Diaper FREE at night!!!

For Norah that is! She has finally graduated into wearing panties at night. I thought she was going to have a harder time with the transition, but she did great. She does wake up most nights for a bathroom break, but I'm sure she will grow out of that at some point.

Here Norah is shaking her bootie at me. She tends to do this a lot. If she is partially clothed or naked, she sneaks up to you, turns around and says, "Shake, shake shake" (while wiggling her bum back and forth)... "I'm shaking my bootie at you!" crazy girl

Meika at 7 Months Old

Meika's Stats @ 7 Months

*12.9 Lbs (5.85kg), 0%
*68cm (26.8 inches), 63%

She is just a little peanut. I did have to take her into the doctor the other day and she was in the 3rd percentile now... but she was weighed with her diaper and jammies on. I don't doubt that she is bigger now though. She looks a little "chunkier"... if that is even possible :)

Meika...

Is Crawling- She started crawling at 6 months, but it was more of a scoot at first. She is full on crawling now, and she is fast!

Is Waving- She has been doing this for about a month now. You say "Hi", or "Bye" and the girl is frantically waving at you. Sometimes it even sounds like she is saying "Hi" or "Bye" too. Melts my heart.
Is Eating More Solids- She is now eating more solids. Her favorites are Carrots, Sweet Potatoes and loves snacking on puffs and Mum Mums. She loves getting scraps of fruit, vegetables or bread from whatever we are eating.
Is Wanting to be in on the action with her sisters. I swear she just wants to run around with them all the time. I feel like she will be in no time!

Is Standing up to everything and even cruises a little bit
Blabbers. Says Ma ma, da da, ba ba, na na, etc.
Loves Chloe
Has the biggest Outie belly button

Loves her little "Bear Bear" and cuddles with it while falling asleep
Uses her binkie only to sleep
Sleeps on average 8 hours at night before feeds. However, sometimes she sleeps all the way through the night. If she does wake up to eat, she goes right back to bed.

Is Being tortured loved by her sisters

Is crazy

Meika is just about the sweetest thing I could ask for. She is such an easy going baby too. We love her so much and I wish that I could freeze the time. Stop growing Meika!!

And a picture overload of Meika....

Cute 4 month pictures of Meika

Meika is not 4 months old, she just turned 7 months... but I found these pictures of Meika and had to post them. Cute little baby.

Daddy daughter campout

Adeline likes an adventure. She has been dying to set the tent up and go camping. We were planning on going camping the weekend we went to Gerardmer, but we ended up staying in an apartment instead. Abe decided that they could just have a little campout in the yard.

When Adeline woke up one morning, her and Abe started getting all the camping gear and laying it out. Once they got everything prepared, they set up the tent. Adeline helped Abe put the entire thing together. If you give this girl a task, she is intense about it and does a great job. After it was all set up, it was probably only like 10am. All day long Adeline would say, "I can't wait to go to bed! I am just so excited!"











When the the night time actually came, both girls and Abe went out to the tent to sleep. At about 10pm, Norah decided to come in and go to bed because she couldn't fall asleep. Adeline already can't wait to do it again. I love watching Abe connect with the girls. He is such a good dad.

and some random pics of cute little Meika

I had a Sh** day

I mean MONTH. Have you heard PINK's new song, "Blow me one last kiss?" I feel like she has described my last month or so perfectly in her sentence, "Just when I think it can't get worse, I had a Sh** day". Although, I was teasing Abe about this the other day and it actually COULD get way worse, so I probably shouldn't say that!

*I actually started writing this post 2 weeks ago and was so overwhelmed my all my temporary struggles. I kept meaning to sit down and blog about it since this blog is also for journaling purposes. For some reason, I was too busy, tired, or something got in the way of me doing this post. I kept pondering why things kept happening back to back to back and thought, "what am I supposed to learn from this?" This past week I discovered something. Although the past month has been hard and trying, I am now able to put the entire thing into perspective. NONE of the things I have been experiencing are that bad. They are all things that will go away or disappear. I have found that I am now counting my blessings and not focusing on small "nuisances". So, even though I felt like I had a Sh** month(and did), it really wasn't that bad when you put things into perspective. I really am thankful.

So, without further adieu, I present you to my month... literally back to back to back to back :)

**Abe and I had HORRIBLE poison oak all over our bodies. I still have scars on my back that I am hoping will go away

**Abe went out of town for work and I got Mastitis really bad

**As soon as I was done with Mastitis, we were able to go on our little weekend trip to Geradmer, France. The last day we were there, Meika started getting little spots and it turned out to be Chicken Pox! Needless to say, we were quarantined after that for about 9 days. Luckily Adeline has had both booster immunizations and a case of chicken pox herself. Norah's one booster has held up through 2 cases of chicken pox now, so I am guessing she really is immune Luckily!







**Right after Meika recovered from Chicken Pox, we were attending church. While we were sitting in Sacrament meeting, Abe turned to me and said, "DON'T freak out, but Adeline has little bugs crawling around in her hair!" Of course I did freak out a little bit and Adeline and I walked outside of the church while I started going through her hair. I was able to pick a handful of bugs out and then decided it was best that we head home. Abe was thinking it was fleas, but I knew better that it was most likely LICE. Weird, because I had just done Adeline's hair that morning and she got a bath the night before. Just shows you that they can be hard to find! Unfortunately EVERYTHING is closed on Sunday in Germany... so no nit combs or lice treatments for me. I took the smallest comb I could find and went through her hair and picked out what I could. After researching the best home remedy treatments possible, I dipped Adeline's hair in Olive oil and bagged it up for a couple of hours. When Norah got home from church, I started going through her hair too and found lice in her hair! Luckily, hers wasn't as bad and I started doing what I could to her hair as well. On top of that, I was stripping down all the beds, starting laundry, vacuuming and cleaning my house frantically. Right before Abe and I were going to go to bed, I had him look through my hair just in case. I had lice too! I was in tears and totally exhausted from all the work that day. I could not go to bed knowing that I had bugs crawling around in my head. I immediately soaked my entire head in olive oil, put a swim cap over it and then wrapped a towel around my head. I maybe slept about 2 hours that night. The most devastating thing for me (on top of having to sanitize and clean our heads and my entire house) was that Adeline's first day of school was the NEXT day.

The next morning I had Abe run to the Apotheke (German Pharmacy) and get a nit comb and shampoo. I went through both of the girls hair with the nit comb and got the rest of the nits I had missed. Even though at this point I had done the olive oil treatment to kill the lice and manually got out all the nits, I still did the shampoo just to make sure! I kept the olive oil in my hair for 18 hours total, went through it with the nit comb and did all the treatments of shampoo. Just to give you an idea of what a pain the shampoo treatments are, ONE treatment consists of washing your hair with the special shampoo and washing it out. Going through entire head with nit comb. Washing entire head with lots of shampoo again and leaving it in for 30 minutes. Wash it out and go through with nit comb. Wash again with Shampoo and leave in again for 30 minutes and then do nit comb again. This was not a very fun process with the girls, but they were really good sports.

I probably went through all of our hair for about 14 hours total over a period of days. NOT fun. I did 18 loads of laundry. German washer/dryers are tiny and take 2 hours to wash and 2 hours to dry. I cleaned and vacuumed my house for countless hours. Luckily Adeline was able to go to school the next day since I was so diligent about getting everything off her head. 2.5 weeks later, I can say that our heads are all nit and lice free! Unfortunately we got the lice from the little apartment we stayed at in Gerardmer. I loved the apartment, but I was worried from the start that all the bedding was dirty and not clean! I have learned my lesson to bring our own bedding while traveling and vacuuming the couches. Unfortunately lice is really common in Europe!

Flower Carpet in Brussels

The week before Adeline's school started, we took a day trip to Belgium, Brussels to see the flower carpet exhibit that happens every other year. Abe actually served part of his mission here too, so he was a little familiar with the area. The day we choose to go ended up being a Belgian holiday and the streets were packed!


There were so many cute little shops that we passed on the way to the town square, but I especially loved this one.




We loved watching the police officers on their horses


Once we made it to the square, we were able to see the Flower Carpet. It's amazing that it is made out of a bunch of live flowers.




I wanted to get a little higher up to get a better view of the Flower Carpet. One of the buildings that it said to go to online looked way too crowded, so I ended up going in the museum to the upper level and took some from there. I got pretty lucky because there were about 6 other people on the deck besides me and Adeline. After we left, we realized there was about a 2 hour line to get to the deck of the preferred building which wasn't any better. Glad we didn't take that recommendation!










We packed a lunch and brought it with us. It seemed almost impossible to find a place to sit and eat it with all the crowds. We finally found some good windowsills to sit on.


After lunch, we couldn't resist getting a belgian waffle. This picture doesn't do it justice. It was AMAZING.






Afterwards, we headed down to see the famous "Manneken Pis"




In just about every window and store on the street, there was something depicting the Manneken Pis




The streets were lined with chocolate and waffle stores one after another. I swear the streets smelled of chocolate and waffles. Mmmmm....


On our way out, we passed the Everard 't Serclaes Statue. There was a swarm of people around it rubbing it. Supposably it gives you good luck.


We only spent a handful of hours in the city and then called it a day. Luckily it is only about 2.5 hours from us and I am sure we will be returning again.