Scooting

Sarah doesn't like to perform on command, unlike her older brother, who loves the attention.  It's been pretty hard for me to get a good video of Sarah scooting.  She's gotten pretty good at getting anywhere she wants to go.  She's even starting to try and get her belly off the ground a bit.

On Saturday morning I enlisted Paul's help in making a video.  It worked a lot better than when it's just me. :)

I can't believe my little Sarah is eight months old this week!

Freight Train!

James' favorite book changes with his mood. However, one of his very favorites almost any day is Freight Train. Thank you, Grandma Hansen, for such a fun book!

Today, James and I decided to build a freight train out of playdough. (Ok, ok, I'll confess. James just said, "Let's make a train!" And I thought, "Oh my goodness! We have all the colors to make the train from that book!" So I took the idea and ran with it. Silly mommy!)

James absolutely loved it. Here's a video of him "reading" the book and showing off his cool train. (Sorry for the shaky video. I had to hold Sarah while I filmed so that she wouldn't scream. She's going through a Cling to Mommy phase.)

Unfortunately, after we made the video, James had to learn the sad lesson that playdough creations have a very short life span and we had to squish it and put it away so the playdough wouldn't dry out. What a hard lesson for a toddler to learn! He got over it pretty quickly (now he's making towers out of the playdough containers and knocking them down), but he cried big tears first!

A Chat with Sarah

It's a lot harder to catch Sarah babbling on video than it was with James (see this video from when James was Sarah's age). I've tried several times, and so far this is the best one we've gotten. I happen to especially like this one because until now, much to Paul's excitement, Sarah's favorite syllable to babble has been "Da". Today she decided to give me some love too, and switched to "Ma". :) She's so funny. She likes to whisper her sounds. Maybe it's to counteract her loud and rambunctious older brother. I don't know, but it sure is cute!

Sarah Loves her Bouncer

I thought this was so funny. She had already been doing it for a while before I got the camera out. So funny!

Scooting is on the horizon!

In the last week or two, Sarah has really started trying to figure out how to scoot. She gets frustrated when something is just barely out of reach. She has started using this method where she leans all the way to one side and pushes with her feet while reaching with her arms and then leans to the other side and does the same thing. It's slow going, but she does make progress! I've noticed in the last day or two that she is starting to get her knees underneath her from time to time. Before we know it, she's going to figure it out!

This is one of those videos that really only family will probably like. It's on the boring and long side of things. But I noticed that she was moving towards the blocks James had been playing with, so I ran and grabbed the camera as quickly as I could. I just caught the tail end of it on the video. Hopefully you can get the idea of what she does.

Crazy, crazy! Her older brother was just about this age when he figured out the army crawl. Maybe Sarah is more like him than we thought!

Sarah and James

I just wanted to share a couple pictures of my cute kids. :) They sure love each other!

Still Halloween?

I know, I know, next week is Thanksgiving. I just couldn't move on to the next holiday before sharing our pumpkin carving adventures with you all. On the Friday before Halloween, Natalie and her roommate came over and we had a good time carving our pumpkins.

We all dove right into the gross pumpkin guts, except for James. James needed a bit more...coaxing.

Aren't we terrible parents for posting that video online? I know. I just couldn't help it. He warmed up to the idea after that.

And here are the pumpkins!

Paul and I took our inspiration from Becca and Katie's halloween costumes, and went with a Mario theme. This was the first time we tried anything fancy together. I did the drawing, and Paul did the cutting. :)

Ok, now we can move on to Thanksgiving!