Getting Bigger and Bigger

I was sitting and thinking this evening how I took eight weeks off of work when Karina was born. Lydia is now seven weeks old, but I went back to work three days per week after her four week mark, and last week was my first week back full-time. It's fun watching the girls continue to grow up and I am excited for all the upcoming milestones. We've been doing our best to pull out the camera frequently so we can document Lydia as much as we did for Karina.

Karina has worked hard on her balance and hand-eye coordination. She likes stacking her blocks into tall towers and we are quite impressed with her abilities to keep the towers balanced. We were impressed that she was able to repeatedly stack 4 cylinders on top of each other, all by herself.

I haven't really seen Lydia start smiling yet, though Tanja claims she has. This is the closest I have seen so far - a satisfied smirk.  I'm looking forward to seeing her actual smile and we'll have to get some pictures.

Karina went with Tanja to the grocery store. The store had small shopping carts that children could push around with flags saying "Customer in Training." Karina's smile is an indication of how genius this marketing gimmick is. Entertaining kids that otherwise would be getting impatient and motivating the parents to get out of the store as quickly as possible allows the parents more time to go through the store, make impulse buys, etc. Not that Tanja made impulse purchases, but it was a much more pleasant shopping experience and Karina has been asking when she can go to Giant (the grocery store) again. The pictures were taken with Tanja's phone camera, but Karina's smile is unmistakable.  Yesterday, Tanja and Karina were at Giant again and there were a couple items in Karina's cart already when Tanja tried to add two bottles of orange juice to her cart.  Karina wouldn't have it though, announcing it was 'too heavy.' 

Tanja with the girls.

Lydia had a blowout in her diaper last week. Consequently, it was time for her first real bath. She was quite apprehensive going in, but then she relaxed and thought it was the greatest thing ever to be sitting in a few inches of warm water. Earlier this week, she was tired, screaming, and upset before bed. I brought her upstairs and gave her a bath, and again, it calmed her down. We might have a future swimmer on our hands as much as she seems to love the water.

Me and the girls.

Karina having fun running around and giggling like crazy.

We managed to miss taking pictures of Lydia wearing a dress so far, so I made sure that we got to take pictures of her this morning before going to church.

We think our girls are cute.