Recovering...

Definitely had a fun weekend, but Ellie and Muzzy sum up how we all felt after all of the festivities :)

Note: We normally don't keep a comforter on the kitchen floor, but this one was waiting to go in the laundry. Came in handy for a very tired Ellie after we got back from the pool and she was waiting for dinner.

Sweet corn fest

Well, we did it. We pulled off our first (of hopefully many) Schneiderheimer's Sweet Corn Fest. As you can see below, it's a real event because we had a banner made. We combined the party with a birthday celebration for Ellie and were lucky enough to get about 40 visitors, including St. Louis family and friends. Here are just a few of the pics from the weekend.
(*Pretty sure Brian is already sweating butter in this one above! Or it's from working the grill... It was HOT, but thankfully rain-free for the party!)

Two candles!

Ellie spent about half of the party playing in the drink bucket, eating ice and getting soaked (hence the outfit change at one point in the party...)

Here's a few pictures from Sunday morning when we had a quieter breakfast with the grandparents, great-grandparents and our friends visiting from out of town.
Jacob, Melissa and Kris (one of Brian's oldest friends) taking a cheesy pic with us!
And here's Ellie halfway through opening her mountain of presents. She's a very lucky little girl. Thanks to everyone!

Birthday report

We celebrated Ellie's birthday with a trip to the park and an unlimited rides bracelet for the two-year-old in the crowd. She did the boats just once, but took a couple spins each on the horses and the helicopters.
With a little inadvertent help from mom and dad, Ellie went very high on the helicopter ride! We made sure her bar was pushed in tight... but that's apparently the position that makes the car go up once the ride gets moving. Ellie loved it while we watched nervously from below!

And here we all are being cheesy before our choo-choo ride around the park. We rounded out the evening with a stop at the Frozen Custard by our house. Ellie requested chocolate ice cream. She finished her small and then helped mom and dad finish our large serving of mint chip. Happy girl!

I took her to the doctor today for a 2-year checkup. The doc said she seems to be developing great and told us to keep up the good work. She weighed 27.4 pounds (with a diaper full of poop that she managed while we were in the waiting room... sigh). And she is 35 1/2 inches tall. She's around 50th percentile on weight while she's stayed on the 90th percentile for height. I wonder if she's going to be taller than her mom?! Because she's such a skinny the doctor said to wait on switching her to skim milk. I was looking forward to having only one kind of milk to buy at the store... but it looks like we'll be buying 2%, too.

Week 13: Shrimp

I guess BabyCenter.com doesn't only use fruit and veggie comparisons for the baby growth. Baby #2 is the size of a medium shrimp this week, or so they say. All I know is my belly keeps getting bigger. And shrimp is thankfully one of the many things I can fathom eating again these days. Very few foods are off-limits anymore. A welcome change! And I'm in the last week of my first trimester, so my comfort level should only continue to improve in the coming months... before the weight, hormones and everything else totally wallops me again in the third trimester. Here's the news for this week:

Fingerprints have formed on your baby's tiny fingertips, her veins and organs are clearly visible through her still-thin skin, and her body is starting to catch up with her head — which makes up just a third of her body size now. If you're having a girl, she now has more than 2 million eggs in her ovaries. Your baby is almost 3 inches long (the size of a medium shrimp) and weighs nearly an ounce.

Two years old!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ELLIE!!

It's hard to believe our little baby turns two years old today. If it's possible, I think we love her more than we did on the day she was born. The days and months are flying by, but I'm happy that we're packing a TON of fun and learning and growing into every moment.

I'm sure I'll have more to add later, but for now I'll revisit a couple favorite shots from the past two years... in no particular order!

Dancing bird

I heard about a dancing cockatoo visiting Lafayette one night last week and decided to drag Ellie and Brian downtown to catch the free show. Ellie was very excited all day and kept saying "Dance?... bird?" and she did a little shimmy.
Here we are hiding in the shade while we waited for the diva bird to prepare for his performance. It was HOT that night.

And here's daddy and Ellie with rapt attention.

And a faraway shot of the bird, Snowball, and his keeper. There are better pictures taken by one of the newspaper photographers here at this link.

And I caught a short video of some of Snowball's moves... and Ellie's reaction. The bird's favorite artist is the Backstreet Boys, but he also got down to some Lady Gaga and then a nice Sousa march.


If anyone wants to catch more of Snowball's act, there are tons of YouTube videos of him. Here's one video tribute he does to Michael Jackson's music... I showed Ellie one of the videos last night and now she's back to asking for "Dance? bird?" a half dozen times a day. She's Snowball's biggest fan.

Two-year photo shoot

I took Ellie in for her 2-year photo shoot on Sunday and she did great!
I'm really impressed that you can't tell in these photos that Ellie was a fraction of a second from jumping out of the frame all together. Even though I'm still Ellie's paparazzi, I've had a tough time in recent months getting great shots of her because she's always on the move. Thank goodness for some professional help in capturing her toothy grin and mischievous smile :)

It's not in these photos, but my favorite part of the shoot was when Ellie stole the hippo hand puppet from the photographer and started chasing people around the studio trying to "get" them. She also was adorned in a fuzzy pink boa she found in the studio, but sadly that was after the photo session was over. Next time I need to remember my own camera for some the-making-of-Ellie's-photo-shoot pictures!

If anyone wants to order copies of the pictures, let me know (rugbydot@hotmail.com) and I'll email you the link.