February 5

This Super Bowl Sunday was actually pretty fun! Perhaps it was fun mostly because I spent most of the evening in the kitchen cooking while Chris played with the kiddos and watched the game...

Before the game, Chris and Caleb raked leaves in the back yard.

When we bought the new house, the whole front yard was covered in leaves. Chris' dad and my mom spent a lot of time raking and blowing those leaves into a giant pile in the back yard, which we then ignored. For two months. Oops. We realized that if we didn't deal with it soon, we would kill all of our grass, so we've been working to scoop up all of the old, wet, yucky leaves and put them in an empty retaining wall/bed area as a makeshift compost pile. Today Chris and Caleb pretty much finished the job! Yay!

After raking, Caleb went "fishing". All by himself, he found a long stick and went over to an area where the previous owners clearly had a swimming pool. It's a round, muddy, grassless area. Caleb determined that this was a pond, and stood there waiting for a fish to bite.

Oh! Got one!

Can you see the surprised look on his face? He really thinks he caught a fish. Funny boy.

While Chris and Caleb finished raking and fishing, Daisy and I took her nine-month photos. 

She has a checkup on Tuesday, so I'll be able to tell you then how small she is much she's grown.

At nine months, Daisy:

takes two naps a day - 9 am and 2 pm

naps for an hour and a half at a time

gets the same food as Caleb at most meals, and generally eats more than him

has me really convinced that she says both "hi" and "bye-bye", with corresponding wave

She is pretty much the sweetest thing ever. I took her grocery shopping with me today. Since it was just her with me, she got to ride in the cart for the first time. Unfortunately, she definitely isn't ready to ride in the cart full-time; she kept slouching down in the seat and pulling her legs out of the holes and spreading them wide like Lindsay Lohan or Paris Hilton.

But, she got so much attention! So many people stopped to talk to her or smile at her. Three different people even walked past, then turned around to come back and talk to her. I love that complete strangers even notice how sweet Daisy is.

This nine-month-old girl is nowhere near sleeping through the night. She goes down in her crib around 7, then wakes around 10. I go in , feed her, and put her back down. She'll wake again around 11:30, and then I'll bring her into bed with me. She nurses pretty much throughout the night, and then decides to wake up around 5. Only I'm not down with that, so I try to coax her into sleeping until Daddy is ready to take her to play with him so I can sleep more. We need to work on our mornings.

I'd really like to work on getting Daisy out of our bed at night, but I'm still worried about her skinniness. If her weight is good at this next checkup, we may work on some sleep training.

Daisy is also totally on the move now. It's no big deal for her to scoot herself out of a room, down the hallway, and into another room. She is all over the place!

There she goes!

Daisy also loves being the center of attention. We have so many videos on our Flip camera of Daisy, staring silently at the camera. Since she's not doing anything, I'll pan over to Caleb. But as soon as I'm focusing on someone else, Daisy starts grunting or squawking until I focus on her again.

Yep, I'm talking about you Miss Thang!

After Daisy's photo shoot, we settled down to Super Bowl watching. Chris and I decided that half time would be bedtime for the kids, so when the first half was over, we shepherded them off to the bath. But apparently Caleb was really paying attention to the commercials, because he started fussing that he wanted to watch the girl with the guitar and the fire at the half time show.

He wanted to watch Madonna.

So we rushed through his bath so that he could sit like this: 

naked, damp from his bath, and totally fixated on Madonna's (disappointing) halftime show.

He was disappointed that there was no guitar and no fire, but he was appeased by the smoke and explosions at the end.