Happy Fourth of July!

Happy Fourth of July to all our family and friends! We want to send out a special thank you to Grandma McGary for spending two weeks at our house helping out with both our kids. (that still sounds a little funny, that we have two kids!) She spent countless hours playing Ponyville with Sydney and coloring hundreds of pictures from the My Little Pony coloring books. If you haven't guessed already...My Little Pony's and Ponyville are some of Sydney's favorite things to do! Grandma also babysat Sophie lots so I could go to all the doctors and dentist appointments I could pack in over a two week period. Well, we are looking forward to spending the fourth just relaxing here at home this year. Mark is going to take Sydney to Phoenix International Raceway to see fireworks and I am going to stay home with Sophie because it is just going to be too hot to bring her out for such a long time. It is supposed to be around 116 degrees on Wednesday! So here is a quick update on what we have been up to this past month...Mark is such a good Daddy and is great with both his little girls.

Sophie is working on growing her cheeks because they make nice pillows to sleep on!

We started Sydney in swimming lessons this year. She cried the first day of lessons because she didn't want to get water in her eyes but then after that she loved getting in the water. She is getting much better at floating on her back and going underwater. On the last day of swim lessons all of the kids, including Sydney got to go down the big slide with their teacher (even though the sign says you have to be at least 42 inches tall). Of course after their teacher had taken each child down the slide once they all wanted to go again...so he had to bribe them with popsicles to get them to go back to their lesson! Sydney's Grandma McGary also took Sydney for her favorite strawberry ice-cream cones everyday after swim lessons.

Here is Sydney's swim class. It was kind of funny that all the kids in her class were from church. None of us moms even talked to each other about signing up our kids at this particular pool. So we were all laughing when we showed up the first day and realized somehow we had all independently put our kids in the same class.

Sydney loves the water!

This was kind of funny...I pulled out Sydney's gym toy from when she was a baby for Sophie to hang out under. Sydney was so excited about this and as soon as I set it up, Sydney crawled underneath the gym toys to play with them. I was laughing because the case on the gym says 0-9 months (but they forgot to add "almost four year olds")! Who would have thought all these baby toys would be so entertaining.

Sydney is showing Sophie how to look at all those funny animals. Actually Sophie is starting to look at the baby toys now and even trys to bat at them. Sophie gets so frustrated when her arms/hands just won't go where she wants them to.

Sophie is officially one month old! She is now nine pounds and has already outgrown some of her newborn clothes (because she is so long)! She is spending lots more time during the day looking around and sleeping better at night. We are trying really hard to get her on a schedule so that she sleeps mostly at night and eats mostly during the day. So far she is doing pretty well.

Here is our most recent family picture that Grandma McGary took for us. We had to take about a million pictures because Sydney loves to make silly faces or look all over the place (except at the camera). Thank goodness for digital cameras!