Life's adventures: This month in Harper and Silas country~H-2yrs, 6mos.; S-basically 4 months

This summer has been a blast so far. We loved our trip to Mammoth, have had some great visits with our friends the Fitzgeralds, and are enjoying our day to day adventures. Harper's language is exploding. She is always listening and comes up with the funniest things to say. The other day she announced she was packing her bag to get on the plane to Wisconsin (daddy travels there on business sometimes and she also overheard us discussing our visit there in August). It was hysterical. She is singing the alphabet and recognizing the letter at the beginning of her name, D for daddy, G for Grace, A for Ansley, M for mommy, L for Leah and S for Silas. She counts to 11 (then comes 14). She loves pretending...we pretend take a bath, play nap, pretend go on the airplane, play doctor, and she throws a party daily, cooking an elaborate meal in her kitchen and setting the table with all the dressings. We've also been attending a Beach Fit Mom's boot camp where she can play with the other kids while the moms (me included) work their tails off. Most of the time Harper is trying to do the exercises with us. It is so unbelievably cute. And even better, she loves to play exercise. She is Annika (our instructor) and she orders me around then goes to her imaginary ipod to play the music while I exercise. She's as tough as Annika and always shows me up in class, doing more "push-ups" than me every time. :) She's also "reading more and more. She loves for us to read books to her and often times finishes sentences as we're reading familiar books. We are still working on using our words, using a nice tone, and being gentle with our brother, but dare I say we are heading out of the terrible two's and possibly into the slightly more tolerable three's!?

Silas is changing and growing everyday, too. He is almost rolling over, but those pesky arms get in the way every time. He's teething, just like his sister did about this time. He starting to sleep through the night but were working on our daytime schedule. Poor second child is always being dragged around to Harper's and my activities. But he is such a happy baby. Patrick and I seriously lucked out. We have two very easy-going children and both were very happy baby's. Not sure what we did to deserve it, but we'll take 'em.

Here's some of the latest happenings around the Vecchio/Wille house:

The day after we returned from Mammoth, we went to our friend Angela's surprise birthday party. It was wonderful to be part of the surprise and see all the kids play in the pool. Harper also sported her first set of pigtails...way cute. If only she'd let me do it more often.

Harper soaking up the rays

Leah & Harper~2 peas in a pool

Silas finally feelin' the bumbo chair

These sweet moments are happening more and more often

Pigtails again, doing sticker drawings, wearing sunglasses...love her!

Playing a game of "where's Harper" (hiding under her blanket) ended badly when she bumped into the tv stand...
slight fat lip~Whoops!

Harper and Leah reading at the library

A peaceful play moment

almost 4 months, almost rolling over

We're counting down the days until our trip to Wisconsin

I love how he looks perched on daddy's shoulders

Early July brought Aunt Monica and Uncle John to the area, so we got to catch up with them and Paul, Alyssa and their girls Emma & Zoe. Here is Zoe (their dog Sydney) and Harper just being cool. It was great to see the cousins playing. Zoe and Emma would be perfect mother's helpers. They entertained Harper all evening and brought out all the (cool toy) stops...if only they lived closer and L.A. traffic weren't so brutal.