LietzauFamily

So sorry this post is late, kiddo!  I meant to make this nice wonderful post on your actual birthday, raving about all the cool things you do.  Somehow your birthday always sneaks up on me and this year was particularly bad – we were sooooo busy these last couple of weeks.

So thank you for be such a good kid, and putting up with how busy life gets.  Thank you for being patient, when right now, it seems everything is all about Lily.  Thank you for being such a good brother to her.  Thank you for being such a wonderful little helper.  Thank you for pretty much handling school on your own this year – you’re fantastic the way you now just sit down when you get home from school and do your homework independently for the most part (the spelling, capitalization, and punctuation still get you sometimes).  Thank you for just being you – our amazing, smart, little (but not so little) guy who’s going to grow up to be an inventor/builder extraordinaire!

Gabe got a PC for his birthday this year.  He wanted a computer when he was 4, but we told him he’d have to wait till he was 8.  Little did we know he would remember that and tell us all the time about how he he gets his ‘puter when he turns 8.  We gave him a big box full of parts though – he had to put his computer together himself (with a little help from Dad).

Pictures from his school birthday party will be up soon!

I’d like you to meet Mr. Gabe:

He can be a bit stern looking, but he’s actually quite nice.  He has a mustache, a deep voice, and often wears a brown wool hat.  He also likes to leave notes for people, inviting them to visit him for a party, or to play a game.  He sent me this message the other day:

“Find a new friend.  A new friend indeed. A robot ish friend for you and me!”

It was an invitation to see a new robot contraption he had made using a chair, a bunch of paper, wires, and his iPod player.  Very cute.

We are so antsy to get outside once the weather warms up in spring.  As soon as it does – out come the blankets – Yay!

Every chance we get to go outside, we take.  We drag out a blanket, lots of toys, and plop Lily down in the middle of the blanket.  She’s mobile now though, so every once and while you have to pull her back onto her blanket as she’s wiggled out into the grass.  She loves to scoot around – arching her back and kicking out with her feet, or rolling over onto her side and wiggling like a worm.  Silly girl!

Gabe has been enjoying the nice weather too.  He will play with Lily (he likes to blow bubbles or tell her a story – either one will thrill her to no end) and play exploring games in the backyard.

These are all the pictures I ended up taking when Katie and Tom were visiting the week before Easter.  Tom had business training in Minnesota and we were so glad we got to play host while they were both in state.  We had such a nice visit – we bought and installed a basket ball hoop, visited Stillwater and hit the antique stores, celebrated Tom’s birthday, hit the Mall of America and Underwater World, tackled the sorting out the garage, had a fire and roasted s’mores.  Such fun!

Here is a few odds and ends that happened in March.  First – Lily looks adorable:

Isn’t she sweet?  This outfit came from Kelly.  It would make an excellent birthday party outfit with all the darling cupcakes on it.  Love the polka-dot tights.  Now that it’s warming up you’re going to see Lily in dresses a lot more.  Speaking of warming up:

Bike riding season has begun!  Yippee!  We go on long walks now, Lily in her stroller and Gabe on his bike.   We plan on doing lots of bike riding this summer.  There are nice routes of both straight roads and hilly roads in this neighborhood, so we have a variety of fun biking paths!

This is a cute little bit of Gabe’s homework.  They were working on homonyms (words that sound the same but are spelled differently and have different meanings).  This one is about flower/flour.  So funny!

We have been using the baby carrier facing out lately for Lily.  She isn’t much of a snuggler – no longer is she content to stay cuddled up against your chest (unless she’s sleepy).  She prefers to see the world all around her.  Unfortunately, she also like to grab at everything she sees.  Watch out!

Hope everyone has a wonderful Valentine’s Day!

We are having a wonderful Valentine’s Day weekend.  On Friday, we (Lily and I) went to Gabe’s school and volunteered for his Valentine’s Day party.  Mike made 48 gluten-free, nut-free, but super yummy heart-shaped sugar cookies.  They were a hit!  The kids played a version of pin-the-tail where it was a heart they had to stick on a life-sized picturethey drew of their helper teacher.  They made heart-shaped decorations, passed out Valentines (Gabe had cute home-made ones with a picture of him and Lily inside), and did a huge dance routine for the parents:

It was super cute, and that’s only a couple minutes – it went on for at least 6 minutes (it took me a while to get my camera out).  What a great way for the teacher to make the kids work off some steam.  Gabe’s in the back on the left side, in a red shirt.

Lily was a huge hit at the party – all the parents, kids, teachers had to look at her and pet her head (let’s hope she doesn’t get sick!) and just in general coo at her.  And she was her most charming self – smiling her biggest smiles and was such a good baby all party long.  Yay!  Here is her Valentine’s Day outfit:

She’s becoming a bit of a squirmer – hard to get a picture of her.  She’s starting to practice rolling over.  She can get close – on her side – but can’t quite get that arm tucked up so she rolls all the way over.  But she’s working hard so it won’t be long!  A close up of my little cutie:

Another Valentine’s Day outfit she wore this weekend was pajamas – Gabe’s old jammies that he wore in his first Valentine’s Day card.  So if you still have it – you can compare them.  Lily is 4 months old, and Gabe would be at least 8 months, maybe 9 months in his picture.  Here’s Lily:

Lily really likes her thumb, and 9 times out of 10 it’s her left thumb (Is that a preference? Will I have a lefty?).  She soothes herself to sleep, or tries to eat it when she’s hungry.  It’s a nice little trick she’s learned.  I took a little video of her sucking her thumb in her swing – she’s pretty much asleep.  But it’s cute!

I also took another video of Gabe and Lily cuddling.  I was sitting with her on the couch and Gabe asked if he could hold and cuddle her (how cute!).  So I handed her to him and he talked to her and patted her head.  He really liked it.  I snapped a small video of it, but it’s a bit dark.  Also, it made me realize how squeaky both Gabe and I get when talking to babies!

Seeing this made me decide to get a little Flip.  I like our camcorder we have, but it’s as old as Gabe, and not as easy to take around and whip out at a moments notice.  It’s also quite the process to get the videos off it and “webify” them.  I tried using the built in movie camera bits with my regular still camera, but I wasn’t to happy with how the videos turned out.  So hopefully the Flip will work for us.  Stay tuned!

Today we had a very fun sledding and skating adventure!  We bought skates today (it took us 4 stores till we found some – most of the stores were out of kid skates this time of year!) and decided to test them out.  So we loaded up Lily in her little sled, grabbed the skates, and headed out to the park.

Lily was kind enough to let Gabe put his skates in the sled he didn’t have to carry them (plus she’s so small she still had lots of room in the sled).  Gabe was very excited to pull Lily to the park.

We had just barely enough snow on the roads to use the sled.  The last few days have been very warm so the roads have mostly melted off.  But there was just enough along the edges, except for crossing intersections (SCRAPE across the bottom – ah well!)  Lily is wearing the bunny snowsuit Angie got her for Christmas.  Between that, and the tiny sled, everyone we passed went, “Awwwwwww!”

Once at the park, I took over pulling Lily to the skating rink while Gabe took a few runs down the sledding hill on his sled.  By the time I’d walked to the rink, he was ready to go.  It went well – Gabe only fell down a couple of times.  I wiped out on the first step on my skates (the slush from the warming house to the rink was SLIPPERY).  After that, we both skated very nicely, Gabe shuffle skating, with me pulling Lily on her sled.  I didn’t get pictures of the skating on account of having my hands full (and trying not to fall down).  Next time!