Family Visit

This week, we are lucky enough to have Ashley, the girls' birth mother, and her family in town for a visit. We are having a great time, and Elena and Clara are just so lucky to have so much love surrounding them.

Here's Ashley, Christina, Clara, and Elena - Ashley is teaching the girls the fashion of sunglasses.

Ashley's son, Gabe, helped feed Elena some carrots for dinner.

Ashley's mom, Grandma Leann, gets down and plays with the girls all the time. They have such a blast with her.

They're really enjoying Gabe, too, although we're not sure what they think about one more person in competition for the toys! Ashley's husband, Josh, is here too - we have to get him in a picture soon.

We had a BBQ in honor of our out of town guests this weekend, and Clara and Elena had their first watermelon! It was a smash hit with Elena; Clara is still warming to it.

Here's Clara's first experience:


And Elena's (I love how you can see the watermelon juice dripping down her arm!)

Adventures at Home

Guess who can make it up the stairs on her own now? Clara!


It seems a little tricky for her still (her legs are so short!) but she is making some good progress and is taking right off after Elena when she makes her big break for the stairs.

The girls are starting to get up to all kinds of mischief. We finally got the right gate for the stairs, just in the nick of time. They move so fast now (especially Elena) that they used to have to stay only in their play yard when we were in the living room, so they stayed contained. With the new gate, looking out over the stairs has become a prime activity, but at least they are safe doing it.

There are some things we never thought to babyproof - like a solid cement statute. Who would have thought Elena could move that?

Clara is a bigger fan of the shiny things. She's taken a real like to CDs.

She isn't quite as interested as Elena in trying to figure out the stereo, though. :)

Teeth

We're not really having good luck getting clear pictures of the teeth our dear girls have grown, so we picked a couple where you can kind of see them to at least give you an idea of where they are. They both have the middle two bottom teeth in.

Clara's are much higher and prominent than Elena's, because she got them first:

Elena got her middle left (our right) bottom tooth first, and is just getting the middle bottom right tooth in now. With the glare, it's a bit hard to see - it's a little easy if you click to make the picture bigger:

Take Us Out to the Ballgame

Today the girls napped later in the day, so we chanced a trip to the baseball game in the early evening. They were wiped out by the end of the fourth inning, but we were pretty happy to get to go at all, and to make it even halfway. Clara and Elena had their first taste of hotdogs (just tiny pieces) and they really seemed to love the action of the game. The music, games, and nice people behind us didn't hurt, either.

Christina and Elena study the finer points of the game:

While Clara has fun fishing for ice chips while keeping one eye on the action:

When Clara caught sight of the big feathered bird who is our mascot, she alternated between beaming and making her "ooh, ooh, ooh" sound and face:

She enjoyed looking at the mascot so much we decided to take her over to meet him.

Up close, he was a little too scary, and she had to burrow into Steve to avoid contact with him. Elena, on the other hand, thought he was much more exciting up close and kept trying to pull his feathers.

We bought the girls each a new baseball cap to celebrate their first game. Clara actually loves hers, right now Elena barely tolerates it.

The look so alike, squinting away from the sun. It's the most identical looking we've seen them since Elena started getting bigger and Clara started getting more teeth!

Here's one last silly shot, where we wanted to get all four of us in a picture but were trying to take the photo ourselves:

Hooray for Baseball! The jerseys they are wearing here are courtesy of Uncle Phil and Aunt Owetta. The Diamondbacks are the team back where most of Steve's family lives (in Phoenix) and where Steve and Christina met. Ah...Diamond Dogs. :)

New Experiences

It's something of a tradition to have your picture taken with this statue of a bear in town; today the girls did it for the first time with Christina, Steve, and their grandma. A kind passer-by took the shot; we won't blame them for cutting the bear's head off.

This afternoon we took the girls to a friends' house for a pizza party. Usually, they just have pieces torn off of our pizza. Tonight, they found a little friend who left his pizza on a plate on the ground, and they were in heaven.

Here's Clara:

And Elena (she was loving this; I think the look here is one where she thinks I'm going to take the pizza away from her).

Aside from the pizza, some big excitement at this party was the toys. There was a walker that the girls took turns on (Elena exhibits here):

And most notably, there was also a little tricycle. It's the kind you walk forward instead of pedal, but still, we had no idea that the girls could do it. We only got video of them mostly standing on it (with a little movement) but at one point both of the girls just propelled themselves right across the room on this! We were so impressed.

Here's some video - please excuse the people running around and the loud voices - it was definitely a party!

And now, for a contest

Sometimes in the summer you need a little surprise, a little bit of fun. I know lots of you only look at our website or a few others, but many people have sites like this and Christina loves to click around and go see what everyone else has to say. Several of these other web sites held contests a few weeks ago, and Christina won one of them. A complete stranger who is completely lovely(from a website called Twists and Turns) sent Christina all this:



Incredible, no? But wait, here was the kicker:


(Christina tried for days to get pictures of the girls in these shirts, but this is as good as it got - they are matching shirts that say: "My first Twins T-shirt" to support the Minnesota Twins!. I guess this is the start of them being fans for life.)


Now, here's where the rest of you come in. The point of these contests is to "pay it forward" (like the movie, if you've seen it) where Christina now passes on the generosity by sending a package to one of you. All you have to do is add a comment to this post by Monday at midnight. Let us know this: if the girls had been triplets, what should we have named the third girl? We would have a Clara Mary Mae, an Elena Ashley Rose, and a _________?

We'll pick a winner at random and mail you off a surprise.

Pool Party (kind of)

I'm not sure you could exactly call it a party, but the girls did have their first experience with a pool today. Christina bought an inflatable frog pool over the winter, and today she blew it up with all her hot air (yes, we all knew she had enough in her) and she, Grandma, and the girls took to the pool.

We didn't want to scare the girls, so we didn't put the top of the frog on, and left it just a green bottom. Even so, the girls were a bit wary:

Elena was ready to splash from the side, but it took a bit longer for Clara to want to get in on the action.

Elena graduated soon to stepping in the pool, but she hated sitting down and so mostly stayed in a position like this:

Clara did end up finding her own path to fun in the pool. She would hold a shovel in each hand, arch herself back in Grandma's arms, and stare up into the trees.


Beautiful!


Two more shots from the day - a funny face Clara in polka dots:

And a splashy Elena: