Summer Update

Here's what we've been up too...

Towel hats and under ware necklaces

Zoo visits and face painting with Uncle Nick.

Big carrots from the garden

Chuck E Cheese trips with Mimi

Pony tails and painted nails

More Chuck E Cheese

Cool glasses to celebrate dad's bday

Oh Lucille

 A few weeks ago when I was taking Hank's monthly pictures I couldn't help buy grab a few pictures of my first baby.  This girl steals my heart every time I look at her.


 She is outgoing, loving, goofy, smart, talkative and nurturing.  While she takes some time to warm up in a new surrounding, I do think she is more outgoing than most kids her age.  She loves people and loves playing with anyone and everyone.  She is so full of life!
I've been trying to write down funny stuff that she says because years from now I want to be able to remember why I laughed so much during this stage of life.  Lucy is seriously funny.  She makes funny faces, uses funny voices, and will mimic everything I say - but out of her two year old voice, it just cracks me up.  Like the other day when she said "Mom, this is embarrassing", or how her current phrase she says with everything is "or something", so when you ask "What is baby's name?" she will answer, "JJ.. or something". 

She picks up on moods and will say "settle down guys" if Ben and I are talking too serious. 

Although we have our share of battles, I can tell she genuinely cares about pleasing us and wanting to do good.  After being in time-out and talking with her about what she did wrong she will say, "are you happy now?" or she will do something and say "does that make you happy momma?". I'm not sure she understands fully what "happy" means, but I do think she gets that when she has good behavior mommy is a much nicer person!

Lately she has also been having lots of little conversations to herself- they are hilarious!  It's awesome to listen in on the imaginary conversations she is having.  One day she was praying to herself and said "Dear God, I love you so you love me.  Amen" (said really fast).  It was adorable. Now whenever I ask her to pray, that is what she says.

I'm not going to lie, we have our days and moments when I want to lock her in her room and scream into my pillow... but I will say, for the most part, I genuinely love getting to spend most of my days with this girl.  She is a true joy in my life.

Lake Ella

2 weeks after getting home from Mahomet, we traveled to my grandparents lake cabin in southern Indiana, Lake Ella. My cousins, Lauren, Jillian and Makenna all LOVE playing with Hank and Lucy (and of course Jadyn and Jordyn do), so we had tons of help with the babies.  Ben and I actually got to relax a bit!  At first I felt bad leaving Hank with them so much, but then I was listening to them while they were watching Hank one afternoon:

"Ok Jadyn, your 5 minutes is up, now it's my turn to hold him." 

"Ok, but then we should probably give him 5 minutes to play on the ground by himself"

Seriously?!?! They were actually fighting over him, and conscious enough that he needed some crawl around time too.  They are too sweet.

While we had lots of help during the day, the babies did not take well to sleeping at night, so we ended up leaving a little sooner than we had planned.  On Friday night, Lucy kept getting out of her room and screaming crying when we put her back (very unlike her) so she didn't end up officially falling asleep till 11:45pm, then Hank woke up to nurse at 2:30am (unlike him too) and again at 5:30am for the day.  I tried to ignore him at 5:30 but since he was sharing a room with Ben, Ruthie and I, I don't think he was having it.  It was also hard for me to fall back asleep at 5:30am bc I kept thinking I was hearing a pitter patter of footsteps above my head.  Turns out I was right, when I finally caved and took Hank out of his pack n play at 6am, I found Lucy was already up playing around.  Let's just say everybody was a little sleepy that day!

A few pictures from the weekend...

My grandma, the lake's namesake.  We were taking pictures to update her facebook profile picture :)

I think this was about 7:30am, Hank is all smiles!

Lauren holding Hank

Boat ride with Jillian... I think this is Jillian... shoot... now I can't remember.  The twins are identical, so I'm not a bad cousin, just hard to tell them apart!

Ruthie had a blast of course.  My grandfather owns about 70 acres and the entire lake, so we just let Ruthie run around as much as she wanted.

helping mom in the kitchen

cheese-er

this girl needs to be an actress, she sure knows how to get her pout on

Swimming! Lucy didn't love the water, I figured she would have been in the whole time, but I don't think she was that comfortable.  Just this past week we've had her in a real life jacket at the YMCA pool (previously we had her in more a swim jacket) and she has been loving the water and jumping in on her own.  We'll have to try that down at the lake next time.

Bible Study Getaway

We have been busy! Between just every day life, we've also been traveling lots and I've been busy planning my 10 year high school reunion.  Here are highlights from one of our recent trips.  A few weeks ago our Bible study was invited to spend the weekend at Thad's parents home which is set on a private lake in Mahomet, IL.  It was amazing!  The home was gorgeous, the lake was gorgeous, and the company was perfect!  Between the 6 couples that went we had 7 babies and 1 on the way.  Let's just say our Bible study has been growing over the past year.

A few pictures from the trip (I stole all these from Heather and Emily... thanks for being the weekend photographers, girls!)

Heather holding Hank and Gigi, I'm guessing Hank probably caused the tears here... he can't get enough of that baby girl's hair... do you blame him?

With 5 of the babies being under 1 there was lots of toys, play mates, and helpers around to play with!

Although somehow the adults were able to manage playing a few games..

and relax a little too.

And of course, we got in a little boating time

Lucy watching mom on the wake board... my second time getting up! Thad is an excellent coach.

Tramp

I mentioned this in a previous post - Ben came home from the grocery with a trampoline one crazy Sunday and life here at the Wehner home hasn't been the same since.  While I did give approval for the trampoline, I did not actually think Ben would buy it, so I was a little surprised when he brought home a 14ft trampoline to set up in our back yard.  I'm not going to lie, I think it's a bit of an eye sore, but I will say that Lucy (and Ben and I) do enjoy it and usually go out to jump every day if not several times a day.

So here's to hopefully getting a bigger back yard some day, or at least one with more a side yard so that I can put the trampoline off to the side and not stare at it all day long.  I hope Lucy, Hank and their friends will use it for many years to come... and that maybe we'll be the "cool" house to hang out at.

Ben said the trampoline was "for the kids"... ha! yeah right.

Lucy was pretty freaked out at first.  When ben flipped she started crying - it took her a while to warm up to the trampoline.

This face pretty much describes how she felt about it for the first couple days

But now she is a jumping pro!

Don't worry, mom gets in on the fun too!

"you wanna jump on my trampoline?"

Hank 8 Months

If I were to give this past month a title it would be Clingy-butt.  Hank has really started to notice when I am in the room with him and when I walk away (And sometimes daddy just doesn't do the trick, this boy loves his momma).  If he's not in a really good mood (i.e. just woke up and was fed and snuggled with for a while) and I try to set him down, he starts crawling after me, crying as he crawls.  It's actually kind of cute, and if it weren't for having to run after the other crazy kid at my house, I would absolutely love it. He's an extremely cuddly little guy and while he does well with independent play, he definitely needs time when he can bury his head in my chest and suck his thumb (oh, I hope this lasts for a long time!)

He's also really got the hang of the idea that he can cry and get his way - he let's me know when he's done eating by crying, when he wants out of the car seat by crying and when he isn't ready to go down for a nap he crys and/or jumps up in down in his crib (pretty cute to watch in the video monitor).  He still doesn't fuss a lot, but I've just noticed that my once pretty silent boy likes to voice his opinion a lot these days.

I think we went through one sickness this past month - Hank was pretty fussy and Ben needed his ears checked, so I had him take Hank to medcheck to check his ears.  Nothing was wrong (I'm now batting 2/4 with my personal diagnosis of him having an ear infection...shoot), so we just suffered through some rough nights until he started feeling better.

SLEEP - Hank dropped his third nap early this month. He was giving me three really crappy naps (not laying down easily and waking up early) and I couldn't figure out what was going on and then I realized I was laying him down to much.  He typically gives me two 1hr 15min - 1hr 45min naps a day.  Some days he needs 3, but that is pretty rare.  Naps are typically from 9:30/10am-11/11:30am and 1:30-3pm (ish).  He then goes down for bed around 7pm... it's tough to stretch him till then, but it just didn't make sense to throw a nap in between 3 and 7pm.  He sleeps till 7/7:30am, with a nursing around 4-5:30am.  He seems to randomly go through weeks when he wakes another time during the night (around 2-3am) but I try if it all possible to ignore him.

EAT - With dropping the nap, Hank also dropped a nursing.  He is now nursing when he wakes for the day and when he goes to bed, then after each nap (and of course the middle of the night feeding...) I'm starting to get excited that Hank is getting close to a year and will be done with nursing.  It's not that I don't love it, but I'm definitely ready to get more sleep at night and ready to have a little more freedom as a momma.  Although I did such a good job storing up milk at the beginning, I've had way more freedom than I did with Lucy (at this age with Lucy I remember not being able to ever get enough milk to leave a bottle).  He eats solid foods when we do, and is basically eating whatever we eat.  I try to give him more pure forms of the food we eat - but he will pretty much put down anything.  He still won't take much from a spoon and prefers to feed himself... which is quite a mess!

We get comments on his smile all the time - the things people say the most about Hank are that "he's got the best smile" and "he is so happy!".  I agree with both!

He has really gotten the hang of waving (see below) and he also learned to clap this month.  Before he started clapping he would bang both his hands on the table in response to us clapping or whenever he was excited.  He loves crawling to things and pulling up to standing (especially the back door).  He LOVES ruthie's food, and I have a sneaking suspicion that we are inadvertently starving Ruthie because I have to put the food up almost the entire day.  Sorry Ruth.  I love listening to him work so hard and move so fast across the kitchen floor to get to the dog food, once he's eyed that it is down.  And then he gives out a cry of protest once I pry it from his fingers and move it to the counter

He also does a lot of cruising and has started pushing objects around and walking behind them.  He likes to walk while we hold his hands, but he doesn't really seem to have the whole balance thing down yet, so I think we're pretty far from the walking stage.

He still mostly just says da da and likes to do a lot of squealing, screaming, grunting and blowing raspberries

I decided to try a couple different poses for this months pictures since I haven't been having much success keeping Hank sitting still in the crib.  Here is Teddy with Hank in the kitchen.

And posing in his chair...

And now for what started as a photo session with Hank and turned into a party in Hank's crib...

If you're thinking that the blonde little peanut had anything to do with it.... you are correct...

 This is Lucy's favorite way to hold Hank... it looks cute here, but typically it goes from a lovingly sweet hold to a strangling death grip.  We're working on that...
I love the below shot... how that leg got in that position is beyond me...