Cousins, crawling, teeth and more

Sorry for the long delay in posts, turns out having two kids at home is much harder to keep up with this as I thought. Anyway, we first wanted to say a BIG congratulations to Uncle Brian, Aunt Cara and cousin Maia as they welcomed new baby Eli to our family last weekend (August 7th). He was a big boy (8 pounds, 6 ounces) with lots of that Genisio black hair. Big sister Maia is pretty proud. Matthew was pretty excited to have a new cousin in the family too. We took a short trip to Ann Arbor last weekend to meet him and let Matthew and Maia play together. It will be nice having the kids so close in age growing up together. Congratulations again!


The biggest news in our house now is that Drew is crawling (he started on August 1st). Granted it is an army crawl, but he is getting pretty darned fast and making Matthew a little territorial over his toys. More lessons on sharing are needed for the big brother I think. When Drew gets to one of Matthew's toys, he quickly runs over, says "No toys, Drew", rips it out of his hands (which usually turns into Drew crying), but then gives Drew one of his toys. Silly Matthew doesn't even realize that the baby toys were once his too :)


Drew is cutting his top two teeth now, making four total! Now he will have more tools for his new favorite thing, eating! He has done amazingly well in this adventure only having a few meals that he didn't care for. He isn't too fond of avocado or green beans (which both resulted in the 'gag' if any of you remember the pea video from Matthew's eating adventures). Drew really likes nectarines, peaches, sweet potatoes and apricots. I am making all of Drew's baby food, just as I did for Matthew, and it is so nice to take advantage of the farmer's market on the weekends for fresh fruits and veggies.


Matthew's potty training took a little relapse a few weeks ago when he decided he didn't want to poop on the potty anymore. This took us by surprise because he was using it great for a week, all on his own, then one day he just started screaming and would poop in his underwear...everyday! Luckily this only lasted about a week or so until we were able to catch him in the act and get him to the bathroom and have him do his business on the toilet. That is when it clicked with him again and he hasn't had an accident since. He is so comfortable with it now that he will go at friend's houses and even went at speech yesterday. Sorry for the in depth accounts of his poop, but it is a big milestone for us.


We have taken a few trips these past few weeks to some local zoos (John Ball Zoo in Grand Rapids and Binder Park in Battle Creek). Highlights of the trips were the alligators, lions, bears and stingrays at John Ball and feeding the giraffes (both adult and baby) and seeing the snow leopard actually awake at Binder Park. I have uploaded lots of pictures on our photo site of our recent happenings.