What a week

Things have been busy lately. The boys flew in this past Monday, Jessica finished her week of finals and Juliana's growing way too fast.

First off, I promised a picture of the kids. Mitchell has shot up past Jessica in height, so we took a picture of them standing for comparison.


As you can see by the height indicator, Mitchell is over 7 feet tall and Jonah is already over 6 feet! Well, they wish they were. Jonah's actually 4' 10" and I really have no idea what Mitchell's height is. You can't see the baby, since Juliana is somewhere around 26" tall, so didn't really reach much higher than their knees. In reality, she was being held by Daddy and didn't want to stand when we took this picture.

Jonah's hair is so long, but mainly that was to show Daddy. His mom is going to cut his hair when they get back home. He's probably changed the most since we saw him last November.

In other news, Juliana's has been more vocal with the other kids around. She waves hello and can sometimes say "Hi" in greeting. (sometimes she even does them both together) Just this morning, she scrambled across the bed and woke Derek up with a squeal and something that sounded not unlike "Hi, Dad!"

In her travels around the condo, she's discovered the entertainment system.

Can you tell? One of her favorite things to do is to stand in front of this, pull a tray out and grab a case. She then proceeds to swing her arm behind her and drop each case to the floor. Rinse. Repeat.

Another trick she has is that she loves spinning the dials on the receiver and changing the settings... usually right in the middle of one of Jessica's shows. Another inch taller and she'll be able to reach the volume dial --- watch out! I think I really need to find a clear guard of some sort for the front of the receiver.

I used to bring her away from there and try to distract her with another toy, but she keeps going back. They say you need to pick your battles. To that effect, I've given up on the distractions but have decided I'm just going to encourage her to not stand/sit on any case with a disk in it if she insists on piling them up on the floor. Until she is older and can be taught to put things away, I'll just continue to clean them up after she's been tucked into bed.

Speaking of bed... it's late and I'm probably going to be woken up in 7 hours, so I better get what sleep I can. We have a few things tentatively planned for Father's Day weekend, depending on the weather. We'll see how it goes and I'll tell you about it next time.