What a Mess!

So Miss Independence wants to feed herself all the time. But she isn't so good with the fork or spoon yet, so we usually have a huge mess to clean up afterwards. Last night she said enough of this using a utensil, and just went straight for the bowl instead! We thought it was pretty cute!

What a great picture!

Practice Run

For midweek, we had a little Easter Egg Hunt for the kids. Rian really liked finding the eggs, but liked finding the candy inside even better! It's her first experience with chocolate eggs and she is in heaven!

Counting the eggs....one...two...three....

Here is one under the piano.....and a few in the bookshelves.

Any on the window seal? (I love that one!)....ooohhh, fruit snacks inside, yum!

A Love/Hate Relationship

We think that maybe Rian and Kaiya have a love/hate relationship. In the first two pictures, Rian and Kaiya are giving each other lots of lovin'! Then the next day, guess where I found Kaiya.....under the computer desk, hiding from Rian. I guess Rian wanted to play and apparently Kaiya was not in the mood that day. Kaiya was giving me a look like 'get her away from me please'!

And the WINNER is....

We are so proud of Matt and his teammates, Eric and Chris! They competed in a robot sumo competition for engineering week at school and WON FIRST PLACE!!!! They built and programmed this robot to scan for and push other robots out of the ring. The robots have all sorts of sensors and stuff too. There are absolutely NO remote controls, the team built a program for it. It thinks it's pretty amazing! I don't really know much about it, but that much I do know!

They spent hours and hours working on this and I am so proud that all their hard work paid off! They were so confident they would win and they did....a cash prize even! And did I mention made the front page of the newspaper!?! We are SO proud of you guys!!!

Fun with Great-Grandma!

We went for a little visit to Matt's grandparents house last Sunday. Here are a few pictures of Rian having fun with her Great-Grandma. They were heading downstairs to visit Rian's Great-Great-Grandma and decided to let Rian take a ride on the chair lift. I especially love the last picture of Rian and her Great-Grandma looking at each other!

Climbing Everywhere

Rian has absolutely no fear these days. She is constantly attempting to climb up, in or out of any place she might find herself in. She even likes to climb into her crib....that is of course as long as it is NOT nap time or night time! Here she is climbing onto our bed. It's a pretty tall bed so I was really impressed with her success!

Here I go Mommy, watch me! Just put one leg up and I'm half way there!

Both knees up and ta da, here I am! Whoa, am I exhausted or what!!!

Go Giants!!!

This superbowl is HUGE for me and my family! My dad, growing up in NJ, has always loved the NY Giants, therefore passing that tradition onto my brothers. They are DIE HARD fans, no joke. And actually an outcast in San Diego being that every San Diegan loves their Chargers. Each season I think to myself, I hope NY makes it this year and lately they have been letting my dad and brothers down, but this year THEY DID IT! We are really excited to cheer their team on this Sunday and hope that they beat those darn Patriots. Being undeafeted, the Patriots are a really good team and I know the Giants have to bring their best game, but it is about time the Patriots lose and the Giants did give them a pretty good run during the regular season....so there is HOPE!!! Although Matt and I were really disappointed when our San Diego Chargers lost their ticket to the superbowl to the Patriots, looking back at it, it is definitely better that the Chargers aren't playing the Giants this Sunday. If any of you know my dad, cheering against the Giants would be incredibily insulting. I am happy for my dad and my brothers to have this glory, and hope that the Giants beat some Patriots booty! It's REALLY exciting to be actually cheering on a team for once and not just watching it cuz it's the superbowl. And YES we do have some martinelli's on ice, for a toast when they win of course!!!

Happy Birthday TJ!

We hope you have a wonderful birthday and a really fun party this weekend! Wish we could be there to celebrate with you, but at least we were able to have an early birthday celebration last weekend!

Mommy's Little Helper

I like to get my daily chores done first thing in the morning (after I feed Rian breakfast of course). Therefore I don't have to worry about them the rest of the day. Rian has been such a little helper these days...

Today's chores were dusting and vacuuming. Here she is dusting the TV stand the humidifier! I didn't even ask her to help, she just grabbed her own paper towel and went at it!

My mom gave her a little vacuum for Christmas and when she saw me get mine out, she went and got hers too. I just thought is was the cutest thing ever.

Hey, Hey, Hey, Goodbye....

Look at this face, how can you deny it! We'll we just had to, Rian is about to turn 18 months, and the time has definitely come. Although we were only giving her her binkie at nap and nighttime, we have finally completely winged Rian off her binkie, or as I like to call it binkster (I know I'm weird, and Matt really dislikes that word for it). We just put her down one night last week without it and although she did cry a little bit, it really didn't seem to bother her all that much. So from then on, it's been MIA. She hasn't even noticed really :) I know we are extremely lucky that Rian wasn't that addicted to it.