Happy Birthday, Dad!

What an amazing year this has been for Dan! He became an Associate in the Society of Actuaries, lived through his first hurricane and evacuation, and, of course, became a dad! The girls absolutely adore him. They light up every day when he comes home, and on Mondays, it takes quite a while before they accept that "dada" is not in the next room. Izzy gives him a round of applause whenever he walks in the door. Their mom thinks he's pretty great, too. We're so, so blessed to have such an amazing man in our lives! Happy Birthday, Dad!

Apologies, again, for the dearth of posts this past week... GPa arrived last Thursday to build the girls' first birthday present, and to help Dan put up one of the fences that we lost to Ike last September, so we've been pretty busy! I'll try to be better in the upcoming week as we chronicle the girls' first birthday party!

Here's a recap of our week:

The girls still love to read... they now sometimes fight over their favorite books, but we're working on teaching them to share. They seem to prefer books about animals, but their Disney Princess book is definitely a winner.

Izzy is LOVING drinking from a straw... it's one of her favorite activities, one that she'll drop other fun things to pursue :) We're still working on Abby... she now makes funny sucking noises when she puts the straw in her mouth, but hasn't figured out all of the logistics. She seems to find it amusing that Izzy likes it so much.

We've been spending a lot of time outside, "helping" GPa, and enjoying the weather. Izzy still prefers riding in the car, but she pushed her sister for a few minutes the other day.... part of the whole sharing lesson :)

GPa, Dan, and Brandon worked late into the evening last Saturday. Izzy loves peeking out through that window, although now she always expects Daddy to be out there.

Walking is getting better and better every day... the girls think it's a little more fun now that they're getting better at balancing, and they often seem to "forget" that they prefer crawling between destinations. When they're tired or cranky, their legs go limp and they refuse to practice, but overall, they're making great strides :)