Welcome myself back...

I am kind of embarrassed about how long it has been since I've posted. Only a handful of posts ago, I was reporting on Iris, the four month old. And now she's almost eight months. Wow. In my own defense, taking two kids (one of them being Riley) to the library to use the Internet is just a recipe for disaster.

Not a whole lot has happened in our lives recently. We're always busy and mostly happy. Eric will be out for the summer in two weeks, so we obviously can't wait for that! He's got an obscene amount of work to do to prepare for the semesters end, but he'll get through it smelling like a rose... he always does. Iris is rolling all around now, and working on sitting up. We were a little worried there for a while, because she was getting pretty far behind, developmentally. She hadn't done a lot of things she should have by her six month check up, so our doc sent Kids on the Move to our house to work with her. They're part of a federal program to help kids with all sorts of problems catch up to where they should be. So they come out once a month, and we work with her in between. It's apparently working, because she's a rolling machine, and is making progress with the sitting. It's sort of expected that she's a bit behind, being a month premature and spending all that time in the hospital. She lost a lot of development time. But she's doing great, and at this rate, she'll catch up in no time. I'll tell you one area that she's not a bit behind in-- eating. She loves it! Squash, carrots, bananas, sweet potatoes, pears... it doesn't matter what I give her, she gobbles it down like a pro. The other day, she ate two whole tubs of pears in ONE SITTING! She just kept going. And she doesn't even get it all over her face-- it's like she doesn't want to waste a drop. She's hilarious, and has been so much fun.

We had a great Easter last week. We went to Patti's to dye eggs, and then had a few hundred Easter egg hunts in the yard. She got pretty good.







We went to Eric's aunt Sherri's house for Easter dinner, and had the traditional Easter egg hunt in their backyard. They do this each year, and begin with a picture of all the kids on the back steps. So now they have countless pictures of them all with squinty eyes, because the sun in staring you right in the face. It was a lot of fun, of course.