Aidan's birthday presents from his July birthday buddy

Aidan got his birthday presents in the mail from Rylee today. He loves them and is actually playing with the puzzles right now.

Andrew is 10 mths old

So Andrew is now 10 months old(and a few days) and doing great. Heading into hist first birthday soon. He is very active. Cruises everything, can hold onto objects and let go and stand unsupported, crawls everywhere, figuring out how to manipulate toys more. He claps, waves occasionally, feeds himself, and knows how to get what he wants from others. Not sure when he will start walking, but thinking by his first birthday, unless he really slows down. He says mama, dada(not sure he knows who daddy is though), baba(no connection to anything), has said byebye a few times, and said night night(nigh nigh) yesterday, but again not sure how many of those he knows the meaning of. I for sure know he knows who mama is. Oh, he also has 1 tooth, with another working it's way up. He is about 20 lbs and 30" tall.

Early 2nd Birthday pictures as well

I also did a few of Aidan's birthday pictures. He wasn't too cooperative so we may try again later. This is one of his birthday shirts and we are waiting on another one that has his name on it so will try and get better shots then.




I took a few more the other day, he of course thought he needed fruit snacks while taking pictures.


Aidan is opening his presents from his Mimi/Pawpaw and Great Aunt Genelle



His favorite

Our early 4th of July pictures

So I know it is over 2 weeks away until 4th of July, however I wanted to go ahead and do their pictures since Aidan is having surgery next week and we will be busy going back and forth from New Orleans.

Andrew's "official" 9 mth pictures

Got to them today, not too shabby.

Rainbow Cake

Last weekend Alex and I decided to try a new recipe for a Rainbow cake, it seemed interesting. The end result was pretty, although it didn't ice very well b/c I made the icing a little too thick, so other than it crumbling when I iced it, it came out pretty nice.
We started with 2 white cake mixes and mixed it according to the box directions

We then separated it into six bowls(about 1 1/2 cups each I think)

We then dyed each bowl of batter a different color, we used plain dye, but it called for gel dye(gives stronger colors I think)

We then put the dyed batter into the cake pans. All you do is measure out some batter, put it in the middle of the round cake pan, then put the next color right on top. Don't spread anything, just continue to work through the colors, adding them to the top, the weight of the batter will force the layers of batter out all by itself:

Then we baked the cakes(yes it was 3 layers-should have probably done 2 since it was just The kids, Ed, and myself:

Iced--you use 2 tubs of coolwhip and 1 large pkg of vanilla instant pudding mix. I used 1.5 large pkgs and it was just a little too much and made the icing too hard to spread. You can also use regular icing, I think it would be really good with creamcheese icing. You don't have to dye the icing but we did.

Swimming Fun

We set up the kiddie pools a few weeks back. Of course they now both have holes in them thanks to the neighbor kids deciding they needed to swim too. Gah, hate those kids, but what can you do, Alex is convinced they are his friends and have a fit when I send them away. They won't be allowed in next time. Anyway, Aidan and Alex loved it of course. Andrew-hated it every minute, it was apparantly torture for him. Hoepfully just too cool for him, we will try him again and just let the water sit out all day to hopefully warm up.




We also took them to my grandmother's house, she has a big in ground pool. It was rather cold as it has tons of shade, but Alex and Aidan did really well after they got used to the cold. Andrew again screamed and cried, and Edward ended up just holding him outside the pool.
I bought a shirt/short set that is the internal floatation device in it for Alex and it worked really well for him, seemed to give him more confidence and by the time we left he was "swimming" around on his on.