The weather was great today, even though our beach pictures make it look like we're freezing or something. It was just overcast & it was definitely cooler down by the water...but we were able to eat lunch outside & enjoy much of the day. Kaelyn made her usual mess in the sand, but she had lots of fun. She came home & took a super long nap. She woke up quite unhappy & I'm pretty sure it's because her diaper was literally full of huge, coarse sand. Poor thing. We've been working a whole lot on the house. Barry's parents have been helping us get the yard in order & watch Kaelyn while I paint the kitchen. I finished edging & trimwork today, so hopefully there will be color up in the next day or so. I'll post more pictures as I make progress. Barry has been working his parents to the bone. Our yard looks great - then Barry had Jon clean the gutters out & clean our shed, while Merrily scraped our back door which was rotting. They'll never want to come back!

Even though this is blurry I thought it was cute. Do you like her piggy pajamas?

She has been loving this teddy lately. It's as big as her!

Lazy Saturday morning just hanging out & playing.

Giant baby attacks Gloucester...eats all houses in sight.

Giant baby seems to have a weakness...does not like to get her hands dirty. Could this be her kryptonite? I have no clue how to spell that.

Here's the kitchen before painting, but after patching up many, many holes. Barry loves patching holes & sanding. It's super annoying. Everytime I get this kitchen cleaned up so that Kaelyn won't get into it, he sands more and it spreads this find RED powder everywhere from the walls...step away from the sander or I will seriously hurt you!

I could never remodel a kitchen. I can barely handle this mess for a few days.

Here's what it looks like today after I primed. Looking good. Unfortunately, now we're wondering if we should've picked something lighter. Oh well, color is a good thing. Hopefully.

You'll see there's still red in the other part of the kitchen. I can only handle one half of the kitchen at once. The walls and trim needed too much repair to do it all at the same time. Divide & conquer was our theory.

The other night Kaelyn just went bonkers like she was hopped up on caffeine. She was crawling back & forth at top speed, screaming (happily) & going all crazy baby. I only got a few seconds of it because my camera ran out of batteries. You'll get the idea though.

This was from tonight. She is such a show off. If you keep clapping for her, she'll just keep doing the same thing over & over. She was quite proud of herself for standing up.

some new stuff

Here are some easter pictures & Kaelyn showing off some of her new almost walking moves. I think she'll be walking in no time at all - I'm not in any big hurry. Although, the beach has been challenging because she gets so messy crawling around. If she were walking it would be kind of nice because I could put her down in more places & not worry so much about her hands getting gross. I have totally bypassed all of our florida pictures from last month - I'll have to get those on here later because there are lots of good ones.


We went to Good Harbor beach today to enjoy the gorgeous weather. It was supposed to hit 80 degrees today, but I don't know if it actually did. It definitely got to 75 though.

She was really making quite a mess in the wet sand where the tide went out. But the ground was more solid there and easier for her to get around.

Jon drew a bunny in the sand for Kaelyn.

These are the corner pads for our coffee table so kaelyn won't hit her head - you can see how useful they are. They were stuck to the table corners, but she just rips them off. Lovely.

Something is wrong with this picture.

Yo, what up?

Getting sleepy. She woke up early from her nap, but was still tired and wouldn't let me put her down. She's so heavy I have a hard time carrying her for long periods of time. This sling actually hurts my back more though I think.

This was easter sunday at brunch.

I brought her easter eggs filled with cheerios to keep her occupied & put them in her little purse. That was her easter basket.

Last night we were helping Kaelyn practice standing up on her own. She did pretty good.

Today she walked for a super long time with us holding her hands. It was very cute.

Guest room

The picture of Kaelyn is from yesterday. I made the mistake of giving her basically an open container of cheerios, instead of one of those little snack traps. Less than a minute later they were all on the floor, but she was so cute, even though she was naughty. I single-handedly repainted the guest room, trim and all right before we left for Florida. I was determined for whatever reason. The red bottom, white top thing was driving me nuts. Now it's all nice and calm & a happy place.

Here's a before picture of the guest room...it's just the only picture I could find quickly and easily.

Ah, much better indeed.

Here's our "where's waldo" pictures. Can you find the mischevious baby in these St Patricks Day pictures?

She loves the tivo remote. We give her other remotes that don't go to anything, but she is smarter than that. She only wants the tivo remote, because it actually does do something.

Kaelyn is wearing a hat that my mom knitted for her...her first attempt at knitting. Pretty damned good. It's adorable on Kaelyn, but she rips it off almost instantly much to my dismay. The top that she's wearing was actually mine & my sisters when we were little wee ones...funny to think about.

Kaelyn definitely looks like Barry/Holly here I think. Mostly Barry though still.

I bought her a "snack trap" last week because I got tired of holding onto her snack cup all the time. I thought she might not be able to figure it out. When it comes to getting to her food, there's no separating her from it I guess. She caught on instantly.

Look at her glowing tuft of mangled hair. She doesn't have much, but it's always a mess nonetheless.
This is Kaelyn's new way of "sitting" in her stroller if we don't have her strapped in. She's become quite the little climber.


Then she fell asleep like that. It was really cute...and seemed really uncomfortable because her legs were all tangled up in a crazy position.


I left Barry to watch Kaelyn for maybe 2 hours this morning. I come back to find he has taught her a new, valuable skill that will undoubtedly create more stress and take more time from my day. Here she is demonstrating what daddy taught her...Thank you Barry.

Here's Kaelyn getting into the groove...until I inturrupted it by coming home from the big children's sale I went to this morning and scored some deals.

Getting bigger!

I have not been keeping this blog updated as often as I should, but I only get short increments of time to do pretty much anything. Kaelyn is really enjoying the freedom that crawling has brought her. It is still wierd to have her just come crawling around the corner after me when I leave the room. The house has become baby-proofed very quickly. We basically just follow her around with outlet covers because she seems to find all the outlets before we do. Whenever I miss or forget one, she always finds it for me. She's turning into a real little girl, and is no longer a baby. She makes lots of friends at the grocery stores...primarily elderly women. They just love her. And she shrieks with delight when she sees another child at the store. We've been getting out for lots of activities and playdates & she always enjoys getting out of the house for an adventure of any type.

These are all pictures of what results when Kaelyn feeds herself. It's not pretty.

Notice how all that's left on her tray are veggies? She used to love veggies...what happened?

We were in Lexington (Mass. of course) last weekend & we took a nice walk before church. Kaelyn looked so cute all bundled up.

Finally asleep!

We were at IKEA a couple of weeks ago & not only were Kaelyn & I dressed the same (green top, blue bottoms) but then we found this green chair that was calling for us to sit on it. Can you even see us?

This is either the "I'm about to cause trouble" or "I just got done causing trouble" look.

Well, here's the trouble I was speaking of.

Here comes Kaelyn and old man stout

More neat and tidy eating.

Kaelyn has this wierd obsession with putting everything behind her neck, like she's dressing herself. She always has a scarf or something on, and then she insists on crawling around like this, making it 10x more difficult than it needs to be. Sometimes there is a whole train of things she is dragging along with her.

This was a modified crawl she's been doing...it's like a standing crawl, which I'm sure won't be long until it just becomes walking.

It's official, she's crawling

Attacking the indie movie daddy worked on in Lexington. Do you like the cover?