A whole year

Tomorrow we're having Maggie's first birthday party! A week and half late, but she won't know. Unless this blog still exists ten years later and she comes back and reads this. Anyway, we did celebrate on her actual birthday and had presents and cake and stuff. Well, at least we tried to give her several presents but the first one she opened was Legos and then she got so absorbed in making lots of noise with them that she didn't want to open anything else. Also, I took the day off work on her birthday and spent the day with her, which was sooooo nice. We went for a walk to the park, then had lunch, then went to the toy store, then another nap, then played at home :)

Climbing up the slide

Mini pineapple upside down cake!

A big bag of presents!

So I went and got her Halloween costume last weekend - no fairies and princesses for her! At least until she grows up and insists on it herself. But I got her this awesome dragon costume with cool shiny wings and a spiky tail. Hehe. Sydney thinks people will tell me what a cute little boy I have, and she's probably right, but oh well.

Then again, I'm not even sure if she's going to be able to walk by Halloween to do some trick-or-treating. These days she cruises a lot, and she can stand up by herself for a few seconds at a time, but no walking on her own just yet. But really, she gets into enough trouble as it is with just the crawling. I literally just turn my head and she's somewhere else entirely from when I last looked, usually about to get to some dangerous item, such as bottles of cleaning supplies I've left on the floor. She's also unplugged the vacuum twice now while I was in the middle of using it. Grrr.

Anyway, will report back tomorrow after the birthday party. It will be at the park and we will have bbq and cake.

A forgotten post

that I never finished. It looks like I wrote "it's been a while" and then forgot about this blog for another month (it's now Sept. 30)

Well, it's been a while but Marlon is finally home and so we have gone back to being a dual-parent household, thank goodness. We considered having me go over there for part of the trip but I didn't want to be away from Maggie. And part of it is definitely not family vacation material, since he went to go stay at a small remote village for a week where apparently all the buildings are decrepit and the water and electricity are constantly being shut off. In fact I think I probably would have run away screaming in less than a day.

Anyway, Sydney started 3rd grade last week at her new school. She was super excited to get a locker, and to also carry around real school supplies such as a binder, folders, notebooks, etc rather than just the one folder that contained all her necessities for 2nd grade. She has this enormous binder with a zipper and a shoulder strap that you can literally your lunch bag in. I thought it was overkill (after all, thinking of the adult equivalent here, don't you want the smallest lightest laptop/tablet possible?) and the zipper was poorly constructed and really a pain to open and close but I couldn't kill her excitement.

Maggie is now getting into even more things, opening and closing cabinets, shutting the door to her room, pulling lots of tissues from the tissue box. She doesn't walk yet (just cruises) but her crawling is pretty fast these days. It seems to be the fastest when she sees me pull out a bag of Cheerios. She no longer eats everything I give her and has started spitting things out a lot. In fact, she even feeds herself food and then spits it out (for fun? because she can't remember if it is something she likes or not?).