New apartment!

I made a pillow cover!

So proud of myself.

My shelf. The man delivering my crib today told me I had a "great eye for decorating". It really made my day.

Penny on the bed.

Dave's desk building project.
Penny helping Dave measure wood.

Penny climbing on the rocks in Maine. She is so close to walking! She can take steps by herself but she till prefers to crawl. It is so fun to watch her learn and grow.

Sorry all of these pictures are completely out of order and just a hodge podge! Penny's room is coming together really well finally! It is so much fun. I'll post pics later.

Just a quickie...

So we are all moved in to our new place and we LOVE IT!!! I can't even count the ways our new place makes my life better. All of the rooms have darkening shades, which is especially useful for naptime and ealry summer bedtime in P's room. On our first morning she slept til 9 am... 9 AM! It was the longest night I've slept without interruption in over a year.

We also went to Virginia and stayed with John and Laura. It was awesome.

I promise I'll post pics when we get internet in our place. I'm on campus right now.

Hiking (kind of)

We went for a little hike today! The weather is getting gorgeous here. I love this picture of Penny because she looks like she's doing a super hero landing (maybe I've been playing too much Ultimate Alliance. I'm such a loser). Penny is so close to walking but she still has to hold at least one finger...

Dave downloaded Picasa onto our computer and its sweet because it's basically a simpler, dumbed-down photoshop. It has an effect that is supposed to make pics look like film. Did it work (in the pic below)? I can't tell... but I like it.

Also Dave starts his internship on June 7 so we were going to take a little road trip starting on Mon... Where should we go???

Virginia/ the Carolinas vs. Nova Scotia/Quebec

"P" Party!

For Penny's first birthday we had a "P" party. It was a picnic in the park with PB&Js, pears, peaches, pineapples, and I made a huge "P" shaped cake. Everyone was supposed to dress up in something that started with P. Penny was a Picnic table. This is the best pic I have of the headband I made for her, bummer that the top of the cupcake and the pie were missing by this point in the day...We played "Pin the crown on the Princess" and "Pin the patch on the pirate"... I made the posters, I think they're pretty good. Penny liked presents. And friends.The "P" Cake was so big it was really hard to get a pic of the whole thing without a wide angle lense. Anyway it was so so fun.

Penny is the best. Happy birthday my sweet baby P.

All Up in My Grill

Whenever I am vacuuming Penny thinks it is 100% necessary to get herself tangled in the cord.

Of course, it's difficult to capture it on camera because whenever I pull the camera out she thinks it is 100% necessary to get her face as close to the lense as possible (that's breakfast on her face by the way). And whenever I am stationary for more than a few moments Penny thinks it is necessary to sit on my feet.

And having Penny all up in my grill is the best thing in the world.

THANK YOU KENDRA!

My sweet sweet sister in law gave me her old camera and it is AWESOME! I feel like I'm never really able to capture Penny's cuteness with my point shoot but we had a little fun with Kendra's camera yesterday and it was perfect. Penny is so adorable and now I'll be able to share it with everyone!


A lot of times I think she looks more like Dave than me, but in this pic she looks just like a McArthur!She really wanted to play some b-ball with this guy:SO CUTE!!!


(I love the shoes too Ken).

Arm-WHAT!?

We got this sweet armoir from our friends who were trying to make more room for their baby for free! So I sanded it, painted it, and got some sweet knobs at Anthropologie. I am so excited to finally have a real piece of furniture in our room! The bottom knobs are still the originals, I just need to soak them in some solution that will brighten them up and I think they'll be better.

Guilty...

So when Penny was about 4 months we broke her of the pacifier habit and started putting her to bed awake. She cried for about 5 minutes the first time and then that was it! She was great at going to sleep (even if still not falling asleep at that point). But then I started working and things unraveled and she started going to sleep with a bottle! So that's how its been and I've hated it but since she doesn't have her own room I've just kept saying that we'll re-sleep train her when we move, but as she's been waking up every morning at 2 or 3 and demanding to be fed and then again at 5 or 6 I've decided I HAVE to do something. But I thought maybe 11 months old it too old to ferberize again! Alas, Penny was in her crib screaming her head of for about 15 minutes, but as I've finished typing this she is quiet, let me see if she's asleep... ASLEEP! It's a miracle! Let's hope this works at three this morning. Help keep me on track...

April is for Awesome.

So much has happened already in April. We had a visit from our great friends the Macdonalds. We did lots of cool stuff with them like eat at Mike's Pastry (twice), drive out to the cape, visit the aquarium, and romp around Boston.Dave and Penny taking a long walk on the beach.Deliciousness.

And it was Dave and my second anniversary on the twelfth! (is that how you spell twelfth?)...We had a good one. More to come on that. (maybe).

Meet Me in DC

Last week we took a trip to DC and it was awesome, one of my favorite cities in the world. There are so many great things to see! We toured the capital building, the botanical gardens, visited several Smithsoanian museums (one in which we saw the hope diamond and a real giant squid!), and saw the memorials. One of my favorite parts about DC is everything is FREE, 100% free. We also happened to be visiting during the best (and most popular) time if year, the cherry blossom festival! It was gorgeous we were so lucky to see all the blossoms--they only last for about a week. Here are some highlights of the trip...
Penny at the hotel. We heard her crawling around, then we saw the curtain stirring, then out popped her little head. She was so tickled.This pic was funny beause she was crawling away from us, then turned aoround quickly, grabbed the map of DC, and crawled away again. Oh, babies.Penny is freakishly strong. Well on her way to aquiring the same nicknames I had in school, Hulk wasn't so bad, it was Butch I really hated...Amendment: Everything was free except Mount Vernon, which we paid to see but then didn't go inside because we hate lines without Disneyland rides at the end of them. Expecially lines that are over an hour long. Someday we'll see you Mount Vernon! But we did go all around the grounds and it was still worth it.

Penny's Puppies

My sister, Sara, got Penny some hand-puppet puppies for Christmas but they got left in CA so we haven't had a chance to use them until now. I think the timing is perfect because she is at the perfect age to love wrestling with/biting/licking/smushing her puppies. We've even named them... From left to right: Sir London Bridges, George, Basco, and Frankenstein. (My favorite name is Basco, because that was Dave's pick, and he was attempting to name it 'Balto')Her smile in this pic kills me because she was about to crawl away but when I pulled the camera out she sat back down and flashed this grin.

Drinking Problem...

Penny has a drinking problem. She LOVES her bottle. It doesn't even have to be full, she just likes to suck on it, but she won't take a pacifier. She gets fiendish even if she sees just the tip of a bottle, breathing heavily and waving her hands.

Before the weather cleared up we took a ittle sledding trip. Well it was more of a "boarding" trip--not snowboarding, cardboarding (we didn't have a sled).

It seems like winter might be over and I am SO EXCITED for the Spring. Me and Penny went on a picnic today (not pictured).

Spitting game...

Remember my old blog? Well I've started blogging on it again. Baby pictures and family updates will mostly be limited to this blog (although I'm sure some will creep their way over), but for Jessica time please see spitting game.

Penny's on the move...

Well a picture's worth a thousand words, and a video is made up out of thousands of pictures... anyways, Penny has been pretty 'mobile' for a while, but has been so interested in standing and trying to walk that we thought she might skip crawling, but she's stepped up her game and now instead of flailing around on the ground until she gets somewhere she's crawling!


Here are some other random pictures... some of which are pretty old.

Here's Jessica and Kaity doing what they do over Christmas break, you're welcome.

And this is our awesome new Joovy Kooper stroller, Jess did a lot of research on strollers and found a good deal on this online, and we love it, and Penny loves it too. I like to imagine that for babies going to the mall is the equivalent of cruising down town in your car, looking cool and checking people out, and this stroller is the equivalent of a cool red convertible for Penny.

Growing Girl.

Penny is sleeping. through. the night. I am so glad.

She is doing so much for her small 8 months. She is getting ready to take her first steps it seems. She LOVES to walk around the house with us guiding her by the hands.

She loves to stand as long as she is holding herself up against something (usually the couch, although she's had a few tumbles).

Today she started fake handing me her toys just to watch me try and steal them from her kung fu grip (impossible). I'd say "Give me your toy" and put my hand out, and she'd place the toy in my hand and not let go, and laugh as I tried to take it away.

She is the joy of our lives, and the favorite part of our days... of course not having her at midnight, and four am, and six am is also the favorite part of my nights...