The Girls!

Here's Nadine in her bouncy seat.
Roxanne working on a family of bears.
Nadine in her panda sweater.
Teensy.
Roxanne was desperate to be in a picture with Nadine.
That's Roxanne's head hanging out of the pumpkin ferris wheel at the fair.
Bumper boats at the fair!
Waiting in line for a ride.
See how Nadine is staring at Roxanne? We were playing "this little piggy."

Little hams. :)
Daddy and his girls.
So cute.
This is how you eat a chocolate covered banana at the Piedmont Park Ice Cream Festival.
How the girls ride in the double stroller. Roxanne likes to turn around and sit on her knees to talk to Nadine.
When Daddy stops paying attention...
The closest I've gotten to catching a smile!
Roxanne in her classroom. She was supposed to be sitting with the other kids, but she insisted later that "there was no room." The teacher was nice enough not to reprimand her.
Roxanne at DragonCon.
Nadine in her new crib!

I apologize for letting so much time pass! I always try to remind myself that it's so much easier to write frequent and short blog posts than wait forever and feel like I'm writing a novel, but then time gets away from me... Anyways, I'll try to be concise!

Nadine is almost 7 weeks old now! I can't believe how fast it has gone. She has started smiling, which is adorable. I haven't caught it on camera yet, but I'll keep trying. The cutest is when she does big smiles, which start out like a yawn. It's like she's figuring out how to do it. She has also started looking at toys more, and just this week started reaching for toys. She doesn't do it all that often, but she has a butterfly attached to her carseat that she stares at and sometimes grabs. It has helped a teensy bit with car trips. Nadine HATES being in the car. She usually cries/screams when she's in her carseat. It's so pitiful. Usually it gets better and worse as we drive so she's not just fussing the entire trip, but once she gets going, she means business. She is definitely more intense than Roxanne was at this age in that she wants to be held a lot. She is starting to be OK with sitting in her bouncy seat or swing for short periods, but still only about 10 minutes at most. Usually it's only about 2. :) I wonder if maybe she's a little more needy because she gets dragged around so much. With Roxanne, it was easy to just stay home and snuggle and nurse most of the time, but with a 3.5 year old at home, we've got errands to run and places to go to avoid cabin fever. Either way, it's definitely not awful by any means, just noticeably different than her big sister.

Roxanne is love love loving pre-school. She gets to take yoga, Spanish and music classes as part of her weekly schedule with school, and we also signed her up for pre-ballet on Wednesdays after school. She had her first ballet class on Wednesday and has asked me about five times a day since then when she gets to have ballet class again. She loves all of her various teachers, and spends a lot of time at school drawing pictures for them. She spends hours every day at school and at home working on drawings. She also loves gluing sequins (and anything else she can get her mitts on) onto her drawings. I bought her a pack of confetti/sequins a while back at Target and she loves taking the hearts and butterflies and flowers and incorporating them into her pictures. She'll draw herself and then glue the sequins onto her dress in the picture. Or she'll glue flower shapes in a straight line along the bottom of the page and then draw in a stem and leaves. She loves displaying her artwork and tells us it's an "art festival." She loves making cards for everyone, and practices writing names. Since she's a lefty, a lot of her letters are backwards and she writes names (including hers) out of order. But she draws a line before writing and so at least her letters are all on a line.

Together, the girls are adorable. Poor Nadine gets Roxanne an inch from her face all the time, but she seems to kind of like it. She smiles at her sometimes, and always stops what she's doing to look around when she hears Roxanne talking or yelling (which is ALL THE TIME). Roxanne always tells me she wants to play with Nadine or hold her. She loves giving her kisses, too. We have to work on not giving Nadine toys all the time, even though I always tell her Nadine is too little for things like stuffed animals. But at least it's that and not eye-poking or roughness. Roxanne tells me "You have me, and when Nadine gets bigger, you'll have two kids! Isn't that great?" So I know she has trouble understanding about Nadine being a baby versus a big girl, etc. In that same vein, she'll tell me "When Nadine gets bigger I'll have a sister!" Still, we're very grateful that Roxanne loves Nadine and hasn't had any aggression towards her.