Not a baby anymore

Yes, I'm talking about Kale. He hardly even seems like a baby anymore! He is officially crawling on his hands and knees, after about 6 weeks of army crawling. We have been letting him practice standing against the couch and figured it wouldn't be long until he started to figure that out on his own. Yesterday I noticed that he was pulling himself up on his knees and grabbing on to some of his bigger toys in an attempt to pull himself up to a standing position. I thought it would be another week or 2 before he figured it out. Jane called Adam this morning very excited to report that Kale had done it - he pulled himself up to a standing position all by himself! He is growing up so fast. When we look at him in his crib he takes up over half of it! We finally had to lower his crib, too. Between his sitting up, crawling around and now pulling himself up we were headed down a dangerous path! He also outgrew his infant car seat. He is getting Nolan's hand me down car seats, and Nolan is the proud new owner of a level 3 car seat. Adam and I spent about an hour last night rearranging the car seats and hooking them in the vehicles. What a pain! It was worth when Nolan talked about his "caw seat" on the home from Jane's house today! Friday is the big day for Kale - we have a rescan of his head to see if it's shaped enough to no longer require the helmet. I am so, so hopeful that we're down to our last few days of it!

Last weekend Adam and I hosted my family for a spring birthday/Easter celebration. We were so thankful the weather warmed up so we could have an Easter egg hunt for the kids. It was a bit muddy from all the rain, but the kids didn't mind at all. I was a little worried with how Nolan would react to sharing all of his toys. Other than a few outbursts of "that's mine" he did really well.

Last Thursday Nolan started to take a downhill slide again so Adam took him back to the clinic. Sure enough he still had fluid in his ears. He is now on his 3rd dose of antibiotics for this ear infection. We're a little concerned by the fact that the antibiotics won't clear it up. Adam asked the dr. about it and she didn't seem all that concerned. We are, primarily because he's had 3 ear infections since October - and has had to be on at least 2 antibiotics each time to clear it up, and is on his 3rd for this last infection. In between he also had influenza and pneumonia. We made the decision to schedule an appointment with an ENT toward the end of this month. We want to make sure that his hearing isn't being compromised, especially since he's talking so much now.


Last fall I was talking with some girlfriends about how some day I'd like to try and run a 5K. Before you know it Adam and I - along with 16 friends - were signed up to run in the Go Commando race sponsored by Team Ortho at the end of June. It's a 5K run that includes 11 obstacles. As I'm trying to train for this thing my thoughts always round back to "who can I blame for signing me up for this?" I'm up to between 2 and 2 1/2 miles of straight running, but the 2 1/2 mile mark is where I run in to trouble. I'm not quite sure how I'm going to add another almost mile to that! I don't really love to run, and I really hate to get dirty. I think I picked the wrong race for that combination!

About a month ago we celebrated my grandma's 80th birthday with my mom's side of the family. I wanted to capture the full group picture from that event, as it's pretty impressive how many people are in our family! I'm pretty sure we were only missing one person for this picture, too. I tried to count how many of us there are, and think I came up with 68 or 69 people!