More Update

Here's super baby! Joshua has discovered his voice and loves to squawk and squeal and we cannot get enough. He is ready with smiles and giggles except in the middle of the night when he wakes up hungry and I have the nerve to change his diaper first, he screams in pure fury and it cracks me up. We love Joshua.

Benny loves our neighbors, we all do, but Benny is obsessed with them. They have three kids named, Tyler, Diana and Will and Ben has sort of lumped them together and refers to them collectively as Tyana. Anyway, he always wants to play with them and the other day he asked if he could go see if they could play. I told him not right then because I had to go shower and then we needed to run some errands. He said, "Okay, I'm just going to go outside to look for bugs." "Okay, but stay in the back yard." The phone rang and after chatting for a few minutes I peeked out back to check on Ben who was no where to be seen. I got off the phone and then called my neighbor and sure enough Benny was there. What a little stink! Also, lately he will get Joshua in a headlock or some other less than gentle gesture and when I tell him to stop he says, "But Mom, he loves me" "Yes he does love you, but you still can't put him in a headlock." We're working on it. We love Benjamin.

The other day Nate walked into my room where I was making Joshua laugh. The baby got giggling so hard and it was so cute. Nate stood there with the biggest grin on his face and then said, "We are sooo lucky." "Why are we lucky?" "Because we have Joshua". I love that my 6 year old gets the magic of our baby. Then again, the other morning he came into the kitchen carrying Joshy and said, "Here Mom, Patches woke up." "Uh, Patches?" (Patches is our guinea pig) "Oh, I mean Joshua!". We love Nate.

For Abby's parent teacher conference the other day I had to bring Joshua with us. When Abby became aware of that she reassured me that she had already talked to her teacher about the fact that even though parents were supposed to try to leave siblings home, there was a possibility her 4 month old baby brother would have to come. I had never mentioned anything about any of this, but found it so funny and so like Abby to have thought it all out and discussed the possibilities with her teacher. "Don't worry, Mom, Mrs. Sutton said it would be okay to bring a baby if we needed to." In so many ways she's about 5 steps ahead of me. If I need to be sure I don't forget something I ask Abby to remind me and can count on it. She's a huge help. We love Abigail.

Anna and Chloe are in full swing of their latest creative venture. They managed to get a good group to sign up for their play. They've scheduled 2 hours each week in our basement for play practice. (When I say "they've scheduled" that's exactly what I mean, I asked to look at the flier right before they went to pass them out). I told them I just couldn't be involved this year, even to answer the door because there's a good chance I'll be feeding the baby. They agreed and so far have kept their word. The first week they did auditions which took about 10 minutes, but they somehow managed to keep their wards entertained for the rest of their 2 hours. They're desperate for boys, but Nate isn't interested so they had to settle for Benny He was willing, but got uninvited after the first hour when he kept trying to sword fight with pool sticks. They are basing this play off a barbie movie of The Princess and the Pauper. In the script they put together based on that movie one of the characters was "Mrs. Madamecarp." They're very cute and very serious about this and I can't wait to see the play. We love Anna.