Julie is 6 months old!

Julie is 6 months old!!

Julie is such a little sweetheart. Her little personality is really blooming. She's becoming more vocal, more mobile, and more opinionated! No more silent observing for this one! She sees what she wants and she will reeeeach and grab and squawk about it to let you know how she feels. Its really pretty cute to watch.

Current updates: She's sitting up by herself! (a bit wobbly still) She's still rolling around.

She also had her first bite of rice cereal this week. She is really taking to solid food pretty well. Shes a real pro at eating rice cereal already! :)

She was so excited she was shaking when Daddy let her drink a sip of his water from a cup.

She loooves her big sister. She laughs and laughs at Lizzie's antics. She even smiles at her friendly rough housing.

Julie, we love you so much!! We are so blessed to have you in our family! You are such a precious little baby. I'm enjoying every second of it. If only I could freeze you in time and never let you grow older....I suppose that is why these pictures are so important :).

Projects and More Projects

Dave and I have been busy working on various projects in the last couple weeks. Most of these were done when we had a little down time in Chicago!
I had a lot of fun working on a swaddle blanket for my SIL. These pics are actually of one I made a couple months ago for my friend, Mary. Lisa's swaddle blanket had a lot more blue than this girlish fabric. I used a doll for my model until Julie woke up from her nap and made for a much cuter model!

The pattern for this blanket was created by my ever so talented mom!

This project, created after our washing machine broke down and leaked gallons of water all over the floor, was far less cute than the swaddle blanket. However, it was far more profitable. We were bummed when it broke down about having to pay a huge sum to have some repair guy come out and fix it. So I decided that I was going to fix it myself!! After a couple hours of research on google, perusing do-it-yourself websites, I was able to diagnose the problem and learn how to fix it! I'll be the first to say I'm not very handy with tools so I waited for Dave to come home then showed him/explained what to do.

It turned out my diagnosis, leaky water pump, was correct. And here's the evidence! We ordered the new part and it is now back to working condition. So back to the CUTE projects. My mom and I had a blast making these hair clips for Lizzie!

While I was busy doing girly projects, Dave kept busy learning to work with wood with my Dad as his guide! They started out with this plain piece of Brazilian wood:

And after much work and creativity......turned it into this beautiful tile, mosaic, frame!
Its one of the first things you see when you walk in the front door, displaying "The Family: A Proclamation to the World"

It was so fun to see all of the beautiful puzzle boxes that my dad has created with his wide variety of tools, and types of wood. He's already sooo talented in this fairly new hobby of his!