8 Months and Crawling

Genevieve celebrated her 8-month day by crawling. Good for her!  Up to this point she's done this weird worm crawl thing where she puts her knees forward and then falls forward onto her stomach and then moves her arms forward, lifts up on all fours and does it again. Weird and entirely too much work, but she just wanted to move so bad.  She's much more pleased with actual crawling. She's been practicing all this morning.

Bill came home with this hat the other day. Apparently it was to celebrate the beginning of finals week or something like that. Genevieve kindly modeled it for us. Both kids love it.

Spencer has been getting creative with his clothing decisions, with maybe just a little of my help. I was fixing the button on his suit coat and he decided he needed to wear it. He had a blue striped polo on underneath.  This kid has style. And on a side note, it drives me crazy trying to take pictures of the kids without a flash indoors. I prefer the color that way, but most of my pictures are blurry. I've got to brush up on my photography skills and improve that. If they'd just sit still... :)

Pigpen and Licklog Falls

Who names waterfalls around here, anyway? They have the craziest names.  But today's hike was amazing! It took a bit longer to get there than expected, about an hour, and it was at the end of a long dirt road where we drove through a creek and such awesome things as that. We parked in a parking lot and got hiking, only to find about a mile later that we were at the real parking lot and the waterfalls were still .7 miles away. Oops!  It made for a nice distance though, more like 3.5 miles instead of 2.

The falls were gorgeous!

The first ones aren't that tall, but have a lovely pool at the bottom that we are already planning on coming back to in the summer to swim in. The moment Spencer saw them, he was doing his best to climb out of the backpack and get to them. 

So Bill took him down, took his shoes off, and he ran in, felt how frigid the water was, and ran back out as fast as he could. It was highly amusing, if a bit sad for him. This kid is a water lover. We'll definitely do swim lessons this summer.

Miss Genevieve was content to eat her graham cracker, the dirt, a rock, and basically anything she could get her hands on. Oh, and she refused to crack even a pleasant face for the camera.  Eating was far too serious an activity to bother to smile.

Spencer, on the other hand, is one photogenic chap. Well, Genevieve is too, she just gets serious around the camera. That'll change over time I'm sure.

We headed over to the second falls after eating and Spencer was a total trooper and walked there himself. It was only about 1/4 mile, but we haven't had him walk much when out hiking, so this was great. He was so happy to hold my hand and run down the trail. I didn't take any pictures, but we went way past the falls looking for a way to get down to see them, only to realize there wasn't one, and we discovered the big river the falls fed into. He was totally fascinated by it. We had been talking about the colors of the water and guessing what color it would be when we saw it.  His conclusion upon seeing it? White and green. Pretty astute, little guy. It was green with white caps on the rapids. 

Saw this beautiful little fern on the way, plus lots of trillium and beautiful spring growth

Genevieve was much happier to smile and giggle after we had seen both falls. Apparently she was just waiting on that. :)

We stuck Genevieve in the backpack and Spencer in the soft carrier for the trip to the second falls and back to the first falls, but Spencer was not cool with that, so we ended up switching them back for the last leg of the hike. We'd tuckered them both out and they both slept on the way back. I didn't get a shot of Spencer, but here's Genevieve. I have a cover that would have held her head up better, but I forgot it in the car. She didn't seem to mind or even be bothered enough to wake up. Ha ha! 

 So good day. Both kids conked out early tonight. Good for them, they deserve a good night's sleep!

Hiking this weekend

I adore hiking in Utah.  I just love it. Getting up in the mountains is the best thing I can think of doing.  So it's no surprise that I love it here too.  We picked a particularly great part of South Carolina to live in being interested in such things.  This weekend we're going hiking and I am picking between four waterfalls, all within 30 miles of us. Whatever we don't do this weekend, then next weekend or next month or this summer or anytime we feel like it really, we'll be off to do the others.  Check out these shots of our choices.

We have big kids

It took months and months and months to get our health insurance for the kids squared away and get them in for their normal well child visits, which was a very patience-inducing experience, but I was finally able to get them in this morning after waiting another week or two to get records over to the new office. Again, a very patience-inducing experience. :)

Both kids started their lives on the high end of all the stats. Spencer never really chunked up, so he's been low on weight and slowly gained, but Genevieve hasn't slowed since birth.  I had thought Spencer had really slowed down on his height too, but apparently I was wrong, as per the measurements today.  So maybe he does have hope to get a little height despite his parents not being particularly tall.

Here's the stats:

Genevieve:














27 3/4 " tall - 95th percentile
19 lbs - 85th percentile
17 3/4" head circumference - 90th percentile

Spencer:

36 1/2" tall - 90th percentile
29 lbs 6 oz - 50th percentile
20" head circumference - >95th percentile

Oh those heads!  I can't really expect anything else, as Bill and i both have big heads too, but dang, actually delivering babies with big heads is intense, especially with the big shoulders that they're attached to.

Apparently we have big kids. All I know is I love squishing them to pieces. Spencer gives THE BEST hugs these days. And he has first and second person completely and utterly mixed up in his head. As long as you recognize that when he says your he means mine and when he says mine he means yours, then he's very easy to communicate with. :) And Genevieve has started leaning her head on me when she's tired and it just takes my breath away.  She is the sweetest little girl and growing like a weed. She's finally decided that she likes the idea of moving, and she's putting huge efforts into learning how to do just that, whether it is rolling, trying to crawl, trying to pull herself up, or standing when we set her up on something. Love it!

Good Sunday

Today was a great Sunday. We've had struggles lately with a cranky pants 2-year old Spencer, so it hasn't been terribly restful the last few days, but today was just a delightful day. He still struggled at times, but we did enjoyable. Things. I love those kinds of sundays.

Genevieve managed to get her entire foot, all five toes, in her mouth during sunday school today.

We took the kids on a long walk this afternoon/evening.  Spencer conked out immediately. Genevieve held out for a while, but eventually fell asleep...leaning against Spencer's head. It was adorable. Spencer was not pleased about it when he woke up though. Haha!

It was raining the entire walk. I'm so glad we went. It was refreshing and lovely with all the spring blossoms come out. Everything is that fresh new green of spring and it is just exploding with color. I haven't seen many of the colors of blossoms I've seen here anywhere else--purple, coral, all shades of pink. It's lovely.

Genevieve spent a bunch of the walk playing with Spencer's hand. So cute.

A Week in Pictures

My guys cooking pancakes together.

Why use the chair when the counter is so much better?

Pancake tower!  These were so good.

Ready to go walking or running. These two love this thing, especially Spencer. He calls it his "skroller."