Reilly is 2!

Can you believe it? I can't. Reilly turned 2 on Saturday, and we had a tiny little party for him Friday night. He had two "friends" there and a few more adults than that. :) He and his friends just ran back and forth, laughing and giggling for about an hour before we did presents and the cake. You might notice that he is a little flushed from all that activity in some of the pictures...

Here is the amazing cake Emily Noorda made for Reilly he loved his "Buzz" cake, even if he couldn't quite figure out the blowing-out-the-candles part. I guess we should have practiced. :)

Here he is opening one of his gifts - a Little People racetrack set from his Kerrigan grandparents.
Enjoying his cake and his little cake topper friends.

Well, at least until Jaina reached over and stole his plate. She heard we didn't plan to give her any cake, so she apparently decided to take matters into her own hands. She was one happy little girl!
Daddy setting up the racetrack for him the next morning.

Jaina modeling her party favors.

And in other "news:"

Reilly is always begging to "hold her" when Jaina gets up from a nap. It's quite comical-looking, since she's not much smaller than him these days. She's not usually as interested in it as he is. :)

The weather has been getting nicer (cooler) lately, and this is how we've spent a couple of evenings lately.

We sold our bike trailer (since the munchkins didn't enjoy riding in it together at ALL anymore) and bought a different jogging stroller. So far, this one seems to be going better for us! They both like it, despite how Reilly looks in this picture...

Just one of those weeks

Don't get me wrong: the days haven't been that bad. We've had good children, even quite happy children at times. But the nights have really been getting me! Reilly caught a tiny little cold (really quite small, only one nebulizer treatment has been called for so far, he's been sleeping find after the first day, and he hasn't been grumpy or miserable) and then Jaina caught it, and she also resumed teething (after, what, a 3-day break?), all at the same time. The last 3-4 nights have not been good sleep ones. Poor thing just can't sleep/isn't comfortable/needs her pacifer/can't breathe with it in/wants to sleep on her tummy/can't breathe when she rolls over. Jeremy's been spelling me some, which has saved me, but he just finished a super-rough 7-8 days of tests too. But I have hope for tonight! Jaina has felt much better today, and took a good afternoon nap, and both kids went to sleep without a peep, in their room (last night Reilly kept waking her up, giggling and laughing and banging things around till like 9 and we finally just had to move her to our room). A tender mercy. Will she/they sleep tonight? There's no telling, but I am optimistic for some sleep, and as Jeremy assures me, if they don't, it will still be okay. :)

Edited to add: Jaina only woke up once, at about 11 - she slept until 6. I am still tired, but it was so great to get a night of real sleep!

My Little Pony

Is it strange that my two-year-old boy loves to play with My Little Ponies? I have probably 6 of the new ones, and 6 of the original ones (not mine - they're home in Arizona in a box, and have been trimmed, puff-painted and nail-polished beyong recognition in a few cases - I got these at the thrift store and cleaned them up), and he loves to play with him. And I don't want to let him! Not because he's a boy, but because he really messes up their hair! But I love Reilly, and that is why there are My Little Ponies attacking each other on the main level of Lydia Kimball's old dollhouse right now...

Zoo Trip

This last week (it's not quite over yet...) has been incredibly busy for Jeremy. We have been without him a lot and he has been studying like crazy. We had the opportunity to take a fun trip to the zoo Wednesday with some friends, and we enjoyed it a lot. It wore us out, (it was a little warmer that day than it's been, and we were there from about 11 to 1...) but it was fun. Here is Reilly on the Merry-Go-Round. He thought it was really cool.
Jaina models one of our new strollers. She mostly rode in here while Reilly ran around.
This is how close the monkeys came and got to the kids. They loved it!

Here are the oldest four of the 7 (all under 2 1/2) kids checking out the alligator.
And a shot of Jaina's new top teeth, for the grandmas out there. :)

Teething is So Much Fun

That is not all that is going on in our lives, but it (teething) has been a major player in the last week. Reilly finally finished getting his four incisors, so at least HE has been in a better mood. Poor little Jaina ran a low-grade fever for about 4 days, and felt terrible. Then the fever went away and she broke out in a little rash all over her head and trunk. It looks better now, but you can still see it some. That was Sunday. Her spots almost show up in these cute "9-month" pictures (I can't believe that!) we took the 13th:
She hasn't been sleeping terribly well, and her parents are feeling it! Last night was a little better, so hopefully tonight will be pretty good as well. For a few nights she was back in our room at least half the night, because she and Reilly kept waking each other up. After one bad Craigslist experience, we had a good one, and found a beautiful crib and mattress at a yardsale (that was advertised on Craigslist). It is only like 4 years old and belonged to a grandma. It didn't get used as much as she thought it might.
Reilly didn't get a crib (versus a pack 'n play) until he was 13 months, but I can't believe how happy it makes me to put her to sleep in a nice crib instead of the little portable one most of the time. Reilly is still very happy in his crib, and hasn't shown any signs of climbing out or anything, so we're going to stick with it for a while for Jaina's safety and their parents' sanity! Here are some pictures of our kids' room and their cute cribs. Hope you can tell which belongs to whom. :) Both can convert to little toddler day-beds when we need them to, which is cool.

Reilly is just about to turn two, and is picking up new words, phrases, and understandings on things daily. He has also found his two-year-old attitude, which we rather wish he would lose again. Instead of listening to us, he is just as likely to ignore us when we tell him "no" or "stop" now. Ah, the joy of a little spirit discovering its independence. :) He is enjoying playing with other kids a lot more. Here he is with his friend, Lily, when she came to invite him on a wagon ride.
He rarely lays down or acts tired during the day, but he must have been tired today, because this is how he was watching "Winnie the Pooh" while I made him some lunch.
He loves "Pooh" and often brings this little hoodie to me. Our house was cool enough the other morning that I let him wear it around for hours. :)












Jaina is doing well, other than the teething. She still isn't crawling, but she is moving around a little more and I'm sure it's just around the corner. She has recently re-discovered the swing, and likes to sit in it and watch Baby Einstein when she feels really rotten. She didn't feel bad in this picture, obviously. I put her in there to keep her happy for a few minutes while I packed a diaper bag so we could go to the store. :)















She has also been more interested in her pacifier during the non-sleep time lately, probably because she hasn't been feeling so hot.


















It has been cool enough here the last few nights that I pulled out her warm 12-month pjs. Sadly, these (we have 2) won't fit for long. I forgot that the Gerber ones run a little small!




















Well, that's all we have for now, at least about Reilly and Jaina. I am enjoying my digital scrapbooking and trying to get Emily's wedding video in production. I'd better hurry, cause her wedding is in like 3 weeks... Jeremy is crazy busy with school the next week and half. We won't see him much during that time. He just has test after test to get ready for. He is looking forward to a NUCCA conference in San Francisco a few weekends after that, though, then Finals will hit, and then we'll have the trimester break. There may be some dull moments around her from time to time, but there's definitely never a dull week!

And one more picture, just for fun...

Videos

A few videos of our kiddos. Nothing special, just them. :) Taken 9/9/08

Happy Media Things

This weekend was good in many ways, (such as stake conference-games with friends-Jeremy was home ways) but it was a really good weekend for me media-wise. Anyone that knows me very well knows I'm happiest when I'm video editing, scrapbooking, journaling, anything like that. So it was an unhappy thing last week when my computer died. It had been dying slowly for months (ie "Your hard drive is failing. Back-up may be possible. Please back up immediately.") Yes, this dire warning has been showing up daily for about 9 months now. Not a happy thing, but I was getting a little bored waiting for it to actually happen (everything of importance was immediately saved to a 500 GB external drive during these last 8 months)... It was getting more and more difficult, and developing new problems every week, it seemed. So we finally tried to replace the hard drive, and failed. Well, the hard drive seemed to be working, but we couldn't get the computer to recognize any kind of Windows-installation disc. And our very-computer-literate friend failed too. And our old hard drive would not even think about running when we put it back in. My computer WAS nearly 4 years old, and I guess I just ran it into the ground. Sigh.

Happy, though: I had my eye on a very cost-effective replacement (a pre-built HP Pavilion - a6500f) and we found it at Office Max for $100 off the online HP Labor Day sale. So we decided to get it. Long story a little shorter: the computer is great. But my old Adobe Premiere 6.5 (my essential video-editing software) refused to run on my new 64-bit system. Panic, terror, depression. Buy very expensive (but it was time for it, I guess) upgrade: happiness! Confusion (trying to figure out a very new interface), but happiness. It came through Fed-Ex Friday. And Saturday I got my digital scrapbook prints that I've been waiting for for over 2 weeks.

Sorry. Are all my posts this dis-jointed? So digital scrapbooking is my new love. It is so much less frustrating than traditional scrapbooking,and I can actually get it DONE, because I don't have to set up a big table or floor full of stuff for Jaina and Reilly to just destroy. I get all my materials online as freebies (or tweak them to make my own stuff), and just use my digital prints however I want. I love the creative freedom it provides compared to traditional scrapping. So finding a place to print them is hard. However, artscow.com (yes, based in Hong Kong, slightly strange, and I don't know how long they'll be around) gives you bunches of free prints just for joining, so with (albeit expensive) shipping, I got my first 20 pages printed for around $1 per page. Amazing! And the prints finally arrived, and they looked fantastic! I was so excited. So yeah, that's all. Happy media stuff. That's the end of my weird little post. I want to do some scrapbooking while the kids are BOTH asleep... :)

One (yes, old - my scrapbooking is way behind, but I've done 5 months worth in the last few weeks now!) page I printed: