Recent Pictures and Videos

I haven't been sharing a lot of our recent pictures and videos. I'm going to remedy that in one, giant, overwhelmingly full post, shoving them all together. Sounds like fun!!! But beware the bandwidth resources needed! ;)

First up: Alex likes to sit in boxes, a lot. So if the older kids get one out, and it's small enough for him to maneuver, you can bet you'll find him sitting in it before long at all! And he not only likes to just sit and enjoy, he also likes to get in and out, in and out. Not always gracefully, but always adorably. One such example:

Alex also likes to try to climb. Or at least try to, in most cases. His favorite thing to do when I'm sitting at the computer and he wants attention is to go under my desk, get in front of my legs, step up on the stool I use as a footrest, and pull himself up onto my lap. He gets high enough that I always have no choice but to help him up all the way. And of course, he's super duper interested in banging my keyboard lately, which is a big reason my blogging has dropped off. It's awfully hard to type *anything* with a baby who won't leave the keyboard alone for even 2 seconds!
He's figuring out our chairs, slowly but surely. Putting his knee up, pulling up with his arms. He once got almost all the way onto the seat by climbing up the back like this, but I didn't get a picture of that. I *did* get a picture of this attempt. Please, please, please ignore our disgusting chair. Focus on the cute baby!!

The next picture is a typical example of Jacob's favorite way to "dress up" these days. He thinks this is a hilarious costume.
I have to agree. Though, I think it can be outdone by the simplicity of putting both legs through one of daddy's long-sleeved t-shirts, pulling the bottom hem up to his shoulders, and running around with a maniacal giggle. I have yet to capture that on camera, unfortunately, so you'll have to use your imagination.

The next series of of photos is from a day at the park during our nice weather.
A *huge* group of geese.... flying west?!? What does that mean?

Alex likes the hula hoop.

Jacob concentrates so he can blow some bubbles.

Melinda runs like crazy, so the wind can blow the bubbles for her.

Mommy tries to take pictures of bubbles, which were blowing by quickly, but still awfully pretty with their multi-colored shimmers, with the optical zoom. This one turned out fairly good!

One of my least favorite chores (and boy, you know, I have a fairly large list of least favorite chores, if I stop to think about it...) is feeding anything of a pureed texture to a baby. I simply don't enjoy it. Enter the giant light-bulb above my head: Melinda is always begging to help with grown-up things! Melinda loves baby Alex! Melinda would *love* to feed food to Alex, and she's big enough to do it competently! Duh! Why didn't I think of that before?! Alex enjoyed some applesauce, Melinda enjoyed being a big helper, and I even got time to clean up the kitchen without a baby begging for attention! Win/win/win!

Now for a few videos!

I apparently don't know how to judiciously stop recording, so my videos are all long and potentially boring in several places. Oh well, skip parts if you want to. I promise there's cute stuff in there! And if nothing else... well, this is real us. More to come, potentially, if the uploading part ever agrees with a host.