Seven Months, A Makeover, and Belated Independence Celebration

I think there has been plenty of documentation of Emil and Colin's seventh month of life.  Whew!  I'm taking a break from cleaning up puke and poop, though, so we'll do a report with some other stuff too.

First, we mostly did nothing on the 4th of July.  We're not total party poopers, we did trade kids with Melissa and Jeff so that Bridget could see what fun people do on the 4th.  Otherwise, it was playing princess and sitting on the front lawn in the shade.  In the evening Brian and I stepped out on the driveway to watch what our neighbors were doing now that certain fireworks are no longer illegal.  It was pretty impressive.

Last week Bridget took the second half of her two-week swimming lessons.  It coincided with the babies having three-a-day blow out diapers and so much puking by Emil that I suspect he is trying to cover all of my clothes, every inch of carpet and couch, and maybe even the van with his puke.  He is using the same car seat we used for Bridget.  When Bridget was using it, we washed it once.  Emil's had to be washed three times in 48 hours.  His most impressive display was blowing out of his diaper on the way to swimming lessons and me parked on the side of the road trying to clean it up.  Unfortunately, my super power is my sense of smell, so I'm going to have to stop talking/writing about this now.  (Part of the power is instant and total recall of certain scents.  It's a curse and a curse.)  The good news is that Bridget LOVES to swim and she's getting pretty good at it.

Here's Bridget pushing off the side so she can fall onto her back in the water.  The very idea of her doing this move the first day of swimming lessons was crazy!

There's Emil thinking about what he'd just done.  The best part was that I left the stroller in front of the van and drove home without it.  Awesome.  (Thankfully no one stole it and Brian picked it up on his way home from work.)

We've been wanting to do a (we hoped) quick renovation in our upstairs family room for a few months now.  The cabinet and arrangement of the couch wasn't working for us anymore.  No one would sit there because it felt like walking into a tiny fort and bumping knees with the person you're trying to talk to.  When I put the babies on a blanket in the little square, I couldn't see them from the kitchen.  One Saturday, Brian hulked out and took the cabinet apart and put it back together again in the garage.  We had to do some repairs to the wall and match the paint (which Sherwin Williams did perfectly), but it only took a day and it was life-altering.

A few days ago Brian got out the sparklers for Bridget to try.  It wasn't quite dark outside, but she was tired of waiting.

Yesterday Bridget got her kindergarten shots.  It was THE WORST thing that has ever happened to her.  She tends to worry about things to the point of distraction and the anticipation of shots about did her in.  Late yesterday afternoon she joined Emil's puke-a-thon.  It's been a gross 24 hours, but I think everyone is on the mend.  I'm choosing to believe that anyway. 

Meanwhile, the twins are seven months old today!  They are both doing the army crawl - forward motion!  They roll and roll and roll, too.  Both babies love to laugh and it's pretty easy to make them laugh.  We've all had a great month.