grown up and super cool

I've been lazy about posting since our return. Well, actually, I've been trying to catch up with laundry, grocery shopping, cleaning and other errands. But I had to post today after Xavi came in to the kitchen yesterday after dinner and started chatting me up about how the dishwasher works. When Caro comes in he says, very matter of factly, "Carolina, go eat your food. I'm talking to Mami. I'm not talking to you. Go."

Then this am I tell him to get ready to go to the Shedd, he's thrilled. He starts getting ready, picks out clothes and cleans up. While I'm trying to get his sister dressed, he says "I'm almost ready, I'm just doing my thing." I turn around to find him putting on deodorant!

By the way, one of his favorite words is cool.

I have great LBI pics to post, so I'll try to get those on this weekend.

update

Caro, especially, has been doing and saying a lot more lately, so I thought I would write a quick update.

She has a new bottom tooth for a total of 7 teeth and she likes to brush them. She says "teeth, teeth" when she wants to brush. She says shoes when she wants to put them on or take them off which is usually followed by a command, "GO". She puts her arms up in a question gesture and says Xavi (where is he?) and then says night- night if he's sleeping. She calls her oma, mami. AND, recently, she hides to make her business...interesting.

Xavi just tells me he's going to be 4 soon...he says it almost every day. He also tells me everything that will change when he turns 4 - no more sippy cups, 2 vitamins a day, big boy classroom. And he can't wait to see cousin Connor next week at the beach.

Blogger SUCKS!

Not sure what's going on with Blogger... it's cutting pics and doing all sorts of weird formatting stuff! Looks like I got it to work - I hope it doesn't look too odd the next time I look at it or when you do.

Happy 4th in NY

We've left the city and have been in the Adirondacks for about a week now. It took a few days to get here, we drove...don't ask what we were thinking - we're not quite sure. I'm so glad we did the trip to Cinci in the spring though - that was great practice, especially for me since I went solo on the outbound trip and had figured out how to drive and entertain a 3 and 1 year old. So having Daniel around made it that much easier. Still the whining got old. There was a LOT of whining and crying on the 15+ hour long drive. Plus a few requests to turn around and go home from the talking child.

He's happy now, fishing and hanging on the beach with gramps (digging for worms, and other critters, too) and various activities with oma, baking, shopping, hiking.

These pictures are of the drive to VT but gives a snapshot of what our drive was like.

We went to the bookstore that day and the kids had a great time.

We also went out to lunch and walked around church street in Burlington.

We walked up Mt. Defiance - what a walk!I was sweating the whole way up...Xavi was a trooper most of the way but...

Requested to be carried the rest of the way. Carolina was just grumpy because she had to stay in the stroller. In this picture she says "NO!" to me when I ask her to say cheese.

The view from near the top kept us going.

Carolina becomes happy once we let her out of her stroller.

All goes well for a while, then tiredness kicks in and it falls apart.











We tried to take a family picture at the top but the kids were not willing participants. It was worth a shot and looks ok, as long as you don't look at their faces too closely...