead with our plans to attend a Halloween party. He is a brave man! I am not sure I would have been able to handle two little ones on my own with that much stuff going on.

Some horrible person at the party taught my sweet innocent baby Emily to say "Roll Tide".

Charlie likes to do backflips off of her pillow, so you can't turn your back on her for a second!

Daddy and Charlie, napping one more while I took a shower.

Ahh, school photos. I laugh every time I see this image!

I have no idea why Emily was so sour this day, but I had no choice but to buy these shots!

I am thinking, Senior yearbook photo? Wedding slideshow? The possibilities are endless!

Charlie fared much better in her solo pics!

Halloween 2014 did not go exactly as planned. For starters, it was freezing cold and raining. I had ordered a precious little monkey costume for C, and E was supposed to wear a little khaki dress and a hat, and be her Zookeeper.

Emily flat out refused the khaki dress.

I had thrown this Titans cheerleader dress in the bag just in case, and manage to shove her screaming body in to this one, and then distract her with candy.

Once she got the hang of trick or treating, she loved it!

Mikey with his girls on his birthday.

Charlie is really close to being able to roll over. She tries to practice all the time. This makes diaper changes interesting!

Morning pancakes and cartoons.

And finally, a shot of my adorable baby girls cuddling together.

Believe it or not, these are not the most recent pictures that I have! There are more to be downloaded - hopefully sooner rather than later!

Month Three

Month three with our Charlie continues to be divine! We sure did luck up with an easy going, sweet as can be baby girl. She is just growing like crazy, too! We went from saying what a tiny little frog baby she was when she first came home, to calling her "Chunk" now. 

In Charlie's third month of life, we turned our little cozy at-home world upside down, and Mommy went back to work. Charlie started joining her sister at daycare, and so far it seems to be going quite well. She is always either smiling or sleeping when we pick her up and her teachers mark her "daily mood" as Happy just about every day. I take Emily in with me when I drop off and pick up Charlie, and she just loves going to "Tarlie's room". At afternoon pickup, Emily runs in yelling "Tarlie, Tarlie" and looking for her sister. She seems to be napping well there, and of course she eats well. And no illnesses yet (knock on wood!).

Over Labor Day weekend Mikey's Aunt Pat came to visit us from Wyoming. We had a house full of family and it was so much fun! Some how I didn't get all that many pictures though. What can I say, my hands are full almost all the time! We took Pat and the girls to the Dickson County Fair, and it was interesting to say the least.

Emily wasn't much in to riding things by herself, but we did take a train ride together.

We tried to stay for the demolition derby, but as soon as those cars started crashing, both girls started screaming and we had to take off out of there.

Since that was also the weekend before I was scheduled to go back to work, we decided to move Charlie to her own room at last. I was nervous, as usual, but she did great! She slept through the night both nights that weekend, and has pretty much done so ever since. She still sleeps on her tummy most of the time, and so she wiggles herself all around the crib, and usually ends up with her face squished against the rails. She will fuss a little, but if we go up and move her back to the middle, she will go right back to sleep. And, I will admit, I have no problem with bringing her in to our bed in the middle of the night if needed!

The girls and I made two trips to Atlanta without Daddy this month. The first one was just us three, and to say I was nervous about the drive down would be an understatement! I loaded the car with books and snacks and water, and I made a little diaper changing area in the back so that I wouldn't have to stop at sketchy bathrooms. 

Emily was really good! She read her books, and chattered to me about the "monkeys in the trees" that she said she saw out her window. When she says it, it sounds like she is saying "monkey cheese" but I know what she means. Charlie slept most of the way down, but she woke up about 45 minutes from Atlanta and needed to eat, so we pulled off the interstate and fed her. I let Emily sit in the front seat with me, and she thought she was so big - pushing all the buttons, opening the sunroof, all those fun car things. Every button in my car had greasy little fingerprints on it!

Our second trip to Atlanta, we took Grandma and went down to Katie's first baby shower. We had a fun visit but Emily developed a funky looking rash on her elbow and legs. She has always had eczema so we thought that was what it was. Also, Charlie decided sleeping was dumb and cried most of the night and all through the shower the next day.

We went to Katie's shower - which was lovely- and then headed home. Charlie had another rough night and Emily's skin wasn't clearing up. so I decided to take Emily to the doctor that next Monday.

As it turned out, the dreaded Hand Foot and Mouth disease was making its way through Emily's daycare class and she had gotten it, but instead of blisters in the normal places - her hands, feet and mouth - it had shown up on her already damaged skin in the places where her eczema normally is.

She had no other symptoms and didn't seem to even be uncomfortable. However, she did infect the one year old baby that she played with at the shower. Oops.

 I just adore the age Emily is at right now. She keeps us laughing every day with the things she says and the faces she makes.

Some bullet point updates on Miss E:

• She loves to have you sing the ABC song. She will yell "ABC Mommy" or "ABC Daddy" and if we don't burst in to song right away, she just keeps yelling until we do.
• She can also count to ten - she will say 1, 2, 3, 4 (she actually says Fork), 7, 9, 10. And she gets progressively louder as she counts, until the 9, 10 come out in a holler!
• She loves Mickey Mouse and Elmo and asks for both of them to be on TV constantly. 
• She pronounces her Fs as Ps, so that makes for some funny conversations. Have you ever met Mickey's friend "Goopy"? Or played "pootball"? Or eaten your dinner with a "pork"? We have!
• Her favorite person on Earth is her little sissy. She asks for Tarlie from the moment I pick her up at daycare until we get C in the car. She hovers over Charlie while she is in her swing and will say "she sleeping". When they take baths together, Emily pours the water over Charlie's legs and belly and only occasionally on her face.

Life with two kids under two years old is definitely non-stop and hard work, but it is also so much fun. We feel so lucky to have our happy, healthy girls. I go back and forth between wanting to freeze time and keep them little forever, and then also wishing I could see the future and see the young ladies they are going to be.