So much for my blogging streak!

Ah, another month has passed with no updates...but we've been so busy!!!  So I will attempt to post an overwhelming number of photos!  Wish me luck!

 We started out the month with a visit from my mom.  She spent 6 glorious days with us!  Of course I took shamefully few photos of her visit, but believe me we had a great time!  Aurelia and Dashiell loved playing with her, and Rick and I loved having her help around the house!  I can't wait to see her again at Christmas!

The following weekend Dashiell and I made a fun trek to The Butterfly Place in Westford (a mere 18 minutes away, so you'd think we'd go more often!).  They have about a bazillion butterflies, a koi pond, and the quail family that lives with the butterflies just had babies!  We were warned that the babies aren't very bright, though, and tend to walk right in front of people.  Squished quail babies make for traumatic visits (not our visit, thankfully!).  Anyway, we had a fun time checking everything out!

I tried to get a picture of D and I together - this was my first attempt, which I was about to delete but D said, "don't get rid of it mommy!  I love it!"

Ha!  The second attempt was somewhat better:

Weird, but better.

Aurelia discovered that she likes Cheerios (what kid doesn't?), and since she was eating them Dashiell had to as well.

He's not a big cereal-eater in the morning (preferred breakfast: toast with grape jelly, yogurt, and/or scrambled eggs).  I think he doesn't get the fact that cereal gets soggier the longer it takes you to eat it.  Soggy cereal is just not that good!

I took these pix of Rick and Aurelia and thought they were so cute!  I love the picture of her with her tongue sticking out! Ha!

Milestone:  Aurelia has moved from a combat-crawler to a full-on crawler!  And she wants to climb the stairs!  Therefore:

The baby gates are back!  As soon as I installed them she tried to figure out how to use them.  Thankfully she's not strong enough to push down on the step release to open the gate!

Milestone #2: She also has been pulling herself up to standing!  Watch out!

This picture makes me laugh - Dashiell was "too cold" so he made himself a nest of pillows.  I suggested putting on pants to help warm him up, but he would have none of that!

Aurelia LOVES avocado.  What's not to love?  It's green, it's squishy, it's yummy.  It's also very, very messy.  Fun!

Dashiell was sitting on the floor watching TV while Aurelia was playing with her toys (and my water bottle) behind him.  She decided to use him as a backrest.  Stayed that way for a few minutes!

We've been having fun playing in the leaves in the backyard.  Aurelia doesn't really know what to make of them but obviously they can be at least a little fun!  (zoom in and check out those teeth!)

Finally, Dashiell wanted to hold his sister the other day, and from the looks of it he may never let her go!  What a good brother!

It's been so fun to watch them interact lately.  Aurelia wants to play with anything and everything Dashiell has, and he is for the most part very patient with her.  But you can tell that it gets annoying to have a little sister knocking over your castles and wanting to take away your noisy toys!

I've decided to save the pictures from Uncle Dave and Aunt Lindsay's wedding for a separate post.  Stay tuned!