What's new around here...

First, how cute are these kids? Reilly has become even more obsessed with Jaina lately, and loves to make her laugh. Unfortunately, what he thinks might make her laugh sometimes includes methods that must be stopped by the mean mom for her safety. He also tries to give her her pacifier constantly (HE wants it all the time, why wouldn't she???) and share his food and drink with her. This last one is a constant source of frustration and worry. Jaina has started eating solids, but only baby applesauce and rice cereal. I had to clean bread and butter crumbs off her face the other day! Scary! I'm pretty sure she's had a taste of regular milk too, but those sippy cups (the soft tops) are now pretty much banned around here. He loves to run up and say hi to her when she wakes from a nap while I get the bottle ready. Once he has even managed to turn on the bedside light for her at this point. I can't wait until she's actually old enough for them to play together...
Also, Jaina's attempting rolling, (she's done it a handful of times, to either side - nothing consistent) can sit for 5-15 seconds unassisted, (not so beautifully, but it's getting there) and happily spins in a circle (rather slowly, of course) on either her back or her tummy. She's sleeping like an angel since her last adjustment, and still loves her swaddler. I seriously just swaddle her, give her a pacifier, and leave the room. She almost always goes right to sleep. I know it won't last forever, but it's so nice for now!















In other news, other than this long weekend (yay, so nice!) Jeremy has been gone a lot lately. He has like 12 tests crammed into these last 3 weeks, and he goes back to the school to study a lot. We're very proud of all his efforts, but we miss him, too! When he is home, Reilly is even more of a "daddy's boy" right now, and Jeremy is the only acceptable choice to put him to sleep after family prayer. If I'm the only one home, I'll do...


The other thing we have going on is that we are trying to get into cloth diapering. Yeah, I know, it sounds a little crazy. If it was just about the expense, I think we'd stick with disposables, cause our kids haven't ever had any trouble with them, and I do not like "gross stuff." Of course, after being a mom for a while now, diapers are less gross to me than, say, doing a sink full of 2-3 day-old dishes. Yep, I'm weird that way. So, other than the financial incentive, (though if I keep going with the spending thing, we're not going to save much at first!) we feel it's a very responsible thing to do environmentally. Did you know it takes one diaper about 500 years or something to break down? And up until this point, I'd say about 1/4 of our trash is diapers. So we've (okay, me, I'm obsessed) been researching and buying (both used and new) diapers the last two weeks, and I think we have enough now that we'll only be using 1-2 disposables a day per kid. I'm not ready to give up the night times yet... We're waiting for the rest of a big order from an online store, and then we'll have 16 prefolds (12 regular, 4 toddler - "typical" diapers), 8 covers (3 of which, Thirsties brand, are modeled by our cute kids below - we probably won't need all 8, but who knows?), 4 "pocket" diapers, a few fitteds, some pins, snappis (alternative to pins), and all manner of accessories. It really is addicting. Who knew diapers could be fun? I'll let you know how things continue to work out...





(first cloth diaper!)