Where Have We Been???

Well. . . I am very embarassed to say that I have been terrible about keeping our blog up to date lately. Its been almost 2 months since I updated last. We have been extremely busy. I just can't seem to find enough hours in the day to get everything done!! So I am going to try to catch up with some of our latest news. It may seem to ramble and I apologize for that! If there are no pictures posted when you read this, check back. I am in the process of getting the pictures uploaded.

We have had a couple of exciting milestones. . . Kylie took her first steps WAY back on May 9th! Now, she is a walking girl. She even likes to try her skills at running too! And, she is into EVERYTHING, and I do mean everything. Her new favorite spots are the toilet-yuck!! and Maggie's water bowl. She like to throw things in the toilet and then take off running out the bathroom. She KNOWS she is not supposed to be doing that. Its so funny! You can here her laughing as we come after her. We also catch her on a regular basis, standing in poor Maggie's water bowl. Again, she knows she is not supposed to be doing it and laughs hysterically when we come after her. We have also started calling her "Trouble" because she has been getting in trouble at school for pulling her friends' hair. Hmm. . . isn't it ironic about the same time, she has also started shaking her finger at us and saying, "No, No". I guess she is hearing it quite often these days.

Kylie celebrated her 1st birthday on May 29th! She had a great time celebrating the day with family. We had lots of yummy food and cake. She loved all the
attention!

















** Thanks to my friend Kim for sharing your friends business with me! Her friend made Kylie's birthday hat. It was adorable! She looked so sweet in it!! And its something we will keep forever. However, she didn't want to wear it long, so we got some good pictures early on.
At her one year old checkup, Kylie measured 27 inches long (60%) and was 21 pounds 15 ounces (60%). She is definitely a chunky thing!!



Ansley on the other hand has had some excitement of her own. She wanted to share some of the spotlight of Kylie's birthday, when she feel face first into a bench at school that day and injured her left front tooth. After several nervous days, and lots of worrying we got in to see a pediatric dentist, who felt her tooth would heal fine, but may be discolored from the trama of the fall. The tooth has slightly discolored, but isn't loose and hopefully will be just fine-whew. I know it sounds vain, but I didn't want me baby to have a hole in her teeth until she eventually got in her permanent one at 7! So, I will take a slight gray tint anyday!

She also celebrated her 3rd birthday on June 26th! She shared popcicles at school with her friends and then celebrated with Mommy and Daddy and Kylie at home that night with a "Fancy Nancy" cake. Its a mommy original! I tried my best to make it fancy! Ansley loves Fancy Nancy and HAD to have a Fancy Nancy cake. She also got several Fancy Nancy dress up outfits and a purse as her special gifts. Her actual birthday party is next weekend! We have decided to have a Sprinkler Party in the backyard this year since its so darn hot to do anything outside these days.
Our family also took a much needed vacation a couple of weeks ago to Orange Beach! It was nice to get away for a while. My parents and sister went along too. They were so helpful with the girls and we appreciate all they did. Otherwise, Chris and I may have not even felt like we were on a vacation!

Finally, I wanted to share that I have had a slight role change at work and am now the lead 3 year old teacher. It is much different from the 1 year old class. I loved my babies and loved my 2 assistants even more and I miss working with them everyday, but I like working with the older children a little more. They can do more and are completely potty trained-yah! No more changing diapers! Hopefully this role will work out. There are some downers about the role, but hopefully God will give me the tolerance and strength to work through them. For the most part, working at the preschool doesn't feel like work for me and that is a good thing! However, if any of you teachers out there know of a position opening up for the Fall at any school, let me know. I definitely would entertain the possibility! Things are still going good at Chris's job at Quiigo and he seems to really enjoy what he is doing!! If anyone needs a website promoted, let me know! I know just people to help you out!

I will try to do a better job posting regularly! Check back in tomorrow for pictures!

Ansley and Kylie's pictures

Here they are, Ansley and Kylie's school pictures! You would not believe these are school pictures. The photographer, Karen Nickel, did an amazing job with them. I purchased just the basic picture package because I had planned on taking them this summer to a friend of mine to have their "official" 1 and 3 year pictures made, now I don't know that I am even going to have to do that. These pictures turned out beautiful. Follow the directions below to view them on her website. They will be listed under Carrington Academy.

Hello!I would like to invite you to view pictures at Karen Nickel Photography. They are located at http://www.cumming-photography.com/photocart. When you go to the website click the Access Gallery link, find Ansley and Kylie Stinson and enter in the access code below:
Access code: Stinson
After you do that you will be able to view these pictures.

We hope you enjoy them as much as we do!

A Day of Accomplishments

Wow, just thought I would share. . . when Kylie decides she wants to do something, she does it! Yesterday, she accomplished two new things: she can now blow you a kiss, and she can play a game of peek-a-boo with you too! Both of those things were new yesterday! Not only that, she also decided to start cutting both of her top eye teeth. Both popped through the gumline yesterday. Her poor teachers at school are having a time with her fussiness because of the teething. She throws herself down on the floor and kicks and screams--(wonder who she learned that from, big sister maybe?)which is very out of character for her. You know, if we still cut teeth as adults, we would probably want to do the same thing too!

Anyway, just thought I would share. It was a big day for her yesterday!

Kylie is 11 months old!

Can you believe it, we are only weeks away from Kylie turning one! Wow! Where has the time gone. It seems like I just had her a few days ago!

Here is a new cute picture of her. She has been eating cool-whip.

She has had a few new accomplishments this month. She is standing up on her on without pulling up! She did this in the middle of the family room floor the other day and I couldn't believe what I saw. It was pretty amazing. She was sitting and then, pop, she was standing up! But, she is still not walking. That's okay--no rush. I have my hands full enough at the moment. She is eating everything now and is quite the eater. She can outeat her sister everyday! She still doesn't like drinking formula. She only drinks about 2 1/2 ounces from her bottles. So I am hoping she is getting enough nutrition from her foods. I will be talking to her doctor about this at her next check-up. But from the looks of her thighs, I think she is okay. At her last sick baby check she was just over 20 pounds and was 27 inches long. Her hair is now long enough to pull up into a "little sprout". I love it. You can really see her eyes better now. She has also started saying "mama". She doesn't do it directly to me, but will say it if you prompt her to. I was mouthing it to her one day and she just mouthed it right back, as simple as that. It brought tears to my eyes it was so sweet. She is also quite the party girl. She loves to be busy and is always squealing with excitement.

I am also in the planning phases of her party. I enjoy planning my girl's birthday parties. As you can see, I start early! Her birthday theme this year is going to be a polka dots theme. I love polka dotted anything and of course, the color pink. Here is a picture of what her plates and napkins will look like.

Happy Easter!

We hope everyone had a wonderful Easter Sunday!
We celebrated by dying Easter eggs on Saturday in preparation for our Easter egg hunt on Sunday. Ansley LOVED dying the eggs and took so much pride putting the stickers on each one of them. On Sunday we went to church and then spent the day with family at our house. It was a wonderful day. Here are some pictures of the girls for you to enjoy!
BTW-- Ansley loves hunting Easter eggs, however she doesn't like to go in the house and close her eyes. She just follows me around while I hide them and then goes back with her basket and tries to remember where I put them all. She is really quite good at it. In the meantime after about 6 hunts, we kept losing some eggs. We had a mystery on our hands. . . Finally, we sat down to count how many we still had. Out of 17 eggs, we only had 12! Then we think we figured it all out on the next hunt, when we saw our beloved black lab up on her hind two legs reaching in a tree to get an egg!! She ate it shell and all!!! We also caught her digging a blue egg out of the grass. We now know she was enjoying the easter egg hunt too! :-) So, we think we solved the mystery of the missing 5 eggs. However, I am not looking forward to tonight. . . we are going to have one STINKY dog!

Here are the pictures of the girls~

Kylie loves these Gerber snacks! The Easter Bunny is smart!


Here is my first Easter basket!


Ansley has a basketfull of art supplies!

Looks at this mess! Kylie loved playing with the Easter grass!

Our 1st Easter together( they won't ever sit still for that perfect picture-ahh!)

Kylie's 1st Easter!

This is one of my all-time favorite pics of Kylie!

Funniness and Frustration

So I have to share. . . my little laid back Kylie is now officially into EVERYTHING! Which means anything she can get here hands on, also goes in her mouth. So, today on the playground, I hear another teacher say, "Amy, look at Kylie!" I look over and she has mud pouring out of her mouth!! Picture it, it looks like she has eaten 30 hersheys kisses at the same time and they are melting out of her mouth, and all over her clothes.
Last week, they airated( not sure I spelled that right) our playground and some of the plugs are still lying around--not such a good idea when you have lots of little ones running about. We haven't taken the kids out in almost 2 weeks, so we had to take them out today. The rest of the kids have been really good about not putting what is left of mud plugs into their mouths. All except for my sweet Kylie, who was gagging, and choking, and sputtering, trying to figure out if what she ate was really worth trying. So after a quick scramble to get what is left of the mud and a small pebble out of her mouth, we get her cleaned up. But, what a sight, I tell you! Hopefully she learned her lesson. Mud is not yummy afterall!

Now on with a little prayer request for Kylie.
Being the second child , she has always been a little more sickly than Ansley and then compound that with the fact that she just started daycare for the first time in January. Well, she is having a lot of problems with her ears suddenly. She has had 4-5 ear infections in a row since starting daycare in January. It has become extremely frustrating and is VERY stressful to me. Although the doctors do not seem concerned at this point and have never proposed tubes(they are very conservative), I, of course, worry about this possibility a little further down the road. Please keep my family in your prayers as we endure yet another ear infection this week. Pray that God will grant her little body the strength to fight through yet another little battle within her ears and that her ears finally clear.
Without getting into the subject too deep(I will spare everyone the details. . . ) also please pray for our family as we go through the application process of a enrolling into a new, better, health insurance plan. I definitely need your prayers as I try to make the best decision for my family.

Disney Playhouse Live

Thanks to Aunt JuJu, we enjoyed enjoyed the day in Birmingham to see Disney Playhouse Live las Saturday. Ansley loved it and was very sad to see it end. She participated so good too! Here are a few pictures from our day. By the way, Aunt JuJu spent more on the souveniers than she did on the tickets. . . but she Ansley loved them and was very thankful. Thats what Aunts are for. Thank you Aunt JuJu! See our pictures above!

Kylie stayed at home with Grandma and PopPop and had a great time! She really wouldn't have enjoyed it and most definitely wouldn't have stayed still! She loved her time with Grandma/PopPop time the best!