"Hey everybody....

... I can crawl !!! "Max has really taken off with the crawling thing. Literally. The video below is day two of crawling and he's becoming more confident everyday. I had to persuade him with "Douglas" his most favorite monkey. (It really is. If you ask him where Douglas is, he will look around and dive for him when he finds him). It also shows how Max eats everything...including the camera.

ignore his bedhead. i do.

Model Crawler

Max has been on the verge of crawling for about a month now. We have seen him move a little but we know he can do it on his own. Twice now he's moved around without us watching. Once in his room, he got stuck behind his bedroom door, and yesterday on the kitchen floor. I call him the closet crawler.

Yesterday he gave himself his first fat lip. I don't know how it happened but he hit his lip on a pizza stone in the kitchen (the kitchen is not child proof yet). He bled and screamed. I laughed and called my Mom. It's fine today just a red mark on his upper lip. It matches the ones on his forehead.

Okay, here's the big story. As most of you know we are house hunting. Today we went to a few open houses then tortured ourselves into looking at model homes. Way out of our price range, but so fun to dream. The first model we looked at had great carpeting so we put Max on the floor to test it out. Then we saw it. He came out of his crawling closet. He crawled all over that model living room. It was so adorable.

Off to child proof....

Garden Babies

We've had pretty good luck with our garden this year. we're happy with it anyway. We've had a lot of good tomatoes, hot and sweet peppers, lemon cucumbers, Kohl Rabi, radishes, ....and we tried a carrot and corn recently too. Here are some "babies" just starting to grow. They are so cute! Teeny tiny cucumber. The only other one we have is about 5 inches long and about and inch or so wide. Almost ready to pick! There are about 5-6 babies like this one.
These are baby lemon cucumbers. YUM! We've had a ton of these already, the plant took over half of the raised bed and the fence close by. There is one at the bottom of the yellow flower and another just touching the fence post.
Little zucchini. Not as cute but still nice and little. Erik grilled these one night on the Q. Double YUM!
This is my favorite. We gave up on the watermelon plant and whah-lah! We now have a four foot plant! This tiny baby watermelon is about the size of my thumbnail. It's the cutest, hairiest baby! I'll do my best to update with the garden. Probably just the watermelon though, it's the most exciting to me. I hope he survives.

Yesterday was plain awful...

Daddy Warbucks: You can say that again.

Annie: Yesterday was plain awful.

Daddy Warbucks: But that's.

Annie: Not now.

Both: That's then.



Continue with tap dancing down the mansion stairs to the circus, as seen above.

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Okay, yesterday was a bad day. It started bad and just seemed to get worse. I won't go into details because it was just one of those days. They pass. (Although it was nothing like Annie had to deal with like running from bad people and being rescued by Punjab and a helicopter. Might I add that scene is terrifying to watch as a child!). Today was beautiful. Max took TWO naps just short of two hours, he sang to me while I took a shower (I even saw him sort of dancing at one of his musical toy things) and was just charming all day. So thank you to Max and thank you to Mom, Kelly, Carla, and Erik who all had to deal with me yesterday.



Tonight was cute too:





I think this was the funniest for me. I made spaghetti for dinner tonight and decided to start a food fight. The fight (which consisted of me throwing a piece of spaghetti onto Max's head) turned into a photo op because the piece stayed there for about 20 minutes. Max looked at it a few times (cross-eyed) but never pulled it off. So here are some funny pics of dinner tonight. Alaina, we are telling him all about the "Noodles" here.
After he tasted it. He liked it a little, until I finger-swooped him and pulled the chunk out. I'm getting pretty good at the swoop.
Happy to be noodle-free. But such a good sport so mommy can have her fun. After dinner as Erik was taking him out of the bath. Nice ending to a nice day.

Max's First Camping Trip

After surviving the flu we decided to make the trek to our favorite camping spot, Lake Alpine. Erik grew up visiting the lake and skiing at Bear Valley and introduced me to it a few years ago. This year marked our third trip there. We usually take the dog and camp and fish for a few days. This year we left the dog at home and took the baby. Have you ever been camping with an infant? One that is just recovering form the flu? Not so fun, eh?

Overall we decided it was a success, but not as fun as we were hoping. Max did well after the second day and we think he liked his first camping trip. Max's camping bath. We warmed the water and he LOVED this. Way better then the cold lake water. So much splashing!!
On Thursday we took a hike to Duck Lake and Max fell asleep about 10 minutes into it. He woke up for lunch and slept the whole way back. It was a good hike.
Who wouldn't love to go on a hike when this is your destination? Is was really beautiful. It had big meadows and huge granite rocks. We got off trail for a little while and had fun searching our way back.
There were a few little cabins, somewhat preserved, that we were able to peek into. Just like Little House on the Prairie. It was a nice reminder of how lucky we are and how easy we have it.
We started a tradition here. Back in the distance, across the lake, is one of the cabins that sat near the one in the picture above. We decided we'd try to take a family picture at this spot every year. A funny thing about this picture is on my right leg. I forgot a belt and had to use a rope to hold up my pants. I tried so hard to keep it covered. Oops. (which by the way is one of Max's favorite words. Oops, spoon, etc. Anything that has o's and p's will make him giggle. Our camping neighbors probably got so tired of hearing it).

Ah, we tried.
The first night of fishing. We didn't have any luck this year. Stupid fish.
My birthday cake. My original cake came in barf form at about 12:30 am from my lovely son...second at about 12:45am. I liked this one much better. Erik sang Happy Birthday to me, it was really cute!
Max really loved the sand and dirt, When we were unloading the car we sat him in his chair and it took about 5 seconds for him to dig right into the dirt. Then eat it. We spent a day on the beach and between Max's naps, we got to play in the sand. We made sand castles that he liked grabbing at too. He is such a boy!
After eating the sand.

Another beautiful trip! Looking forward to next year...even if it's in the lodge.

Where's the milk?

This is what happens when your baby has the flu. He gets tired, cranky, irritated, hot (understatement), confused and just plain fed up! This is what happens to Mommy and Daddy when their baby gets the flu. All of the above and then baffled when you can't find the milk...
Finally, after several days of baby barfing, we were able to go on our camping trip...

11 kiddos...and counting

On the 4th of July we all got together at my parents house and actually got a decent picture of all the Mills grandkids. This is a VERY difficult task. We had to pull a few of them out of the pool. Addy lives the farthest away which is funny because she's the one looking at all the other kids and probably wondering "Who are these people?" The age ranges are from (almost) 15 down to 5 months. They have so much fun together. (Thanks for the picture, Carla).

Teef

I just spent what felt like forever trying to get a picture of this boy's teeth (yes, there's two now). I gave up and tried a video. You can only see them in the beginning but it's still cute of him giggling. Enjoy!

Snails pace

I finally finished Eclipse tonight. It took me forever! I was told that after reading the third book my feelings towards Edward would change and I could be headed in the Jacob direction.

Nope. Didn't happen.

I think Jacob is a whiny brat. I sort of think Bella is a whiny brat now too. Sorry, I do. I think she's selfish. And I'm totally jealous of her.

Edward 4eva. (That's only funny if you've seen Fear).

4th of July!!!

I won't have time to post tomorrow so here's our little patriotic boy! I took a short video too. It's not the best one (still haven't really figured out the video capabilities of blogging...some work, most don't) but it shows a touch of how much Max moves. He never holds still. Holding him or not he is constantly waving his arms and legs. Even when he is sitting in his high chair he is doing "circles" with his toes. This certainly doesn't show just exactly how much this boy can really shake it (it even has a still moment), but it will give you an idea.

Have a fun 4th of July!