So Much to Say

Rylee has made blogging impossible in the evenings lately, but she's sleeping right now (I know, I'll be up all night) so I might as well try to write.

Date Night: Recently a friend of ours gave me a ride in his older model truck (it has a bench seat and manual windows and door locks). The manual locks reminded me of the "date test" the guys used to test us girls with back in high school. (You know the one. If he opened the passenger door for you, he would see if you reached across the seat and opened the driver door for him while he walked around to the other side. If you did, you passed.) Since most cars have automatic locks these days, I was wondering what they use to test us now? If you know any teenage boys, you'll have to find out and let me know.

Solve for S:
X = I've never been much of a drinker. Y = I didn't drink for 10 months while pregnant. C = One bowl of cereal in an 8 hour period. V = vodka cranberry.

(X + Y) (2V - C) = S

Answer: If you had S = a tipsy, chatty Shannon at Saturday's wedding reception, give yourself 5 points.

Vikings:
Rylee made her second outing to the family sports restaurant for the Vikings/Packers game Sunday.

Here she is showing her frustration after the Vikings gave up their lead.


Luckily they pulled out a win!

Rio & the Grinch

We haven't completely forgotten about our first baby, Rio. She wouldn't let us anyway. She makes sure to beg for treats, ask to play with toys or demand to go on a walk right when we sit down to feed Rylee. :)

So I've entered her adorable Christmas photo in PetSmart's Happy Howlidays Photo Contest.

You can view and rate our photo at PetSmart's website. Go to the Happy Howlidays contest, view photos of dogs and she's towards the bottom of page 2, photo #64. (Sorry Blogger wouldn't post my hyperlink for some reason.)

Winners get gift certificates to PetSmart and since Rio begs for treats every time Rylee eats and Rylee eats about 8 times a day...well, she's going through a lot of milk bones!

Pics

I thought you all might be getting sick of the newborn slideshow (to the left :) ) so I decided to update with some more recent pics. Take a glance if you have time.

Also, another first for Rylee today. She wore her first pair of shoes. Erin, did you give her these little cuties? I thought so but I wasn't sure if I was remembering correctly...


We were supposed to make an Ikea run today, but Rylee is Little Miss Fussypants so it looks like she is all dressed up with no place to go. :(

Oh, I'm not a big fan of those little headbands, but Nana insisted she wear it for the photo. It does like kind of cute...

Snuffleupagus

You may remember an earlier post about how difficult it is to extract boogers with those nose suctioners. I took all of your suggestions under advisement, but the easiest thing was using my pinkie fingernail to scoop them out. Odd how this does not even disgust me. (It's amazing the gross things you do for the ones you love. I once caught one of the dogs puke in my hand, but I digress.)

Today in the mail I received the nose suctioner of all nose suctioners from my friends Kevin and Rima. It's battery operated and even plays music to distract your little one during the procedure. (Have any of you ever seen this thing? Impressive.) It couldn't have come at a better time as Rylee is all stuffed up.

I'm still not entirely sure how to use it. I tried it once today and it had so much power I was worried I was sucking out her little baby brains. It seems like it will work great once I get the hang of it.

You know I'm a little bit sniffley myself, hmmm.... :)

Flipper

I'm not sure if it was all the time Rylee spent in her mermaid costume or what, but yesterday she decided to flip over for the first time.

Finishing a couple sets of push ups during tummy time.


Deciding it was more fun to flip over and play.


I'm calling it a flip over because she can only go from her frontside to her backside and not vice versa. I'm assuming the latter is required for a real roll over. So far she has a preference for only flipping to the left (to the left, to the left - oh come on, you were thinking it too).

Of course we praised her, gave her treats (oh wait, that was the dog) and documented it all on video. Rio wasn't sure what all the fuss was about. She can do the full roll over so this didn't seem like much of an accomplishment. Rio only rolls over to the left also (to the left, to the left).

Like dog like daughter...weird huh?

Halloween Take 2

Last night was Venessa's Halloween Birthday Bash so Rylee, Rio and I had a second chance to put on our mermaid outfits - and this time people actually saw us - yeah! Jon refused to go as a merman (go figure) so I worked him into our ensemble as a pirate instead.


Here he is enthusiastically showing off his look before we left. Does it seem like I'm the only one who truly loves the costuming?


I so loved my mermaid costume. My very talented mother added some flourishes to my 11th grade prom dress to make it more mermaidish. She sewed the floaty fabric strips on the bottom, turned a sparkly pink belt into a fishnet effect around the waist, and even cut and styled last year's Daphne wig to make an Ariel look. Thank you Mom!


Here's a pic of me and Venessa at the party. She looked awesome as a pretty Octoberfest barmaid.


Rio is barking because she wants a walk. Rylee is up and she wants a bottle. All of this means I have to go pronto!

Halloween Take 1

You know how I love me some Halloween. Even this year with Rylee (who's even better at time suckage than your computer), I still managed to decorate the house and shop for costumes.

So last night I was super excited to get everyone dressed up in their mermaid-fare and pass out candy to the trick-or-treaters in our neighborhood (bonus for me that lots of these kids are former students of mine).

Here we are excited and waiting. Okay, I use the word "excited" loosely when it comes to Rylee.


At least Rio looks ready to answer the door.

(I'm only wearing half of my mermaid costume. I couldn't wear the wig and other accessories as we were heading to a party later and I was wearing another costume for that. You'll see the full mermaid costume in pics tomorrow after party #2 tonight.)

So we're all dressed up and ready for fun when the rain starts to pour. It was of the torrential variety so nobody came (boo hoo!). Rylee got tired of waiting - literally.


But we had other festivities to entertain us so I changed and we headed out to celebrate with the gang.


Two Leia's courtesy of Jess and Jerry. Jess looks hot, Jerry looks... well, he made his costume so that's impressive. :)


Erin as Sexy Miss Robin Hood.


Brian & Crystal in their good versus evil ware.


Ryan went sans costume but did bring along his crutches and I deemed Pete's costume too NC-17 for my PG-13 blog. Later he changed into two more costumes though. A fat witch and... mine (during the traditional end of the night costume swap).


A fun night was had by all and we have costume party #2 to look forward to tonight!