In honor of our new camera!

Justin's dad and Susan came for a lovely visit, and gave us their old (but awesome) camera. Yay! We've been very busy with everything and I'm back at work now. We're doing well and Nadine is getting huge! She is more smiley and interactive. Roxanne is loving school and being back at work. Yay for fall!
She loves her bouncy seat.
Please love the smile and ignore the drool.
So alert!
She loves the elephant.
Getting huge!
At Yule Forest (farm/pumpkin patch).
Hayride at Yule Forest with Grandpa Jim and Mimi.
Yule Forest.
The sisters at Yule Forest.
"Helping" Daddy carry a pumpkin.
Roxanne in the pumpkin fields. She was probably crying. Did you know pumpkin vines are actually covered in fine spikes. Tiny, but painful. We had the exact same thing happen last year. Sigh.
Roxanne on a horse at Yule Forest. She rode one here last year! The same guy led her last year.
Roxanne and Justin cutting off the perfect pumpkin at Yule Forest.
At the Ellijay Apple Festival. We somehow didn't take many photos at all here...
Sisters.

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.

Apologies in advance for the blurry photos...

Yes, our camera is on the fritz again, so we've been using an iPod Touch to take pictures. Unless you are outside in bright light, they come out pretty fuzzy. I'm going to try and keep working on the old camera. No funds for a new one at the moment, so please don't get dizzy from looking at these blurry pictures! It's the best we can do for now. :)
Here's Nadine modeling one of her fancy BumGenius cloth diapers! We are so lucky that we were given enough to cloth diaper. I still use disposables sometimes for overnight or when we go out, but we're moving towards full-time use of them. They really are wonderful, and we can't thank our generous family and friends enough for helping us get set up with 12 of them. I might pick up some more here and there, but 12 is a great number to start with. They are on the smallest setting now, and fit her wonderfully. And lots of room to grow! They are supposed to fit until 35 pounds. Which should definitely be potty-training weight. Yay!
Here's a fuzzy close-up from the same diaper photo shoot tonight. Her eyes are the prettiest purpley/blue/gray right now. I know they will change soon, but I wanted to try and catch them in their newborn shade. And I know there is no cover on our changing pad. Awful, but she spits up a LOT and loves to pee on the changing pad during diaper changes. I gave up on trying to keep a cover on it for now.
Here's Roxanne feeding a parakeet at the zoo this morning. I took her and Nadine and we had a lovely time. This is our last week before Roxanne starts pre-school next week!
And here's Nadine enjoying the zoo from inside the sling... What a muffin.
Here's Justin reading to his girls this week. He reads to Roxanne every night, but Nadine only sits in once or twice a week. Roxanne loves it when all four of us sit together for story time. Of course, then we have to sit on the couch or her bed. We don't all pile up in that rocker.
It really almost looks like Nadine is listening...
One of Roxanne's favorite things to do during the morning/day with me and her and Nadine at home is read to the baby. Here she is reading Owl Babies, one of her favorites as a baby. Of course, she's not actually "reading." Just making up words that actually are close to the real ones. She sometimes gets absorbed in the books and forgets to say anything out loud. Then Nadine gets bored and fusses.
Here they are both being camera hams.
Here's Roxanne and I playing in the Chattahoochee on Sunday. We went to a park in Norcross with river access. It was gorgeous. Roxanne had a dress on, but since we had a spare in the car, we let her get soaked. Her favorite part was digging in the "sand" on one area of the shoreline. It was mostly dirt. Red dirt. Ew.
Justin was on baby duty. We've tried to be creative about taking the girls places that are fun and get her out of the house but don't expose Nadine to lots of germs (ie: no jumpy places!).
Here's Roxanne all dressed up for her pre-school playdate last week! School starts next Wednesday, but the room moms organized a playdate at a park near the pre-school. She got to meet some of her classmates and we met her lead teacher. Her teacher is really really sweet. She nannies in the afternoons, so we talked a bit about that. Roxanne played a little with some of the kids (especially Ben, who will be in her class) but she also loves swinging. I noticed two other kids in her class who wanted to just stay on the swings. Their moms kept urging them to go play with the other kids, which I did, too, but I finally just left it alone. She wasn't being shy or anything, she just really likes swinging. :)
Here she is at the playground, playing in the dirt. Sigh. She was burying treasure apparently. A little boy came over and started digging with her, and the two of them had a really elaborate conversation about buried treasure and whether or not to mark the spot with an X. She really is a social little thing, she just doesn't seem to feel the need to have someone play with her all the time. I think she'll like pre-school though. Oh, and she'll be going 5 mornings a week from 9-12. She'll do yoga and Spanish and music on rotating days. Fun!
And here's one last Nadine photo. This was probably the middle of the night during one of her peaceful but wakeful periods. We're working on getting nights and days straight. In the meantime, there's coffee for mama and the basement bedroom for daddy. Thank goodness for that.

Photos

I know it's gas and/or a nice baby dream, but even involuntary smiles are cute.

Having a serious chat with Daddy. Roxanne picked this outfit out for Nadine at Target. We let her pick out two, and of course one is pink and the other is purple. She keeps asking me why Nadine doesn't have any dresses to wear. Oh, and they had newborn sized pink tutus at Target. Roxanne really really wanted to get one for Nadine, but we convinced her we should wait a little while.
Cloth diapers are WONDERFUL, but my favorite part is how they make her little booty look so big.
Story time with Daddy. Look how tiny Nadine is compared to Roxanne!
This was taken while Nadine was in the sling. It was her first trip to the park! We went for a nice long walk at Mason Mill Park. Nadine did this the entire time. :) Roxanne found lots of "nature" that she made Justin take home in his pocket. If we had a dollar for every acorn, tiny stick, rock, leaf, etc., that gets brought into this house, we could re-do our bathroom.
She's getting her chubs back. She's been nursing like a champ!
I know these are dark, but she has her longest wakeful period at night. Of course.
So many fun faces to try out!
Yawns.
Here's Roxanne and Daddy on our walk at Mason Mill Park. We've also been taking long walks around the neighborhood. We took our Joovy double stroller on one and it was perfect. Nadine's baby seat fits into it, and Roxanne can hop on and off whenever she wants. Poor Nadine is getting dragged around way more than Roxanne did she was a baby. We've just been trying to keep Roxanne doing at least one fun thing each day so she doesn't go nuts at home. Story time at Little Shop of Stories, lots of walks, and Justin has been taking her to the pool some. We are going to miss him when he goes back to work next week...