We had a great Thanksgiving Day. We went to my Dad and Cindy's house. It was just Dan and me and Owen and Audrey, my Dad and Cindy and my Uncle Dave, Aunt Gaye and cousin Kate. It was fun and the food was great!

Audrey has another new trick. She started pulling herself up, just one step closer to walking! Yikes! She pulled herself up on the coffee table on Thanksgiving and since then I have gone to get her up from a nap and she has been standing up in her crib.

Audrey playing with her cousin Nolan.


They are only 2 1/2 weeks apart and they are becoming good buds already.

8 Months old today

This month Audrey started clapping and crawling. She has two teeth now, on the bottom, and I think the top two may be coming in soon. She is still hardly napping and doesn't sleep real well at night either. I don't know how she gets by on so little sleep. I think she's afraid she is going to miss something. Here is a picture from today: 8 months and I uploaded two videos. A video of her crawling, I think it was a day or two after she started crawling. She is already getting much faster. The other video is Audrey clapping, which is just too cute.

Off she goes!

Audrey is officially crawling. She started crawling on Friday. She has been trying for weeks and she finally got it! She's not very fast yet, but she sure is proud of herself and getting where she wants to go. Her favorite thing is to crawl over to the dog and pull her fur, squealing with delight the whole time. The dog isn't really enjoying it as much as she is. We had to move Owen's train table up to his room. There are too many small parts that she will try to put in her mouth. She's starting to pull up on things now too. She mostly just pulls up onto her knees so far. I video taped her crawling and I will try to upload that at some point. It takes quite awhile to upload those videos.

We had a fun Halloween. Owen had a great time trick-or-treating. He dressed up as a monkey again. The weather was so nice we were able to go to a few more houses this year.

Carving pumpkins

I thought Owen would want the big pumpkin to be his pumpkin and the smaller one to be Audrey's, but he claimed the little one as his pumpkin.

I wasn't going to dress Audrey up at all, but at the last minute I decided to try Owen's old Lion costume on her. It was really big but still looked cute. She'll probably be able to wear it again next year.

Story time with Daddy

Owen has always loved books. One of his favorite things to do is to look at books, and have them read to him. We walk up to library every week now. It's so nice to have a library so close to our house. I'm hoping Audrey will like books as much as Owen. I read them books together before their naps and Audrey has to sit through all the books about trucks and Thomas. She gets bored with those pretty fast. For the most part, she just likes to try to eat the books.

Cutest kids ever:

We went to the pumpkin patch last weekend with my brother Bill, my sister-in law Beth and my nephews. Everyone had a lot of fun, but I could not get a good picture for the life of me!

Bill and my nephew Sam on the hay ride

Owen playing in the piles of hay, he loved this but for some reason his shoes kept falling off.

Pumpkin train

Audrey loved the hay ride the most. She was all smiles the whole ride.

Dan and I could not get the kids to look at the camera or even in our general direction for a picture. The pumpkins were far too fascinating I guess.

Audrey looks like she has GIANT feet. Those shoes are size 6-12 months but her feet only fill about half of them. They kept her feet warm though which was the goal.

All the boys, and Audrey

7 Months old


I think Audrey may be crawling sometime in the next month or two. She goes from a sitting postion and leans forward onto her hands and knees until she falls onto her belly. She slept better the last two nights, only up once during the night. I can deal with that, it's at least an improvement from last week. She's starting to grow a little more hair. Maybe soon I can put a teeny tiny bow in it!

An update on my knee. I had the doctor look at it yesterday. He thought it could be a cyst and tried to aspirate it. That did not work, so it's probably scar tissue like I thought. He said I can either ignore it and watch it and see if it eventually goes away, or he could take me to surgery and remove it. At this point, I think I'm just going to ignore it. He also said if he removes it, it could come back.

About three weeks ago Audrey started sitting up on her own. I could tell how proud of herself she was when she started doing it all on her own. Now she can sit for long periods of time and entertain herself. The nice thing about this stage is that she is not crawling away yet, so she stays right where I put her. I know this probably won't be a very long stage and she'll be crawling soon, so I better enjoy it while it lasts.

Audrey got her first tooth yesterday. That explains why she has been waking up ALOT at night for about a week or so. We are all very sleep deprived over here, and if you know me, you know I LOVE my sleep so I'm just trying to make it through the day most days. I'm really dragging. I'm probably just extra tired from my heart problem also. I'm hoping I'll have more energy after I have the surgery, but that isn't for another 3 months. I feel like my body is falling apart. I'm having heart surgery in January. I need to get my wisdom teeth out and possibly have my knee fixed again. I have another wisdom tooth coming in and it's shifting my other teeth on the bottom. I should probably wait until I'm not nursing before I get them out though, so I haven't called the dentist about it yet. I go for a check-up in December and I'll talk to him about it then, unless it gets really bad.

I need to have my knee checked out again. I think I have a large amount of scar tissue and it clicks over my knee cap when I walk. Not a good sensation! I'm just afraid I'm going to have to have surgery on that too to remove the scar tissue. Bleh!

Owen had a great 3rd birthday. We are finally done with all the parties. Owen had tons of fun and loved all of his chocolate cakes. Whenever I asked him what the wanted for his birthday he always said "chocolate cake", so he was very excited about that. The first pictures were from the celebration with the Milanowski side of the family.





He was so excited about the train table we all got him!


Here are some picures from when Grandpa Steve and Grandma Cindy came over to celebrate. He got lots of trains and another chocolate cake!

And here are some pictures from the celebration at Grandma Ellen's house and yet another chocolate cake!

Dan set up the train table last night after Owen went to bed. He's been playing with it all day today. He didn't even want to stop to eat breakfast this morning.

Owen and Audrey went to the Dr. office on Friday. Everything is good. Owen grew 4 1/2 inches this year! He is 40 1/2 inches (>95th percentile and off the chart) and 36.2 lbs (80th percentile).


Audrey is 6 months old now. The last 6 months have just flown by. It's just going too fast! She weighs 17.3 lbs (70th percentile) and is 27 inches (90th percentile). She is starting to babble now, she says ba-ba-ba all the time it's so adorable. No crawling yet, but she sits up by herself pretty well now. She's still taking three 45 minute naps usually around 9:00, 12:00 and 3:00, but those will probably be getting longer in the next couple months and then she will be taking only 2 naps a day. Actually today she took a nap this morning for an hour and a half and she is taking one now that as of right now has lasted 2 1/2 hours. It would be so nice if that became her pattern. It's hard to get anything done in little 45 minute chunks of time.