Corinna's Seventh Month

Month Seven was a busy one for this little girl. She mastered crawling, getting teeth, and not sleeping! She's chomping away on such delicacies as the occassional Cheerios and Vegetable puff. She'll tolerate baby food, but prefers stuff with a crunch to it. She's about 20 pounds right now. When the pain from getting all her teeth at once isn't bringing her to tears, she's such a happy easy going baby. She has seemed to temporarily forget how to sleep at night, but does great during the day, so I'll still count my blessings. Her brothers didn't really sleep during the day or at night when they were her age! Her smile continues to light up the room and she LOVES to chase around her brothers now that she can.

Jake's a DAD!

Okay, he's not in the Guiness Book of Records for youngest dad officially, but Jake's pet snail, the ever-popular Snaily, had babies! The cuteness! We were away for the weekend and when we came home, 3 baby snails were crawling around. Snails have both male and female reproductive parts but, according to our internet research, couldn't fertilize their own eggs. Snaily had been laying eggs like crazy and Spike and I spent quite a while looking for snails outside to make mommies and daddies, but no luck. So unless Snaily had a mullosk booty call, Snaily changed sexes over the weekend and voila--baby snails. They are about a centimeter big and just so cute! I hope they all make it. I thought triplets would be a lot of hard work, but these are okay!

Row, Row, Row Your Boat

I believe the word of the day yesterday was "Serendipity". It's one of my favorite words anyway, meaning 'a happy accident'. We were visiting Lainie and Bavan saturday in Connecticut. Weather-wise the week had progressed from from a tornado on wednesday, drenching rain on friday, to a beautiful, warm sunny day on saturday. Bavan has lake rights, which we believed included access to several canoes visible from his house. Long story short, we didn't, but a neighbor drove by seeing our troubles (kids suited up with life jackets and oars, no boat) and lent us his boat for the day! Yahoo. Jake absolutely LOVED rowing, being in the boat, everything. There were a million dragonflies around, which he was trying to catch. Aidan gave it a try (he is a brave guy) and when we got home he said his favorite parts of the day were: When the nice guy let us use his boat, running up and down the stairs and jumping on the bed.
Jake said: THE BOAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In a tragic remark, Aidan said he did not like holding onto the silver bar in the boat when it was hot. So sad. The kid speaks non stop, but he couldn't mention that he was scalding his hands. Poor guy.

Even though Aidan looks 100% miserable in the pictures, he said he really liked being in the boat.

First Lost TOOTH!

FINALLY! Jake's tooth had been wiggling for more than a month when it finally came out in his sleep last week (who knew it could do that?). LUCKILY the tooth fairy caught wind of the event and swung in for a late-night job. In speaking with Ms. Fairy last night we learned that her job is a lot easier these days. She used to suffer quite a bit of back pain back in the day when one tooth=one quarter, but with inflation, she has switched over to single dollars. She's more productive and the back pain is gone! We were even able to talk her into leaving the tooth behind for scrapbooking purposes. What a kind woman! What she wouldn't answer though is what she does with all the teeth that she's collected? Is there a black market for children's used teeth?

Rain, Rain, Tornado, Go Away

What an adventure the last week has been. This summer has been drenched in rain, so when yet another thunderstorm started up last wednesday, I didn't think anything of it. For about an hour or so there was a lot of thunder and lightning (and OH the humidity!) but really, that was it. I even told the boys, "See the storm can't be that bad, the wind isn't even blowing!" Oh how wrong I can be!

Once the wind started picking up and the sky turned black, I got a little freaked out. I was trying desperately to keep my cool so the kids didn't get scared. The wind continued and stronger and stronger and I actually worried that something might fly through the window so I calmly asked the kids to 'hang out' in the windowless hallway. They looked at me a little strange. Sweet Corinna was asleep in her crib this whole time completely unffected by the raging storm outside. It was so strange! Hail had started at this point and I kinda noticed smoke in the yard. I went to check on things and I noticed a lot of downed trees! BIG ones, totally uprooted. Our tent was fine.

This part of the storm was quick, maybe 15 minutes in total. Then everything just stopped and went to survey the damage. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. The tent had blown down the birch path (it had been set up since the weekend when a thunderstorm had soaked it and we were trying to let it dry out!) Many, many trees down. Luckily, and strangely, no damage to the house though. When Spike got home from work we all walked around outside. We discovered a sinkhole in the pavement in the driveway, the tent ripped out of the ground with the stakes still in it, and just tons of branches down and many trees sideways. I learned later that a tornado had touched down in Wantage, NJ about 10 miles from here.