Fall begins!

A few weeks back we went from summer weather to fall weather in about 36 hours. Seriously ... on Monday and Tuesday the highs were in the 80s and by Thursday and Friday the highs were in the 60s. Crazy, right?

The first week of school in our house passed once again with the only noticable change being that we now see the school bus go by in the morning and afternoon. It's kind of nice that once again neither Mommy nor daughters need to worry about school schedules :)

The day that school started here, we went to the new Madison Children's Museum, thinking that it wouldn't be as busy as it had been in the prior few weeks. We were right that it wasn't quite as busy, but it was pretty crowded nonetheless. Still, it's a great place to visit and I'm sure we'll be heading that way again this fall and winter :) The only problem is that the girls are practically guaranteed to catch something whenever we visit; there's just too many people/kids who go through on a daily basis for us NOT to be exposed to unknown germs. Oh, well. This time the cold was pretty mild.

We also made a trip over to Milwaukee to visit Gretchen and Josh one more time before their baby comes. Everyone did well with the traveling and it was really nice to be able to visit with Gretchen again.

Labor Day weekend was low key in our house, especially since both girls were still working through the MCM cold. The highlight for me was probably my birthday (31 ... ahh!). My brother surprised me with flowers and chocolate (yum!) and then Matt and the girls got me flowers and balloons. Anna and Matt also made me my birthday muffin and hid some 31s for me in the afternoon (that I just finished finding!). The highlight of the day, though, was probably my trip up to the Dells to go shopping and have lunch with my mom; several hours of being kid-free was really nice :) The lowlight was the fact that Anna had some pretty rough sleeping troubles the previous night and we both had very little sleep that night :(

In the midst of all of this, Kate has been entertaining us a lot. A few weeks back she said something that sounded like "I'll bite you!"; Matt thought it was hilarious and so she kept saying it to get him to laugh. This girl will do just about anything for a laugh. Anyway, I figured that if she could say "I'll bite you", she should be able to say "I love you." So whenever she would say "I'll bite you", I would try to change the topic to "I love you". She picked up on the phrase pretty quickly, but then got the two connected in her mind so that if we told her "I love you", she'd respond with "I'll bite you". Silly girl. Now we're a little past that and she'll say "I yuv oo" on her own :)

I haven't ever uploaded a video so we'll see how this one goes. It's from a week ago or so and when Matt and I looked at it today, we realized that she's already different from when it was taken. It's amazing how much Kate is changing and learning in such a short time!