Sammie's 6 months!

Half a year already!!! I keep saying it over and over but she's just such a SWEET girl! So easy going and smiley all the time. She is very very grabby lately, you really have to watch what you have near her because it'll be hers in a second if you aren't careful. We started some rice cereal about a week before she turned 6 months and it took her about a week until she seemed to really like it and not just spit it all out right away. She is rolling all over the place and will even try to scoot some when she's on her belly now, and she's getting better and better at sitting but still leans forward without help. At her 6 month appt she was 14 pounds 9 ounces, which I'm almost positive is bigger than her brother and sister at that age, I'd have to double check. She seems a lot bigger to me, but maybe that's just because she seems to be growing SO fast and time is just flying by! Right when she turned 6 months she was still sleeping in the bassinet right next to me, very uncomfortably because she was WAY to big for it. As I'm writing this it's 2 weeks later and a lot has changed, but I'll get to that later :) She is a big fan spitting and doing raspberries. She sucks in her lower lip all the time, which I just love! She is just such a little angel!!!

Painting

I bought these wooden star and flower racks at Hobby Lobby a while ago and thought I'd let the kids paint them for their new shared room. Bradley did a great job and painted all 4 of his. Gracie lost interest pretty quickly but did a great job on 2 and I finished up the other 2 for her :)

Peppers!

Yay, we have peppers! I don't even know what kind they are - what kind of gardener am I? Um... banana peppers?? Maybe. Whatever, it doesn't matter, they're yummy :)

Bradley didn't think it was right that one was curved like that, so he immediately tried to straighten it out, of course breaking it in the process :)

Oh, and a Green Pepper (I know that one :) )

I know she looks like she's kissing it, but she's smelling it, she smells EVERYTHING, I have NO idea where she got that :)

Little Model

I am addicted to my new camera, I want to play with it all day. It makes me want to go out and take pictures of scenery, and people, and anything I can find so that I can fiddle around with it and try to learn more. I try to read as much as I can online and now I'm trying to figure out which lens I should buy next. When I bought this camera I was really debating going with an SLR or a nice bridge camera. I figured I'd go for this one and if it was just too much and I was overwhelmed I'd return it and get the bridge camera. I am a little overwhelmed, but it has challenged me to learn more and I am curious now to see how much I can learn and how much I can do. I think I'll be keeping it :) Even though I do get frustrated with myself sometimes when I'm trying to take some pictures and they just aren't turning out right, meaning I have it on the wrong setting, mode, focus, flash, aperture, shutter speed... it's sure hard to get EVERYTHING just right. I have a long way to go, but like I said, it is addicting and now I want to see how much I can learn :) Bradley is the only one who is tolerating the camera being attached to my face, I hear "no picture" from Gracie all the time now :) He really is all baseball all the time and he went outside with his bat and ball the other day and I followed him out and he had no problem showing me some baseball poses :) It gave me some time to mess around with the exposure and white balance a little bit!

Bed Project

A while ago I saw this really cute idea for toddler beds online where you pretty much make a frame that fits over the bed from PVC pipe, make fabric curtains to fit over the pipe and you end up with a cute little tent over the bed. I thought Bradley and Gracie would love that, so we decided to make them when we moved Gracie into Bradley's room. Then I started thinking about it and didn't want the bed to be just sitting directly on the floor, so we were going to make a little frame for it to sit on. THEN, I was thinking about how I'd love to have some storage space under the beds since space is going to be very limited once they are both in one room together. So, we adjusted the plan again :) After many changes and tweaks, we finally came up with a plan, got material and went to work.

We pretty much wanted little cubes to put baskets or totes in, so they look like 2 bookshelves on their side.

It's really nice how Kevin designed it because once all the kids are out of the toddler beds we can take the two sides apart and use them as bookcases or shelves, or even a bench seat with cushions on top.

Bradley is always eager to help out Daddy any way he can.

Gracie's big thing lately is getting (stealing) wipes and wiping everything in the house down - so that's how she helped out with the beds :)

All put together, with nice trim which happened to make a nice lip on top to keep the bed from sliding off at all.

Then we primed them... (Painting is one of Bradley's very favorite thing to do)

And painted them.

The one thing that's too bad now is we feel like adding the PVC pipe on top would just be too much and too tall now, so we're going to hold off on that for now. We did use some of the PVC pipe to make bed rails for them.
We're putting the final touches on the room right now and are hopefully moving Gracie in there in the next couple days, so I'll take pictures of the new room and let you know how Gracie is doing in the big girl bed - I'm dreading it a little bit :) But, I did that with Bradley too and he was always so great, BUT it's a whole different ball game with the two of them together :)

Zucchini round 1!

We have had several zucchini ready in the garden for a while now, but like I said before, I was scared away by spiders every time I went out to pick them. I finally caved and brought Kevin out there and pointed out which ones I wanted and watched as he carefully, and quickly picked them - all the while pointing out to me how he was not getting attacked. Yes, he survived, he's bigger than I am and the spiders must have ran away. We happened to pick them when it was raining outside, but it was actually really nice because it's been so hot around here lately. We definitely have some massive zucchinis, I've never seen zucchinis this big (granted I don't see that many zucchinis :) ) And Bradley was SO excited about how big they were, he could barely even hold all of them while I took pictures :) Now I just have to figure out how to get my family to eat zucchini :) I am going to make lots of zucchini bread (recipe courtesy of Grandma Mary Ann) and I made fritters the other night that I thought were very tasty but no one else would eat them, darnit.

New Toy

So you know how my camera died? I somehow convinced Kevin to let me buy an SLR camera, something that I've been wanting to do FOREVER but never was able to before. I figured it could be my birthday, and mothers day, and Christmas presents for the next couple years or so :) So YAY, I got a nice new camera!! I'm still trying to learn all about it so that I can take the best pictures I can. I'm reading a lot online, watching videos online and trying to play around with it to teach myself all about aperture, shutter speed, focus modes and all that fun stuff! I'm having a blast with it. I always have taken a lot of pictures of my kids, but now I think they're getting a little annoyed :) I think I took about 200 pictures the first day :) Here are some of my favorite shots so far, experimenting with different modes and effects :)