The News of the Week

The time is starting to fly by. Next week I begin planning for the upcoming school year. I will spend the day at the central school office on July 8th for a planning session. Barney will have the girls during the day and then hopefully our babysitter for the Fall will come over when he goes to work. It will be the first of our trial runs as I will have other work days throughout the summer. Over the next two weeks I will also be busy cleaning and packing up my classroom as it is moving to a new school. I am very sad that they are closing the school I work at as a cost saving measure. Hopefully things will turn around quickly!

The girls are just fabulous. It is hard to believe that Kaitlyn is going to turn three in July. I get very emotional when I think about it. I have tears in my eyes right now. When I look back on her baby pictures it is hard to imagine her as a baby because she is so grown up. Especially when I look at Meghan, when was Kaitlyn ever like that?

Everyday Kaitlyn wants to be more grown up. Today her friend Carlie came over to play and she goes potty without a potty seat. Well now Kaitlyn doesn't want to use her stool or her potty seat anymore! In fact, she is determined to use the potty without them!

Kaitlyn and Carlie when Kaitlyn was 10 months old and Carlie was 3 1/2.
Kaitlyn and Carlie now, playing pirates!

Meghan is getting closer to rolling over. She was mostly on her stomach today when I went in to get her from her nap. She just has to get the rest of her shoulder out of the way and she will be there! It is still hard for her to loosen up in large groups of people. She is definitely a home body like her mama. You can almost see the relief on her face sometimes when she gets home after being out at a noisy place. Meghan loves to go to church though. She is almost mesmerized by what goes on. The girls are so good there that I even took them both one time. Of course they did great but I was on pins and needles the whole time ready to run to the cry room!

Meghan is so ready to eat food. She watches it, she sits in her high chair at the table now and she grabs for the food. I am nervous that once she starts on solids that she will not want to nurse as much and my milk supply when I pump will go down. She's already sleeping through the night and I am worried that my supply will go down because of that. Don't get me wrong, the sleep is great, but I need to produce enough for her to have it while I'm at work.

Barney is still determined to learn how to play tennis. He just came in from hitting some balls. He bought a tennis racket with the money his mom gave him for Father's Day. He is busy planning his road race for the Sheriff's department. It is going to be on September 13th. It is a 5k run/walk. I hope lots of people make it as it's a great event.

July is turning out to be a busy month for us. We are having a 4th of July party on the 5th. Then we have Meghan's baptism on the 13th. We are going to Providence for the weekend of the 19th. Then our friends Matt, Sara and Maren will be in town on the 21st and 22nd. And of course Kaitlyn's birthday is on the 24th and she keeps talking about her birthday party! Who gave her this idea??? She tells me she is going to have friends over and they are going to sing Happy Birthday to her. Oh, we were hoping to hold off until 5. Oh well.

The News of the Week

Meghan reached two milestones this week. On Wednesday she grabbed her toes for the first time and now she can't get enough of them :) Here is a picture of her trying the get her toes! What a chubba :)

Today she cut her first tooth. She has been a little cranky this week and we were able to see the teeth under the gums. Today I was able to feel the slit where the tooth is breaking through! She seems to be growing up so much faster than Kaitlyn did.

We also had the dead tree that overhangs our yard taken down this week. They parked a crane in our driveway and hauled the tree out over our house. It was a little nerve wracking as the tree hit our house when they were taking it down. I thought our house was destroyed as there was a huge boom and the whole house shook! It turned out to be only a torn shingle to our roof but I was shaking every time they has to pass the tree over the roof. Here is a picture of the man who cut down the tree and the crane. YIKES!!!
The best news is that we can use our backyard again! The tree had gotten so bad, with falling limbs, that Barney and I did not want the girls out there until the tree was down.

Kaitlyn went to a kids workshop at Home Depot with Barney. They built a boat together.
We are continuing to work on the yard. We made a play area for Kaitlyn.
And we continue to hack away at the weeds. This week I have been working on digging up all of the weeds along the fence. (There are lots of spiders, ewwww) I also trimmed back part of our Rose of Sharon bush/tree. Our butterfly bush is finally growing back after a massive cut back. The rhododendrons have just bloomed and I am reading up on how to prune them. I would like to cut the big one back a lot but I know it may take a while for it to bloom again if I do that. The job for the fall will be to rip out all of the pachysandra in the front yard. Not sure what I will put down, probably wood chips and plant some mums for the fall. I definitely don't want it to have the "overgrown" feeling that it seems to have now.

For our home improvement projects we are looking to have our two roof areas vented. We are going to put a flat vent on the roof over the addition and probably a ridge vent over the top of the original roof. Barney went to a workshop on solar panels last night and got a lot of good information. We are hoping to have an energy audit done on our house in the next few weeks to find out what we can do to make it more energy efficient. In the fall we will have the windows upstairs replaced as they are the original windows to the house. And we will continue to plug away at painting rooms and taking down the last of the wallpaper. Well that seems to be all for now. Don't forget to check out our photo web site for recent pictures!