march madness

So as mentioned in the last post- March is absolutely insane with birthdays. check out the sahnow boys blog for a good recap- shahnaz did a good job of documenting. We celebrated Madi's 23rd bday by taking her to the Dublin for a little "Boys next door" (a great cover band that has been playing there since long before MY 23rd bday (which I also spent there)). Anyway, we cooked dinner for a few of her UPS friends and then hit the Dub. It was fun to get to meet her friends and have a night out sans baby. Then came Owen's 3rd bday. He had a pirate themed party down in corvallis including a full blown treasure hunt and costumes. it was absolutely adorable and Rory got to participate a bit by riding with the older kids in the pirate ships (wagons). Next was Rory's 1st bday which we celebrated with 40 of our family and a few friends. She was a champ- she made it through the whole crazy day with a smile and impressed all with lots of flirting and signing. She liked the little bug cake I made her and of course tried to grab the flame of her 1 candle. Fun was had by all and she was so wired afterward she didn't go to bed until 10pm- lucky us. It was also National Corndog Day (http://www.corndogday.com/) so we watched some bball in the afternoon and tried to put our house back together post party. I stipulated no gifts on the invite- but that didn't fly so we had tons of wonderful new things for her to play with and find a place for. Then last week we had Pat's 33rd bday which he and I celebrated with dinner at Oba- always a fav. And we finished this crazy marathon off with having tons of old friends in town for the fake, oh I mean fantasy baseball draft. This basically means 10 boys in my basement playing cards on friday night, and then disappearing all day to do their draft and then reappearing for a big group dinner on Sat. at a local pub. It was fun to see those guys and fun for them to get to meet/see rory. I will add pics to this post later, but for now, Spring Break is officially over and I have to get back to work! good night, Britt

A day at the zoo for two

So Rory and I spend a lot of time together by ourselves, but I relized today that rarely do we go to the zoo, omsi, children's museum or other event places alone- we almost always have family, friends, playdates with us. So today it was 11am- She was fed, napped, and dressed and the weather was nice, but not too sunny, so I decided to run up to the zoo for a bit. I figured I could kill 2 birds with one stone because I had wanted to work out today and if you do the zoo right, you can get in a great speed walk! I hadn't realized how long it had been since we had done an outdoor outing- talk about spring fever! It was a totally different experience going with almost 1 year old Rory instead of 7 mos. old Rory. She LOVED it- she was totally into watching all the animals and kept trying to share her snack with them. I took a ton of pictures b/c I just kept trying to capture the look of wonderment on her face. My personal fav. was the larakeet landing- she kept doing the "come here" sign to the birds, followed by the "please" sign- I think she thought if she asked nicely they would let her pet them. She did get to get pretty up close and personal once we bought the nector to feed them. She also loved the sea lions, the polar bear(although she kept doing the sign for dog- so she might be a bit confused), and of course the monkeys. I need to figure out how to do a slideshow of pictures because I have a lot of them. My friend Seth's blog does all slideshoes and it makes it easier to see more pics.- I will work on that. Other then zoo trips, we are staying busy with all the march b-days. Madi's was todays. Owens this week- Rory's next week, Pat's the week after, and smattering of friends in their as well- my one goal for our next child is no March bday- it is just too full! Enjoy, Britt

Bubbles

Just a few pics of Rory's new favorite sunny day activity. Bubble, bubbles and more bubbles. At least it is a cheap habit. I am loving the nice weather and am dreading the dark and rainy days that I know are still in store before summer. In one of the pics you see her newest super cheezy smile and in one you see her new favorite sign "come here" it looks like a low baby wave. She likes to use it when I am asking her to come to me, as if to say, "no mom, you come here." Ah the next 15 years ought to be fun... Enjoy the pics, britt

A little old

So this clip is a bit old, but I had so much fun watching the video of cole badger on his blog, that I thought I would attempt to start figuring out how to add video to ours. since our camera does take video, I had some old footage. This is of Rory and my friend Nicole's daughter Sierra with Madi at OMSI. It was right after Rory learned how to dance. ~Britt

Since I added the video, I might as well add a few of the cute pics of them as well. Rory is around 9.5 months at this point and Sierra is around 6 months I think. As you can tell from the first pic Rory is using her age and newly aquired kissing skills to make friends with Sierra.