Eight Months of "Firsts"

There is absolutely no excuse for my lack of blogging. According to my 8-year-old, "it's not like you work or anything. You just hang around the house all day." At this point, I think working outside of the home might seem like a vacation to me. Honestly, having five kids is exhausting. And the last thing I want to do during the ten minutes of quiet I get each day is get on the computer. But I feel so guilty that I haven't been updating on Sprout's transition and development. I can't update on a lot of details of the last eight months but I will try to highlight some of her big "first" milestones. Sprout is wonderful. Exhausting, but wonderful. She is still tiny - wearing 18-24 months at 3 1/2-years-old. But what she lacks in size, she makes up for in personality. She is so very happy almost every minute of every day. She is so very loud. She is so very busy. She is like our own little Tasmanian devil. You can always tell where she has been because she leaves a path of destruction behind. For example, today she emptied half of the box of detergent on the laundry room floor; as we were cleaning that up, she squeezed half a box of toothpaste into the sink; after that she managed to get an ink pen and scribble all over herself and the couch. All of this happened within a five minute span. With both Stu and me home. She is like this all day, every day. But then she looks up to you with her mile-wide smile and her goofy little laugh and you forget all about the mischief she has caused. We call her our little pint-sized tornado. Her transition was pretty seamless. She acted as though she had lived with us all of her life. Her siblings acted like she had been here forever. It was really easy...except for the fact that I was trying to juggle five kids, three of which were toddlers. For the first three months, I would crawl into bed minutes after we had the kids down for the night. After that, we seemed to find our rhythm and haven't looked back since. Everyone seems amazed that we have five children, but honestly our house was already crazy and chaotic and one more child didn't make too much of a difference (other than one more LOUD voice to the crowd). Enough words...time for pictures.

First Birthday with her Family (can you tell she has a sweet tooth?!?)

First Christmas

First Chinese New Year celebration

First experience in snow (no fear at all in this girl)

First haircut (courtesy of her big sister)

First time in a pool

First time on the beach

First Easter

First trip to the zoo

Second trip to the beach but the first time swimming by herself without a lifejacket (and now she is a little fish) A few more "firsts" will happen tomorrow as I send two of the Littles off to preschool. With just Sprout and me at home, who knows what kind of trouble we can create. I promise to try to update again soon...with some exciting news about Sprout's newest big brother!!