I Am In Love With This Baby!

The Dude is fantastic. 10 weeks now and we just really love him to death. Like a lot of moms probably do, I really could not fathom loving another baby as much as I love Sam. Those worries went out the window as soon as Jude was born, of course. He is such a sweet little guy and is as much of a cuddle bug as Sam was. And he's even a better sleeper - the best part of all! (Now that we survived a little rough patch a couple weeks ago, anyway.) My favorite time with Jude is when it's just him and me after his morning meal. If Sam's at school, I just feed him in our bed and afterward, he just lays there and smiles at me. Take it from me, it's adorable. I didn't catch a smile this time, but it's still pretty cute:

"Geez - stop taking pictures of me, lady!"

Here's a scene from right before bathtime in our house....

Caught one!

So far, Jude still has blue eyes. I checked some old pictures and Sam's had changed to brown by this time. We'll see if they stay!

Last Days of Summer

Maternity Leave makes me feel like doing this:

Sam's thinking - "Mom's lost it."

I'm on Week 9 of 16 of my maternity leave. Now, I really do feel so lucky to have a job I love 98% of the time and get about 9-10 weeks of vacation time and get paid a decent amount to do. AND I have a husband who also has that time off with me. But I'm definitely enjoying my time off with the boys. We've done a lot of fun stuff over the last month. A lot of going to the park, library, and so on, and it's been really nice.

Last week, my friend Emmy set up a little visit to the Norwood Fire Station to visit a firefighter we know there. Doug showed Sam around and was so sweet to him, but Sam was still pretty terrified. He would rarely let go of my hand. Of course, after the day was over, he talked non-stop about it like he had the time of his life. The other day he picked up a little toy fireman and told my sister "This looks kind of like Fireman Doug." He's his hero (after Ben, of course)!

A couple days ago, Sam decided to pretend his Smurf was baby Jude. He carried him over his shoulder, burped him, and fed him:

Sam thinks that Jude gets milk out of my belly.

We had a special visitor on one of our recent trips to the park - Nana! We had a picnic, played on the playground, and walked around the gardens. Our favorite part was the butterfly garden. Mom and I had a blast with her super duper camera (I'm dreaming of owning one myself)! She even caught a hummingbird mid-flight with it. Here they are in the butterfly garden.

Took some on the playground, too....

Mom caught Sam giving me a kiss. These are hard to come by now because he's such a busy little guy. :(

On Saturday, we traveled down to Louisville for Jackson's 5th birthday party at a soccer club. Jackson had a lot of fun with his friends and Sam had a great time, too, even though he was younger than most of the kids. Ben helped Sam join in.

Jackson doesn't look like he's having fun at all here.

Had a great time and it was fun staying at Rachel and Gammon's lovely new house. Sam had so much fun at the soccer club, he didn't want to leave. When we were heading out, he had ventured back into one of the darkened soccer fields. Ben went in and told him we were leaving. He looked at Ben and excitedly said, "I just want to run SO fast!" and took off down the field. I'm thinking track may be in this kid's future!