Visiting pop-pop and grammy for the first time

Hanging out on the couch and relaxing
 with the kids

Tomorrow we leave for a short but much-needed vacation to Phoenix to visit Rachael's father and brother.  It'll be everyone's first opportunity to meet Nora and have a chance to see how much Joe has grown since they last saw him.  Wayne hasn't seen Joe since before he turned three and Wes hasn't seen him since just before we left for Belgium when Joe was only 8 months old.  It'll be a great weekend, I'm sure.

Nora is just about 6 months old now and just loves to smile and spend time snuggling with mom and dad.  She has parts of three lower teeth in now and has been gumming soft food for about 3 weeks now - sweet potatoes, bananas, and steamed carrots mostly.  She also loves grabbing at just about anything we put near our mouths, especially glasses and cups.  She's still running in the 60-70 percentile for height and weight, which is a drop-off from her earlier rate but still is great to see.  She fits in mostly 9-month clothes now and his consistently been a size or two ahead, which has thrown off all our clothes we had lined up for.  We're not complaining about it all that much, but it's led to some stressful times trying to get her in clothes that fit.

Joe has been doing great the last few months.  He's very active when we give him the chance to be and loves to read and count in books or on his apps we got for his tablet.  He's been a bit of a handful trying to get to bed sometimes, but other than that he's been very helpful around the house with Nora and loves snuggling with her and making her laugh.  He also has been playing around with technology and has been very interested in making phone calls or trying to make voice-directed web searches with my mobile phone when he finds it unattended.