Picture Catch-up

I've gotten behind on posting pictures so here's a lot of them. First, here's a quick update on the girls.

Natalie just turned 15 months and is still not walking. It might be soon but I thought that awhile ago, too. She is learning new words left and right, though, including "Elmo", "apple", "bye-bye" and my favorite "ga-girl" (my girl). This is from the song "My Girl" which has become Elizabeth & Natalie's new favorite song (with only slight encouragement from myself). I was trained to love Motown when I was young so why not continue the tradition? It's so cute to hear Natalie sing along. She is also starting to really love reading and will find a book and crawl over to us while dragging it so we'll read it to her.

Elizabeth is doing great. She has completely grown out of pull-ups and has stayed dry at night for about 3 weeks now. She's on a good stretch right now which I think is mostly due to the fact that I have been really trying hard to just relax and not take every bad thing she does so personally. She can definitely sense when I'm frustrated or angry and feeds off of it. Anyway, I'm sure we'll hit another challenge with her soon but it's nice to enjoy the good days. She really is a good girl.

Elizabeth making faces and being her cute self.

Natalie went through a phase where she had to have this ring of connector things around her neck and if you tried to take them off she'd cry. It was funny to see the proud look she'd get when she'd have them on. I guess she's already into jewelry. :)

We've been swapping babysitting with some neighbor friends and Elizabeth enjoyed playing with her friend Tyler.

What was fun for me to see was how cute Elizabeth was with Allen (shown below). She kept coming up to him and bringing him toys and calling him "Little Buddy". I think that she really wants a brother. She's always talking about there being a baby boy in her tummy and coming up with different names for him. Then, today she got to play with her friend Jared at the McDonald's playplace and kept calling him her brother and telling other kids to "be nice to my brother". She is already a great big sister to Natalie and it's going to be fun to watch her with our future children, too.

This past weekend we got to go to our niece Hallie's baptism. I managed to get a few pictures from the get-together afterwards.

Randon walking

Elizabeth and Joelle pretending to take pictures of each other with a play cell phone. Are they children of the 21st century or what?

Matt & Elizabeth

Natalie mooching off Uncle Tom (who is too cool to look at the camera; this is my way of getting back :)

Richard and Joe also refusing to let me take a decent picture. In all fairness, Richard had worked a graveyard the night before. What's Joe's excuse? ;)
Thank you Jaime for actually smiling!

We had a great time being with everyone for the occasion. Unfortunately I didn't get any pictures of Hallie because she ran off to play but she looked beautiful and we were all very proud of her.