Matt and Sarah

Our good friends, Matt and Sarah Bethune, came up to visit us last weekend. I was able to get them a private apartment in my complex to stay in while they were here. On Saturday we visited the Shaker Heights farmers market, and toured Shaker Square, which has a fun toy store. Then we spent the afternoon at a very nice Lake Erie beach on the west side. The beach was at the base of a bluff. At the top, there was a nice park with grills and picnic tables, so we we were able to cookout for dinner. After dinner, Matt and I got on the Rapid and went to see an Indians game downtown. The game ended with a huge "Rock 'n Blast" fireworks show designed as a tribute to the Beatles. It was actually a really good show complete with lazer lights, elaborate sparklers, and fireworks lauched from within, on top of, and around the stadium, all set to a compilation of Beatles songs with a large animation playing on the massive scoreboard screen. On Sunday, we went to church in the morning. In the afternoon, we toured the campus. For dinner, my parents had us over at their place. Thet put together a great meal, which included three different types of sausage. On Monday morning, Matt and Sarah headed back to their home in West Lafayette, Indiana. It was great to see them again. The girls really liked spending with them as well.

10 months old!

Cami is now is double digits! She has hit some very big milestones this month. Most notably, our happy little baby is now longer stationary. She is crawling, and getting better at it on a daily basis. Once she started crawling, it didn't take her much longer to figure out how to pull up to standing. When we returned from our vacation, we decided that it was time to move Cami's crib into Mady's bedroom. Of course, we also had to lower it all the way so that she doesn't climb out. For the most part, both girls have handled the new sleeping arrangments really well. Unless one of them is in a really grouchy mood, they can get to sleep without disrupting each other. Cami also sprouted two new teeth this month, brining the total to six. She also now claps her hands when she is happy. Most exciting for me, she started saying "dada" this month. She uses it very sparingly. "Mama" and "baba" are still her go-to words.


Hard to believe we are two short months away from her first birthday!

Independance Day!

Happy Fourth of July! For Cami's first Independence Day, we just had a laidback cookout at our place. My folks came over and brought ribs and a giant American Flag cookie decorated with blueberries and raspberries. We also grilled brats and made a potato salad. It was a very nice day. We didn’t go out to see fireworks because that would have been well past the girls bedtime and they had already had a long day. However, Mady was excited about fireworks, so I agreed to wake her up when it got dark and take her up to the clock tower in our building so we could see some fireworks from there. Waking her up was much easier said than done. In fact, I couldn’t wake her. She was in a very deep state of sleep. I went ahead and carried her, sleeping, up five flights of stairs to the clock tower and gradually roused her. From where we were, we could actually see five different fireworks shows, but most of them were off in the distance. More impressive was the lightening show. God put on a much more exciting pyrotechnic show that evening. The combination of lightening and fireworks was pretty cool to witness. Mady was pretty annoyed about being woken up, so I eventually just took her back to bed and Carrie and my mom enjoyed the show. The next morning, Mady was actually pretty excited about the fireworks, so I guess it was worth it. We’ll see how she does next year!

Summer Vacation Part 2

Summer Vacation Part 2

The next leg of our summer vacation journey brought us to Cedar Falls, Iowa to visit my siblings, Monica and Allen. Monica and her husband, Wes, just bought a house so they hosted us while we were in town for three days. We visited the Sturgis Falls festival with Monica and Allen, which just happened to be going on while we were in town. They had a children’s tent where we got to see a magic show, a yo-yo show, and Mady got to express herself with sidewalk chalk (her favorite medium). I took her on some very over-priced carnival rides. Her general reaction ranged from boredom (the merry-go-round) to terror (the go-gator kiddie roller coaster). I probably should have known better because she still gets intimidated by some of the attractions at Chuck-E-Cheese. I did succeed in convincing her to go down the giant slide with me. It was the kind where they give to a burlap sack to sit on. By “convince” I mean I carried her up the stairs and had to wrestle her onto my lap when she started to panic at the top… Hopefully the experience didn’t scar her too much. We also had some carnival food. Allen ate a giant turkey leg like a caveman.

My folks were also in town to help Allen and Amber paint their house. The brought their trailer and stayed at a nearby State Park. We spent some time with everyone at the campground and went swimming in the lake. Amber created a burger recipe for a contest that she wanted to test on us. It was burger stuffed (yes, stuffed) with smoked gouda and bacon served with sweep red peppers and avocado. I forgot what bread she used for the bun, but that was good too. Probably the best burger I’ve ever had. Before leaving Cedar Falls, we visited Mr. and Mrs. Lundy. Sherman Lundy was Carrie’s high school chemistry teacher and he has kept in touch with us over the years. Their house is full of all sorts of fascinating stuff (rocks, dinosaur bones, dolls, and the largest train collection I’ve ever seen). It is always nice to visit with them and they love doting on the girls.

The final stop on our journey was to Dubuque, Iowa, to visit our friends Jen and Tim. Their daughter, Sam, is one week older than Mady, and their son, Austin, is just a couple months older than Cami. Mady really enjoyed having a playmate and lots of new toys and dress up clothes to enjoy. We went on a riverfront walk and visited a local Children’s Zoo. We also took the kids to Jumpin’ Janes Bouncehouse. It was a giant room with six large inflatable toys and a play place. The cool part is that adults get in for free, but we were having just as much fun as the kids. We basically had the whole place to ourselves. Mady was a little hesitant at first, but she eventually started having fun in the bounce houses and we even got her to go down one of the slides.  Sam was fearless. She was climbing on everything and even went down the giant slide a few times.

That was the end of our vacation. The last drive, from Dubuque to Cleveland, was the longest. We left early, made regular stops to eat and stretch, and got home pretty late. One exciting moment of the drive was when we spotted a semi swerving around ahead of us. He almost went off the road a couple times and almost swiped a few other cars off as well. I called the highway patrol and we got to watch as they pulled him over.

Now were safely home and back into our summer routine. It was a great vacation and probably something we’ll continue to do during the summer.

Summer Vacation Part 1

Summer Vacation Part 1

 On June 8^th, we started out on our 19-day journey of the heartland to visit friends and family. Our first destination was West Lafayette, Indiana, to visit our friends Matt and Sarah Bethune. Matt and Sarah are Madelyn’s Godparents, and we hadn’t seen them in over a year, so it was nice to catch up. The highlight of our trip was our visit to an IU Hospital sponsored Community Health Fair in a high school gym. Matt was performing in a puppet show about bullying. Aside from enjoying the excellent puppet show, we got to walk through a giant inflatable heart (where we learned about aneurysms), watch an up-close demonstration of the “Leonardo DaVinci Surgery Robot” peel the skin off of a grape, and see a life-flight helicopter land in the parking lot. For Mady, none of this was nearly as exciting as meeting Sparky the fire dog (man in a big suit). She told us that she loves Sparky and has dreams about him. ~sigh~

The next leg of our journey was to Topeka, Kansas, to spend some time with Carrie’s parents. We hadn’t seen them since October, so we planned to spend the bulk of our trip with them. Shortly after arriving in Kansas, I got on a plane and flew out to Georgia for the National Housing Training Institute at the University of George for a week. We planned our vacation to overlap with this trip because it gave Carrie and the girls an extra week in Topeka that did not count against my vacation time since the trip was work related.

Grandma and Grandpa Mittelstedter planned lots of fun activities for Carrie and the girls in Topeka. Before I left, we visited Gage Park, which features an awesome playground, a carousel, a train ride, a water park, and a zoo. The girls also got to visit a fun toy store, story time at the library, go shoe shopping, and explore the brand new Topeka Discovery Center, which has lots of cool activities for kids including a Strider bike track and a plexi-glass room that kids can paint. The girls also got to take a splash in a kiddy pool just about every day. Grandma and Grandpa were even brave enough to treat us to a few of their favorite restaurants in the area. The highlight for Mady was probably visiting Chuck-E-Cheese with her Grandma.

After I returned from Georgia, we had a couple more days in Kansas before we drove up to Cedar Falls, Iowa for the next leg of our journey… You can find pictures from our vacation at our Picasa Album here: https://picasaweb.google.com/carriebeyer/VacationJune2012?authuser=0&authkey=Gv1sRgCKW2-7qKvs-o5wE&feat=directlink (to be continued)

9 months old!

Cami celebrated her 9 month birthday in Topeka Kansas with her Grandma and Grandpa . The full details of our road trip will be forthcoming in the next couple blog posts. For now, I’ll limit myself to some of the exciting developments of the last month. The big news is that Cami spoke her first word this month! Technically, her first word was “baba,” and she said it last month. This month she said “Mama” and she definitely has been using it in context (ie whenever Carrie enters or leaves the room).

She has also been sleeping very well this month. She has been going down pretty consistently between 7 and 8 pm and waking between 7 and 8 am. She also takes two naps a day pretty consistently this month. She has started eating table food and she can drink from her sippy cup all by herself now. She is still an nursing enthusiast, so Carrie is still naturally her favorite parent.  At her 9 month checkup, she weighed in at 20lbs 14oz, which is moving much closer towards the average weight for girls her age. Until now, she had always been on the bigger side.