Sibling Love

Austin adores his baby sister! It is really quite cute. He gives her kisses all day long. He likes to lay down beside her and hug her. He loves to hold her. He dabs her drooly chin with her burp cloth and says "boop boop boop" while he dabs. He talks sweetly to her and makes her smile. She watches him play and tracks him as he moves around the room.

Here he is laying beside her on the couch.

Then he wanted to hold her.

He declared that he LOVES his baby sister, then looked up and said "Thank you, God!"

My sweeties!

Silly "zerbit" kisses from Nanny!

Last weekend Sarah wore Austin's hand-me-down Notre Dame sweatsuit jumper. She was pretty excited about it. Go Irish!

We got out the swing to try to help Daddy with bedtime while I'm at work. He just needs a way to occupy Sarah while he gets Austin to bed. She sometimes likes it, but not nearly as much as Austin did. Here she is the other day, totally asleep, snuggled up with the burp cloth she had been chewing on.

She was a pretty happy girl today, and looking cute in her flower jammies. Here she is hanging out on her boppy pillow.

 Sarah is working on sitting up too.  She REALLY wants to sit up, but isn't quite stable yet.

She is getting so strong and holds her head up for much longer periods of time now.  Today she held her head up well for about 10 minutes before she was ready to be done with tummy time.

I still haven't gotten her to smile much while doing this, though. Today when I was trying to get her to smile at me while on her tummy, I got faces like this...

 I can just imagine her thinking, "Mom, would you knock it off? I'm workin here!"

We're otherwise doing well. We've had some increase in activity on our house, but still no offers. We're doing our best to be patient, but do have our moments of frustration. We buried St. Joseph in the yard about 1.5 weeks ago and figured maybe he'll help us out.

I've been working a lot of night shifts and Sarah and Austin have sometimes been behaving for Steve while I'm gone. Sarah sleeps through the night now, which is awesome! The only problem is trying to manage both of them at bedtime and get them both to bed. I switch to a busy daytime rotation next month and will be working a lot of hours during the days, so it will be a bit of a switch for us all, but we'll make it work. Only 2 more months before I'm done with residency!

In other events, we'll be walking in the March of Dimes March for Babies tomorrow morning. Unfortunately, the weather forcast looks really crummy, so we'll have to see how long the kids last. It is a 6 mile walk. We'll bring the Sit N' Stand stroller for the kids and Sarah will be cozy tucked into her car seat in the front of the stroller and Austin can walk alongside the stroller, stand on the platform in the back of the stroller, or sit on his seat on the back of the stroller. If the kids tucker out before we make it through the whole walk or if the weather gets too crummy to have them outside, there will be a van running along the route to pick us up and bring us back to the start/finish location. Thanks to all of you who supported our walk and this wondeful cause! The ambassador family for the walk in Rochester this year is actually a family that I got to take care of in the NICU.  It's great to see how they're doing now and to have them involved in the March of Dimes.

We had Sarah's 3 month photos taken this week, so we should hopefully be getting them within the week and I'll post them as soon as I can.