Guess What We've Been Up To?

Throwing rocks in the stream

Saying "Hi" to our favorite puppy

Playing in the sandbox

Taking a bath with shaving cream 

Painting the yard with chalk paint

Swimming

 

And biking.

Notice something about all these photos?  Somebody isn't wearing diapers... We have all new big-kid underwear!

THE cutest baby bum

We aren't out of the woods yet, but she's got it down.  Congratulations MiniM.E.!

The Victoria Pool and the Philadelphia Orchestra

We had a pretty eventful Saturday this weekend.  Usually my posts are filled with 17 too many photos because I take 50 and after the painstaking process of choosing the best ones, I can't not post 17.

This post you get one.

Half-naked baby!  So cute!

And its not even a photo from this weekend... though it is from the pool.  So its half legit.

Why you ask?

Well...

We got up early as usual, packed a lunch, some toys, some diapers, some more toys, some baby food, some towels, an extra bathing suit, some toys, some drinks and of course, sunblock.  We were ready to go to the Victoria Pool at the Saratoga State Park... when somebody needed to take a nap.

So... instead of arriving early to get a great spot, we didn't arrive until 2.  Fortunately, our friends were already there and had been staking out spots for about an hour.

As we arrived we saw a line.  Yes, a line.  Of hot, sweaty, irritated people that just wanted to go swimming.  But instead, had to wait as the pool was filled to its capacity of 344.  HOLY. CRAP.  That's a lot of people.

30 minutes later we were inside.  Dying to get in the pool.

We parked our 35 bags near the one lounge chair and one other chair our friends had procured (good thing we brought our own) and tried to nestle our cooler into the tiny spot of shade provided by our half of the shared umbrella.

We had a blast.  MiniM.E. loved the water and we swam most of the time.  I planned on being Photographer Extraordinaire, but between swimming with the baby, keeping her off the hot pool deck, pulling her out from under the lounge chair, making sure she didn't eat the coffee stirrers, park maps, and rocks that kept finding our way into our space, and the "reusable swim diaper poop-splosion", I really found very little time for snapping pictures.  (I won't get into the gory details, but suffice it to say I'm soooo glad I'm not using cloth diapers for anything but swimming!)

When we'd had it with the heat (and MiniM.E. passed out cold and slept in the grass), we headed home for a rushed two hours of unpackingrepackingtakingashowerbathingthebabygroceryshoppingmakingdinner.  That's how it felt.  And headed back to SPAC for the Philadelphia Orchestra.  They were fantastic.  MiniM.E. was super cute and I had a much needed glass of wine.  Then MiniM.E. stopped being cute and started being fussy (not to blame her... after a short afternoon nap in the grass and it being two hours past her bedtime) and we left after the first half.

It was SO nice to fall into bed when we got home.  I figured MiniM.E. would sleep like a log after all the sun and heat and water and orchestra... let's just say I'm still tired...

My Baby is Growing Up...

Before I get to posting about anything substantial, here are some photos from our long weekend:

This is where MiniM.E. sleeps at our house (in the pack-n-play under the changing table thingy so the cats don't accidentally jump on her...) but we couldn't fit it in the car... 

so this is where she slept at my parents' house- why did we spend so much on a pack-n-play?

trying out the new hat

resting up for the big trip

excited to leave... 

enjoying the comfy comforter

unsure about shopping on Black Friday

nice couch...

sleeping in with Daddy

MiniM.E. turned six weeks old on Saturday.  It's funny that when you have a new baby you mark the time first in days, then in weeks, then in months... then in half years... and sometime between kindergarten and fifth grade you just use years.  And eventually you don't want to remember how many years old you are.

But I digress... the point of this post is that MiniM.E. is growing.  She was so tiny when we brought her home and I kind of wanted to keep her that way.  You don't really notice something growing when you see it every day, but I think she just went through some pretty major growth-spurting, because a few days ago when I woke up and carried her down the stairs what used to feel like a Cabbage Patch doll suddenly felt like a bag of bricks.  Not to mention the fact that I'm squeezing my poor baby into clothes that have probably been too small for at least a couple weeks (what? that outfit isn't supposed to look like a spandex jumpsuit?).  But the biggest milestone was switching from newborn diapers to size one.

Looking back, apparently I should have made this switch weeks ago... however, being a new mom, I didn't realize the signs of a diaper being too small... those red marks around her legs- those have always been there, haven't they? and the fact that it's really hard to make the diaper tall enough in the front AND the back... well, she's just getting taller, right?  And maybe that's kind of the case- she's still pretty long and skinny...

While home for Thanksgiving we met up with one of my oldest friends and her 11-week-old.  He'd just moved up to size TWO diapers... which made me think... are MiniM.E.'s diapers too small??

So I decided that once we finished off the size "n"s, I'd move her up to size one.  But every time I changed her I couldn't help noticing that I was squishing my baby into teeny-tiny diapers when she really wasn't so teeny-tiny anymore.  I just didn't want her to get bigger...


To celebrate the last day wearing my favorite jungle outfit, MiniM.E. decided to show off all her new smiles:

...I also snapped a couple more non-smiling photos :

And finally this morning, I packed up all the newborn diapers and all the "spandex jumpsuits" and replaced them with roomy size ones and bigger clothes.  She seems much happier now.

and she fits in the NEW jungle outfit!!