Tomorrow is Abby's birthday and she decided to show how grown up she is by taking her first steps this afternoon. She's been doing a lot of feet shuffling lately, but these are her actual first steps! Since Joe is out of town this week, I had to post this so that he can see. Not a great video, but I do only have two hands! She really is walking, I promise!
Oh, and just a note for future bragging rights...both of her brothers took their first steps around 14 months :-)
...he lost his first tooth! As I expected, he was a bit traumatized by it! It's been loose for weeks and we've talking about it lots so that he knew that it would come out soon, but still the shock of it took him a bit off guard. He was fine until he saw the "hole" in his mouth, he thought it looked very funny. But, he felt much better about it once I explained that a new tooth would grow in!
The other night I told Andrew that we were having nachos for dinner. He thought for a minute (trying to remember if that was something he liked) then said, "Oh yah, I wike dat!" Then he went on to tell me how to make the nachos, in case I couldn't remember. Here are his instructions:
She loves her baths!
The hardest part was that because of the time change, we had to do it just a little while before church started (that's when they'd be available) so we had to take Andrew away from his fun new toys right after he'd opened them. Cruel, I know. We only had time to get the tracks put together, and then we drug him away, literally!
As he opened this space shuttle from my mom he said, "It's just what I always wanted!" He was so excited, it was very cute.
Here's this year's masterpiece (A.K.A the birthday cake), a special request from the birthday boy, of course!
Of course, Joe had take him to the backyard and try out the new toys! 
Ela gave it a shot, too!
Waiting out the rain...Joe took the kids to the tent to play Uno!
They did their best to canoe down the river...
...but there was a lot of this in the shallow parts...
...and then they'd be off again!
Joe wanted to play volleyball so bad, so we made it happen! (It wasn't as dark as these pictures make it look...)
The creation of "Andrew Rock". Joe started making this rock sculpture and since it was the same size as Andrew, they put a face on it and gave it a name!
Abby and Grandpa, she loves a good fistful of hair to yank on! 
(Side note: that sweatshirt is one that all three kids have worn and we have almost identical pics of all three on Grandpa's shoulders wearing it. I have to do a double take everytime I see this picture to tell if it's Andrew or Abby!)
"Don't even think about touching my chips!"
