overheard at a restaurant:

old couple sitting next to us...

old lady: Aww! Look at that darling baby girl! Isn't she the sweetest thing you've ever seen?
old man: Yeah, well they both are. The older one looks just like Shirley Temple.

and I laughed into my napkin.



I'll take it as a compliment. I always liked Shirley Temple. :)

It only took 3 months

The incredible thing about this picture...

...is that even as I stood at my normal five-foot-eight height, I was still at least a foot under the thing.
A mere 3 months ago, Britt planted sunflower seeds around Grandma & Grandpa's garden. We've all loved watching them grow. (I should have taken pictures of the green beans and peas he planted in Granny's garden too...)

"Awesome sunflowers, dude!"

accessories

I don't remember if I mentioned (here) that Marnie didn't cry a single tear when she got her 6-month immunizations... Well since she's so tough, we decided to get her ears pierced. She cried 3 tears and then she was happy. I think the noise scared her more than anything.
1st picture turned out blurry, but you can still see Marnie's face showing a bit of concern.

A good hug can work wonders.

Outside the salon (with Grandma Tara) and she was already smiling.


I decided she needed a little something else to go with her pearl earrings, so I made a pearl bracelet.

Unfortunately, it looked delicious so it won't be worn very often. :)

Any guesses what this is??
It's my Justin's very manly tackle box. {haha} Now instead of holding hooks and fish crud it neatly organizes all of MJ's hair accessories and jewelry. (He needed a new one anyway)

Speaking of manly...

He needed something as new and exciting as Marnie's earrings. I'll tell ya, it's tough finding a tattoo parlor that will accommodate a three-year-old...and he only cried 3 tears.

..:lucky number seven:..

What's fun when you're 6 months old...

To convince your brother to climb into your crib and help you rearrange the bumper pads... yep, provides at least 10 minutes of entertainment. :)

sssssssnake!

I believe the name Britt gave him was, "Snoochy Doochy Brownie Brownie." I don't know where this kid comes up with this stuff...

What would we do without Uncle Brett and his amazing critter-catching abilities?? This particular day he caught a snake, tiny lizard and a striped racing lizard. I told him he should be one of those guys who goes to schools and teaches kids about animals and reptiles and stuff. He'd be good at it. :)





Marnie even got in on the action...

...she wanted to catch my blizzard even more though. :)

Marnie Jayne's first 6 months in retrospect

Happy half-birthday, MJ!

this one is incredibly embarrassing (it's an inside joke with Brooke), but I thought it best illustrated how huge my belly was.

I had to use my belly-table one last time before I went to the hospital :)













I still can't believe that she's 6 months old! It still feels like yesterday that Britt told me I needed to "let her out." He's been such a wonderful big brother, from day one. He loves her and always wants to play with her. Now that she's able to scoot and roll around, he's becoming very good at being her guardian, telling her what she can and can't play with. He's been so patient with her, even when she slobbers on his favorite things. Marnie is an amazing baby. She's very happy, but is not afraid to let us know when she wants something. Britt got his dad's mellow, go-with-the-flow personality, and Marnie got my happy, but sometimes bossy personality. :) She's a very active and vocal baby, and keeps us on our toes. She loves to roll and scoot all around the living room, getting into anything she can reach. She likes to sit on her own, and manages to do it for a few minutes before tumbling over. She loves her red blankie (at bedtime) and her jumperoo (at playtime). She loves Britt's hair and he doesn't complain a bit when she pulls it. :) I've never seen a pair of cheeks that I wanted to squish more than I do hers! She fits right into our little family, and I don't know what we did without her.

Why eating a fudge-sicle and holding a baby don't mix

She's got her mother's cat-like reflexes. :)

do you remember...??

This was posted on a website that we frequent, and after Justin and I laughed for a fifteen minutes reading it, I figured I had to share it. I highlighted a few of my favorites...

100 Things Your Kids May Never Know About
Inserting a VHS tape into a VCR to watch a movie or to record something.
Super-8 movies and cine film of all kinds.
Playing music on an audio tape using a personal stereo. See what happens when you give a Walkman to today’s teenager.
The number of TV channels being a single digit.
Standard-definition, CRT TVs filling up half your living room.
Rotary dial televisions with no remote control. You know, the ones where the kids were the remote control.
High-speed dubbing.
8-track cartridges.
Vinyl records. Even today’s DJs are going laptop or CD.
Betamax tapes.
MiniDisc.
Laserdisc: the LP of DVD.
Scanning the radio dial and hearing static between stations. (Digital tuners + HD radio b0rk this concept.)
Shortwave radio.
3-D movies meaning red-and-green glasses.
Watching TV when the networks say you should. Tivo and Sky+ are slowing killing this one.
That there was a time before ‘reality TV.’
Wires. OK, so they’re not gone yet, but it won’t be long
The scream of a modem connecting.
The buzz of a dot-matrix printer
5- and 3-inch floppies, Zip Discs and countless other forms of data storage.
Using jumpers to set IRQs.
DOS.
Terminals accessing the mainframe.
Screens being just green (or orange) on black.
Tweaking the volume setting on your tape deck to get a computer game to load, and waiting ages for it to actually do it.
Daisy chaining your SCSI devices and making sure they’ve all got a different ID.
Counting in kilobytes.
Wondering if you can afford to buy a RAM upgrade.
Blowing the dust out of a NES cartridge in the hopes that it’ll load this time.
Turning a PlayStation on its end to try and get a game to load.
Joysticks.
Having to delete something to make room on your hard drive.
Booting your computer off of a floppy disk.
Recording a song in a studio.
NCSA Mosaic.
Finding out information from an encyclopedia.
Using a road atlas to get from A to B.
Doing bank business only when the bank is open.
Shopping only during the day, Monday to Saturday.
Phone books and Yellow Pages.
Newspapers and magazines made from dead trees.
Actually being able to get a domain name consisting of real words.
Filling out an order form by hand, putting it in an envelope and posting it.
Not knowing exactly what all of your friends are doing and thinking at every moment.
Carrying on a correspondence with real letters, especially the handwritten kind.
Archie searches.
Gopher searches.
Concatenating and UUDecoding binaries from Usenet.
Privacy.
The fact that words generally don’t have num8er5 in them.
Correct spelling of phrases, rather than TLAs.
Waiting several minutes (or even hours!) to download something.
The time before botnets/security vulnerabilities due to always-on and always-connected PCs
The time before PC networks.
When Spam was just a meat product — or even a Monty Python sketch.
Typewriters.
Putting film in your camera: 35mm may have some life still, but what about APS or disk?
Sending that film away to be processed.
Having physical prints of photographs come back to you.
CB radios.
Getting lost. With GPS coming to more and more phones, your location is only a click away.
Rotary-dial telephones.
Answering machines.
Using a stick to point at information on a wallchart
Pay phones.
Phones with actual bells in them.
Fax machines.
Vacuum cleaners with bags in them.
Taking turns picking a radio station, or selecting a tape, for everyone to listen to during a long drive.
Remembering someone’s phone number.
Not knowing who was calling you on the phone.
Actually going down to a Blockbuster store to rent a movie.
Toys actually being suitable for the under-3s.
LEGO just being square blocks of various sizes, with the odd wheel, window or door.
Waiting for the television-network premiere to watch a movie after its run at the theater.
Relying on the 5-minute sport segment on the nightly news for baseball highlights.
Neat handwriting.
The days before the nanny state.
Starbuck being a man.
Han shoots first.
“Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father.” But they’ve already seen episode III, so it’s no big surprise.
Kentucky Fried Chicken, as opposed to KFC.
Trig tables and log tables.
“Don’t know what a slide rule is for …”
Finding books in a card catalog at the library.
Swimming pools with diving boards.
Hershey bars in silver wrappers.
Sliding the paper outer wrapper off a Kit-Kat, placing it on the palm of your hand and clapping to make it bang loudly. Then sliding your finger down the silver foil to break off the first finger
A Marathon bar (what a Snickers used to be called in Britain).
Having to manually unlock a car door.
Writing a check.
Looking out the window during a long drive.
Roller skates, as opposed to blades.
Cash.
Libraries as a place to get books rather than a place to use the internet.
Spending your entire allowance at the arcade in the mall.
Omni Magazine
A physical dictionary — either for spelling or definitions.
When a ‘geek’ and a ‘nerd’ were one and the same.


So, is there anything YOU have thought, "I wish my kids would know about..." Or have you told your kids, "When I was your age..."

eye love bugs