Calvin took his first steps.......

His first taste.......

Nearly done with his banana (his own special cake).

Emerald taught him our special sign. Each time we say "I Love You" we do the sign for it with our fingers. When she was too little to speak, we would touch fingers and do a "psssst" sound. Emerald has been doing that with Calvin since he came home and now he is reaching out to do it on his own with all of us. He is quite proud of himself.

Emerald LOVES that Calvin is trying to walk. She held his hand all the way out of church trying to get him to walk with her. Of course I didn't have my camera then.

He is a pretty happy boy facing forward.

An image of what our house looked like just before we moved in the furniture. It doesn't take long for a tornado (aka Emerald) to destoy a room.

Didn't Aunt Heidi do a fantastic job?

He wasn't so happy with the hat.

..........and we are all worried! Yep, he is walking!!! Of course he is still slow going and has that adorable arms out, slow unsteady steps. He has been playing around with one or two steps for a week or 2, but he finally found his balance. Saturday morning he walked from Daddy to Mommy, about 6 steps. Then, Sunday night, after his bath he was taking 6-10 steps several times in row. There is no stopping him now, well maybe not. He still has to maneuver around Emerald and the dog. I am going to try to put a video on here soon.


It is 66 degrees today, in Kansas, with snow still on the ground! How confusing is that? Don't worry we won't get too spoiled, it is supposed to snow by Thursday :)

Calvin had his one year well-check and weighs in at a whopping 21 pouns 9.6 oz. He is also gettg taller and is up to 30 1/4" long. No wonder he isn't fitting in his clothes any longer. It was fun visiting our pediatrician because Dr. Mike & Jenny (his wife) watched the kids for us on Saturday. They had so much fun dancing and building forts. Emerald thinks they are pretty cool, and we love having them in our life.


We are trying to clean out the rental house so that we are only down to taking care of 2 homes! Not that we have been doing much with the Texas house, but paying for utilities and considering 3 houses at once is not very fun. We haven't been getting much done on the new home. It has been difficult to do and we are hoping to get more done soon. We were able to take the kids and dogs (we were dog-sitting Zane, Jeff & Heidi's dog) out for a walk around our new neighborhood yesterday. It felt nice. We also attended a quaint "country" church yesterday. I will have to take a picture of this cute, old church. It is out in the middle of no-where and is so old inside. It has a school associated with it, so there were kids doing the readings in honor of Catholic Schools' Week. Made me miss my SMG family. I hope you all have a fun week.