June: Nine Months!

Happy nine month birthday, Junie!
I can't believe she's nine months old. Next month she will be two-digit months old. That means she will soon be a year old. A year! How can that be?

I snapped this photo this morning as Dane was supposed to be watering the garden plants (that are not actually in the ground yet, as you can see through the door) but he ended up playing with June through the glass instead. I was okay with it.

Do you see June's beautiful, smiling face eerily floating on Dane's head? It reminds me of those creepy, floating head photos from the 80's. Except way more awesome because it's a real reflection.

Her stats as of this morning:

Height: 29.5 in., 95th percentile

Weight: 17 lbs. 11 oz., 20th percentile

Head: 44.2 cm, 50th percentile

I can't believe she's still so tall. Dane was always about 80th percentile until he was about 6 months old, when things started curving downward to his expected, slightly smaller than average size. But here June is, 9 months old, and still 95th percentile. Is she going to be one of those tall girls? Tall girls whose lives I can't even imagine? Will it give her advantages I never had, like...volleyball? That's the only thing I could think of. Oh, I know, jeans that you don't have to roll up. That's a good advantage. 

It's a strange situation. I have no problem with Dane being a little small, and I have no problem with June being tall. Except will Dane's little sister actually be taller than him? Since they're 4 years apart, I don't anticipate it being much of a problem, but...as adults? I just don't want either of them to have a issues. I used every tiny aberration from "normal" to throw me into hyper-self-consciousness while I was a teenager. Hopefully the will be more confident than their mom was.

Anyway. 

I think June is so beautiful. Sometimes I look at her, and I think she's the most beautiful baby in the world. It's kind of a strange feeling because I know rationally that she's not literally THE most beautiful baby in the world. But it feels that way. It makes me happy.

She appreciates good literature. She stands unassisted for seconds at a time. She crawls with proficiency. And when she think you're not paying attention, she gets into mischief:

I have a video of her mischief in action, but it won't upload. 

She's sleeping a little better these days. When she's in the mood, she'll give kisses, clap, and wave. She eats all sorts of vegetables, but the only fruit she'll eat is prunes. Prunes! She's started doing this coy little scrunched faced chuckle. And she will let you know when she's unhappy by bellowing. Bellow! She isn't super dextrous with her fingers but she is really good at working cheerios around in her hand to make them accessible. And every time she wakes up from a nap, she stands up in her crib and reaches one arm out to me. She's my sweet little baby. 

Dane has his moments of bonking her and getting frustrated with her (and biting her) but mostly he's so sweet. He's so excited to see her in the morning and loves to snuggle her and hug her. He's recently figured out how to pick her up and move her away from his toys, which he likes to do frequently. And nobody can make June laugh like Dane can. 

I love my two sweet babies. 

Happy Anniversay!

Today is our 8th anniversary. As cliche as it sounds, I think every anniversary has been happier than the last. I am grateful to have a happy marriage, beautiful children, and a kind, hilarious husband. We kind of have a problem staying up too late because we are just talking about random stuff. Maybe if we didn't like each other so much, we would get more sleep. But I can think of a lot worse problems to have.

On Saturday, Joel arranged for us to go sailing on Lake Hefner. It was beautiful, and a long-awaited event. See, back when we were engaged, we made various unrealistic plans for our wedding day and honeymoon. ("We'll have a couple hours between the sealing and the luncheon, and a couple more between the luncheon and the reception--let's go sailing!" Ha. As if you have any downtime during a DIY wedding.) So the sailing never actually happened on May 1, 2004, or any other day since.

Until now!

Here is our lovely jib sail.

My handsome husband

You can see our guide, our sailor, if you will in the background of this picture:

His name is Bill Rains, and his email is sailorbrains. I'm sure he means Sailor B Rains, but Joel and I called him Sailor Brains behind his back. Haha, we are jerks, but it made us laugh.

At first, it all felt a little underwhelming because there was hardly any breeze, and it felt awkward trying to make conversation with this random man steering the boat. But after a while, we all relaxed a little, the wind picked up, and Sailor Brains kept asking us why we didn't bring any beer or wine on with us. I think that made us friends.

So, I am pretty much awesome at sailing. I didn't want to steer at first, for fear of messing something up really badly, but after a while, Joel convinced me to man the rudder, and it was fun. Here are I am, on the lake side of the fake lighthouse. I've always been on the land side, so it was cool to finally be on the other side for a bit. 

After both of my pregnancies, I got the common "baby blues" for a bit. It's not terrible, and it goes away one its own after a couple of weeks, but it's not really my favorite time, you know? So, after June was born, I read this book, The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud. It's really not that great of a book, for multiple reasons, but there were a lot of descriptions of sailing, and it made me feel like I needed to experience it. In fact, the anticipation of someday sailing helped me feel happier. So it was fun and validating to finally make it happen, and to not even have to travel to New England to do it. (Though I will do that someday, too.)

Anyway, at one point, I had stopped paying attention to our direction for a minute, and the main sail swung out into the other direction. It was an accident, and I felt all embarrassed, but the Sailor Brains said I had actually accomplished something kind of tricky: the wing and wing position of the sails:

So yeah, I'm awesome. 

And have any of you been wondering if Joel attempted to recreate the famous "I'm sailing!" scene from What About Bob?:

Did you really have to ask?

Happy Anniversary, dear. Thanks for 8 happy years and 1 really great sailing voyage (what are they called, anyway...?)

Beautiful Children

Sometime I look at my children and can't believe how beautiful they are. I know I am completely biased, but I don't care. These are some random photos that I never got around to posting but I just wanted to share.

This picture was actually taken in January, but I felt like it was the first photo where we captured the bright smile on her sweet face:

At the end of March we had a little photo shoot to capture June's snaggle toothed smile:

And Dane wanted to show off his great boots in his picture:

One of our first sibling baths; Dane made an impressive bubble beard.

I took these pictures for June's 8-month birthday. She enjoyed the beautiful spring weather...but her mommy was too lazy to go in and get the sunblock, so she got a little burned. Bad Mommy.

Finally, Dane always has a "handsome check" before church to make sure he looks appropriate. It is not hard to make him look handsome.

So, sometimes I read back through some of my old blog posts. Remember when I was clever and interesting? I need to get that back.

Baby Expo!

Also, tornadoes.

Firstly, I decided that I will now start each post with a little tidbit about me. A pet peeve, an observation, a random thought. I get the urge to share these tidbits, but I don't really have any good friends here yet (besides family), and so I turn to my faraway, internet friends!

Oh man, I sound so pathetic.

Anyway.

Tidbit: I often wish it were socially acceptable to tell people that their kids are weird looking. Isn't that terrible? Karma will probably come back to bite me on that one. But my kids are pretty cute, so maybe the fact that I've never actually said it to anyone has protected me from said karma. But really, have you never seen someone post a picture on Facebook and had to really fight the urge to say "Your kids are weird looking"? I am of course excepting the children of everyone who reads this blog. Heh heh, heh...

Maybe my tidbits are a bad idea.

So, the Children's Hospital at OU, which is affiliated with Joel's work at the cancer center, hosted a baby and toddler expo over the weekend. This is the type of thing I normally have no interest in, but Joel showed up late for a meeting at work, and as a result, everyone else volunteered him to wear the mascot suit at the event.

So, of course, I had to go.

I unfortunately didn't bring my camera, so all we have are terrible phone photos.

The mascot has yet to be named, so Joel was an unidentified bird or some sort, and we entered a contest to name it. Here he is as her first appeared--something about a large, plush, costume just attracts kids like flies.

It took a while for me to convince Dane that the bird was really Daddy, but once I did, Dane felt extra special to personally know the bird.

June was fond of the bird, too. Or maybe just the svelte legs.

Then I entered June in the Crawling Diaper Derby. There were only three entrants, so I felt pretty confident about our chances.

Here she is at the starting line:

And they're off!

Halfway through the race, June had not moved. The baby in blue took off in the wrong direction, so the one in the striped shirt was the clear winner. At the end, June still had not moved. It was awesome.

But we still got a third place prize: a giant set of plastic keys!

Dane also had some fun. He made a fun plastic plate turtle and played with the juggler:

Finally, they had a booth where you could get a free portrait of your child. You can tell by Dane's outfit that we were not expecting to be photographed:

Also, his pose is super awkward. Would you believe they actually posed him like that? Still, free portrait!

June is pretty cute, though.

Considering I wasn't originally planning on going at all, we had a pretty good time. Oh, and I bought a Sophie Giraffe.

I have not previously purchased Sophie for several reasons:

1) It is expensive for a little rubber teether

2) There is no guarantee that June will actually like it

3) It is kind of a trendy thing to do

But I have learned that my kids tend to get their teeth in very quickly, which makes for misery and sleeplessness for a while. And June especially likes to sooth herself by gnawing on our fingers, which hurts a lot (she has six teeth). So I've been researching teethers, and Sophie always came up. At the expo, they had a display one (which I cleaned) that I handed to June for testing. It was a hit. So I forked over the money. I still feel like it is too pricey, but she does like gnawing on it, so I'm okay with it.

Also, for those of you who made have heard about crazy storms and tornadoes in Oklahoma, we are safe and sound. In our city, we only experienced strong wind and rain, and one middle-of-the-night siren and minimal damage, so we were lucky. To the northwest, five people were killed when a tornado touched down, which is very sad. I have been sluggish about getting our emergency preparedness stuff together since we moved, but there's nothing like the threat of tornadoes to get you motivated. It was an eventful kickoff to tornado season.