Caution; smiles and giggles may be contagious.

We've been enjoying life around here lately, it was a beautiful weekend and Ricky ended up being home with us all weekend which we all enjoyed.  In the later part of the morning on Saturday, he took Chase to his friends house to go squirrel hunting.  Chase looked so cute in his hunting gear, although the knife in one hand and the gun in the other made his mommy a bit nervous.



Don't worry though it was only for the picture, he didn't carry the gun in the woods.  Ricky said he did really well too, they just sat on a rock in the woods and Chase was real quite looking for squirrels, they didn't see any though- go figure.

I stayed home with my little girls and Joanna enjoyed sitting on the blanket with Katy during her "tummy time".

Joanna just loves her baby sister and is very gentle and caring to her.  If she's laying on the floor or sitting in a chair (which is not that often) Joanna will go over and sit with her and talk to her about who knows what :) a lot of times she'll even take over a book and show her the pictures.
Katy is still such a easy baby, she hardly ever cries.  I like to rock her to sleep on my leg.  I thought this progression of pictures from the other night were funny:
Tired:

More tired:

 Very tired:

 aaaaaand asleep!:

so precious :)

Yesterday Ricky had to work the overnight shift at work so he had the day off and worked around the house a bunch.  His main project right now is to try and convert the old chicken coup into a kennel for Jenna.  Two of our Yorkies are due with litters of puppies in December and there is no way I am going to have two litters of dogs in the house AND Jenna AND a new baby, so she'll be moved outside for a couple months.  I found a library book under our couch that was due back that day so I piled all the kids into the magic minivan and headed to the library.  We returned that one book and then got another bagful to take home with us.Ricky left for work at 5:00pm and got home at 5:30am and only slept for a couple hours till the kids jumped on him and woke him up... poor guy. 

I stepped out of the house this morning to let Jenna out and noticed that our Japanese Maple decided to drop every single leaf it had last night, it was a pretty funny sight, but also beautiful.

a carpet of leaves!

I decided that I should take the kids and get out of the house to let Ricky try and get more sleep so I packed everyone up and headed to NJ to visit Dawn and Kira.  The kids were very excited to see each other.  Kira really took to Joanna and at one point kept trying to sit on her lap.  Dawn and I were getting such a kick out of it, Kira would not let her alone and Joanna was being very tolerant, it was so funny.

 Joanna would try and move and Kira would just get up and follow her to the other spot and sit on her again.

I had fed Katy right when we got there and then put her in the sling and she just slept in there pretty much the whole time we were there.

I think the kids got out every single toy that Kira has.

The kids where so funny together.  If one person was holding someone all the other kids wanted to be held too.  Dawn was holding Katy so I held Kira and then Chase and Jo wanted to sit with me too :)

As I was getting ready to leave my Mom and Dad stopped by to see us.  They got a kick out of the kids too.

 All of their smiles and giggles are quite contagious.

 And Katybear just sat there the whole time wondering what in the world was going on.

I had to stop a couple times on the way home to nurse her and then hit traffic so it took me over two hours to get home, but it was a very fun day.