The girls and I are sitting in the living room watching Sesame Street. I rented Sesame Street: 40 Years of Sunny on DVD. It's wonderful and it makes me happy. :) I've always been absolutely addicted to Sesame Street. I want to be able to watch the full episodes from when I was a kid, but I can't, so this is good, too. It shows clips from the episodes from all 40 years. We're only up through the first 15 years, I think. Some of these clips take me right back. Sadly, I really only enjoy about the first 15 minutes of the new shows. There's too much animated stuff and not enough of the muppets and songs. Joanna thinks so, too. :) She's glued to these DVDs.
Gotta go; it's teeny little super guy!

Lunch date

Open wide!

Joanna visited the dentist for the very first time on Friday! Luckily, my wonderful mother offered (okay, was asked with kind of a begging quality to my voice) to watch Natalie. It would have been fine to have her there, but much easier with paperwork and such to not to.
The waiting room was small with not much for kiddos to do (note to self for future visits), but we didn't have to wait long. Joanna made friends with everybody, even climbing into another mommy's lap to play video games/watch a DVD player. I let her, as I was busy with paperwork and talking to the office staff ladies. Joanna has a VSD (tiny heart murmur) if you remember, and I had actually kind of forgotten about that with regards to the dentist appointment. I had actually just made the appointment the day before, and it hadn't crept into my mind yet. Used to be, people with murmurs were supposed to take prophylactic antibiotics before any dental work to prevent the possiblity of bacterical endocarditis, but that's no longer the case. In the last couple of years, it has become no longer recommended. They did call Joanna's cardiologist just to make sure, though.

SHE WAS SO GOOD AT THE DENTIST!!! I figured she would be; she really likes people messing with her, but I was so impressed!
I took lots of pictures and posted most of them; I couldn't help it!
Getting her teeth cleaned:
She just layed so still and opened her mouth so wide.
She crawled up into the chair all by herself, picked out some sunglasses, and layed back like it was no big deal.

Everybody commented on how good she was.

Not her best look, but I think I'll hang on to it. You never know when you might need embarrassing pictures of your kids.

Joanna got to pick out a fish sticker and a fish toothbrush.

She had a great time! We'll go back in 6 months for another cleaning and x-rays!

The dentist wants to do x-rays, but didn't mind waiting 6 months. Joanna's teeth are just so close together, they want to make sure (fingers crossed!) there's no decay in between those molars. Poor kid has her momma's mouth. It's a cute one, though. :)

We opted not to cover Joanna on our dental insurance this year, so everything's out of pocket. I'm really really hoping she doesn't have any decay or weird stuff this year. If so, we'll deal with it, of course. If not, we'll be spending just about as much for all this dental care as we would have just adding her to our insurance. I'm sure there would have been copays and maybe a deductible (can't remember). I'm thinking we'll about break-even this year. Next year we can add both girls for the price of one. :) We could have this year, too, but Miss Natalie won't be visiting the dentist this year. She actually may not next year either. Hopefully she'll have more room in her mouth for her teeth. I ramble... sorry. At least I posted the pictures first!

From scratch.

Lately I've been trying to make a lot of things from scratch. It's usually cheaper and almost always healthier than buying the equivalent. I'm really striving toward keeping junk out of my house and eating simple, healthy food. I'm not talking necessarily low-fat, low-calorie stuff. I want the food I make to resemble it's natural form. I want to be able to pronounce the ingredients.
This was the first time I'd ever made pizza crust. It was pretty yummy! The sauce is not homemade... it's BBQ sauce (not healthy!). But it's topped with baked chicken breast, spiniach, corn, and of course lots of cheese! I've made spaghetti sauce before, and I did again this week. I used my dad's home-canned tomatoes -- yum! Next time I will cook the veggies (celery, bell pepper, onion) until they're much more tender or puree them or something. This was too chunky-style for me, but everybody else loved it.

Case in point: my picky finger-food eater COVERED in homemade spaghetti with whole wheat noodles!

Oh, I think I'll throw some carrot puree in the sauce next time, too. I don't think anyone will know!

Sleep.

I walked in to the nursery on Wednesday morning after Bible study and found this: I was in shock!! I took two pictures and a video. I simply could not believe she put herself to sleep in the swing. It was pretty noisy in there, too. She stayed asleep for a little while longer while Joanna played.
That same day, Gran came over for lunch and this little cute one crawled up in her lap and fell asleep. She stayed asleep for a long time, too. I was very excited, especially since this is the only nap Joanna's had in over a week. :(

A few more birthday pics

I dug out the t-shirt Joanna wore when she was one year old. I was actually thinking it would be more snug on Natalie. It's a 6-9 month size.
Natalie wore it to school on the 12th.

The evening of the 12th, Uncle Mark and Aunt Allie came over for some cake and ice cream and to give Natalie a birthday present.

Joanna enjoyed opening the card and present for her. Next year I have a feeling Natalie won't like her sister's "help" quite so much. :)

Only mostly dead

Why am I posting pictures of dead and decaying old roses?

Because if you look very closely, you'll see that there are buds... two, I think.New life from dead, cut roses. Never seen it before in my life.