Back to work

First some pictures from the last couple of weeks:

One of Mackenzie's first smiles! What a silly goose!

Brady loves to play in "Sissy's bed." I put Mackenzie in for some tummy time and Brady came along for the ride!

I finally figured out how to get Brady to smile for pictures...I tell him to show me his teeth! You can see here his "open bite" that he got from the dreaded pacifier. He's got a football shape gap in the front, but it is getting smaller each day since he's been rid of the pacifier for more than a week now.

I went in to get Brady out of bed the other morning and this is what I found. "Line!" Brady said, proudly showing me that he arranged all his monkeys and his bunny in a line in his crib! He's so stinking smart! I swear he's advanced ... but I'm not partial am I??? :)

This is the new scoreboard at the Royal's stadium. It is the world's largest high definition screen and it is totally awesome. It's like a giant tv or huge movie screen or something. It's so cool. At least there's one reason to go to a Royal's game now! Ha ha. Actually they are doing a little better this year!

The weather has finally warmed up and we have been enjoying it as much as possible. I have a really cute picture of Brady and Melea playing on the boat yesterday. It was out in the driveway because Jeremiah took it to the car wash to pressure wash the floors. Brady had fun "driving" it. He didn't want to come inside last night and we practically had to peel him out of the drivers seat!

Well, it was back to work for me today. Ugh. It really wasn't all that bad. The kids went to the new babysitters today. She said they did really well and they seemed to have had a good day. Brady had lots of fun and didn't want to leave because he was playing with her son who is only three months older than he is. She said Brady was really nice and sweet all day and gave her lots of hugs. He ate all his pizza for lunch and came back for seconds! At nap time he slept on a couch instead of in a pack-n-play. They get to pick where they sleep and she has cots and mats and couches. We think it will be a good thing to help him transition to a toddler bed, which we expect to do this fall. She said Mackenzie was good all day too - only a little fussy when she was hungry. She said she was awake and alert for a long time and enjoyed watching the kids run around.

I spent the day answering the questions, "Are you glad to be back," and "Was it hard to leave the babies?" Everyone seemed glad to see me...even my boss. Amazing. I'm sure the luster will wear off by weeks' end. Ha ha. The first three weeks I was off I checked my email from home. I probably went through about 80 or 90 of them. Today when I logged in I had 263 new emails in my inbox. Ugh. That took a few hours to get through and when it was all said and done I had five pages of notes of action items to take care of. It gives me something to do!

I spent part of the day in staff meeting...which was hard to keep my attention. I gave my Get Fuzzy cartoon page a day calendar to my friend Miranda who is the security manager while I was gone and she gave it back to me today. She had kept all the pages in order for me when she tore them off so I spent most of the meeting getting caught up on the happenings with Bucky and Satchel. If you have pets - cats in particular - and you have never read that cartoon you totally should...it is hillarious. I love it.

The day went by pretty fast. I got to embarrass my boss when I told him that I had to close my door for a few minutes every few hours because I am nursing my daughter and have to take care of business. His face got all red and he said, "Ok. If your door is closed we won't bother you!" It was funny. He doesn't have any kids so he hasn't been through that yet.

I put up pictures of the kiddos on my desk so I had a lot of people stop to take a peek at them and tell me how cute they are...which of course I already knew!

Getting out of the house today was quite a chore. I seriously am going to have to start getting up two hours before I have to be there to get there on time! Luckily most days I don't have a 100% set time to get there...but unfortunately the days I do have a set time it is 6:30 a.m. YIKES! I might as well stay up all night! Luckily it's only once or twice a week so I will manage. Somehow!

In other non-work related news the other night Brady was playing in our room and found one of his old "bites." I thought we had found all those dreaded pacifiers, but apparently there was a stray. Jeremiah told him he was a big boy now and that was trash and do you know what Brady did? He marched right out into the kitchen, showed it to me and said, "Trash!" and opened the trash can and tossed it in! Wow. I'd say he's over the whole "bite" now. What a big boy!

It looks like our fall vacation is going to be Oct. 2 through 12. We'll be flying into Baltimore and parading around the eastern seaboard for 10 days. Really the first weekend we'll be going around D.C., Baltimore and Ocean City and then we'll spend the rest of the time relaxing in Jersey. We plan to spend a little bit of time with our friend Jen and her little boy Christopher who will be a little over a year by then. He'll have fun with the kids. Mackenzie will be almost 8 months by then! Wow. When we get back it will only be a few more weeks before my newest niece or nephew arrives! I'm excited about that too!

Well, that's all I can think of for now.