Maggie Smiles!

Well, it took her 9 long weeks but Maggie has finally started to smile. It is about time! Most the time she goes around with this look of "I am so annoyed with these people, why did they take me out." Maybe all babies have this grimace but all three of mine have it. She mostly gets that look when she is not being fed or held.

Here are pictures of me TRYING to get her to smile. Such a failure...

Here's Owen trying to get Mags to smile as well. Owen is so CUTE when he says "Mags" or "Maggie"!

Magdalyn's First Pictures

We finally took Maggie to get her 6 week pictures done, except she got hers done at 8 weeks because she had such bad baby acne that she was not looking too cute, so we opted to wait a couple weeks. We took her to JC Penney for the first pictures like we did the other two. They turned out alright, I guess.

Underneath is the quilt my mom made for Maggie.
Such a peaceful sleeper.
This is the picture that I signed away the rights on because JC Penney wanted to be able to use this picture. For me signing off the rights allowing them to use this picture however they please... I got a $4 coupon. Rip.
Here is the picture that we will hang above Maggie's crib. We have pictures of Ellie and Owen in this exact pose, except Owen's bow was blue. This picture looks SOOOO much like Elise's picture.

I thought this picture was hilarious. She looks so silly with the bow, the collar up, she is almost about to cry and she looks so chubby!

Enjoying Home

While we were home, the kids were really able to cut loose. The kids just played and played with all the toys they haven't seen in a month, it was nice. Daniel and I enjoyed sleeping in a bed where we had a little distance from each other and didn't have to simultaneously switch positions in order to avoid breathing in each other's faces.

Maggie trying out her new bed. She seemed to enjoy it and she looked pretty darn cute in it.

Here's Owen cutting loose... wearing heels. We had a couple of the kids' friends over and it seems like all the boys enjoyed the dress up clothes and shoes a little bit more than Ellie did. Owen has always had a bit of a shoe fetish, but he definitely prefers the heels! :)

Back in Houston again. We love being home but don't get me wrong, it has been a good summer, but we are still anxious to be in our own home again and rejoin our ward and be with our friends again.

Ellie Meltdown Pictured

When I was cooking dinner one of the nights we were home, Ellie fell asleep on the couch. She was not going to sleep that night if we didn't wake her up. So, we woke her up and she was so tired that she just cried (extra dramatically) and like the wonderful parents we are, we thought it was funny and took some pictures.

New Beds for All!!

This weekend we went back home to Pflugerville for a couple days to check on the house. While we were up there we decided to switch rooms around for when we return for good in August. Owen moved from the crib to a regular bed, Maggie gets the crib and Ellie got a new twin sized bed. Elise and Maggie will be sharing a room and Owen has a room all to himself.

Here are some pictures of the finished bedrooms!:

Here's Ells and Mags new room. I have to pat myself on the back for Ellie's comforter because it matches Maggie's bedding perfectly!! I was so relieved when I saw how wonderfully it matched. You can't even tell they're different sets. The girls' room is pretty cramped, but we managed to fit it all-- bed, crib, changing table, dresser and rocking chair. I even set up all of their clothes for the upcoming school year (Ellie and Maggie's next size up clothes). Ellie has white hangers and Maggie has pink. Their closet is pretty full! We still need to move some pictures around and put up a picture of Maggie and some letters spelling out Maggie's name. I am excited to get back home to finish it!
Here is Owen's room. Not as cute as the girls, but I am not done with it. The comforter I bought didn't match his quilt the way I wanted it to, so I am still on the hunt for the perfect comforter. I found it on the Pottery Barn Kids website but it was way expensive for me! For now, he will have to live with the blue down comforter that Daniel and I used to use. It looks fine though. We also moved the bookcase that was in the playroom into Owen's room. The kids have too many books for the little one that used to be in Ellie's room (we have most of their books here in Houston!). Ignore the window covering, it is just a blanket to keep out those sunny summer evenings. We actually DO have window treatments underneath.
This picture is a little crummy, I think I must have had something on the lens.... anyway, Owen's dresser.

Those are the new rooms! We still need to get some boards to put under Owen's mattress as the mattress fell through the frame each night we were there. Besides that, he did fine sleeping in the bed. He was a little hard to put to sleep one night, but we'll work on that when we get back home. And Ellie loves her new bed!

Who are you?

Disclaimer: This post is narcissism at its finest, so if you don't like navel-gazing or other related activities, this one's not for you.

I probably spend too much time looking over the statistics for our blog: who visits us, where are they, how did they get here, etc. That sort of stuff fascinates me. I use both Google Analytics and Statcounter. Google has nicer graphs and better overall navigation, but I prefer Statcounter's drill-down tools for looking at individual visitors.

I enjoy playing detective to try to figure out who's reading our blog. I can usually tell from the location of the ISP. It makes sense that we get a lot of hits from Texas and Utah, where we have lived and have family. We also get a lot of visitors from Arizona, Idaho, and Massachusetts. Internationally, we're quite popular in Nigeria (yes, Dad, I can tell how often you check the blog). If the location isn't enough (and it can sometimes be deceiving, as ISP's can be a little free with the location they give), I can often use the site you used to get here to figure out who you are. For example, people who use the link on Matt and Debbie's blog to get to us are usually shared acquaintances. Occasionally we'll get a recurring visitor that I can't identify (who do I know in Arkansas?), but I can usually tell who people are. It is more difficult to identify individual visitors in high traffic areas like Texas and Utah.

Of course, if you don't visit the site itself, I can't track you. So the six other people subscribed to our RSS feed on Google Reader remain in relative anonymity.

The search strings that guide people here are pretty interesting too. Thanks to this post we have a strong corner on the "milk maid's elbow" market. We get quite a few people searching for "Magdalyn" which goes to show that her name isn't as obscurely spelled as we thought. We also get an inordinate amount of hits from people looking for my mom. I'm disappointed that our blog doesn't show up very high on searches for "Weber family", "Weber", or "Daniel Weber" (yes, I've googled myself - I am that self-centered). I guess that's the result of having a more or less mainstream surname. I was disabused of any and all notions of uniqueness long ago when a nurse accidentally pulled the file of a different patient with my exact same full name. However, if you search "Weber family blog" you'll find us.

Recently we've been getting a lot of undesirable traffic resulting from this post. All I have to say is that judging by the search strings used to get there, there are some really weird people out on the Internets. I apologize to those of you whose comments I deleted - we certainly didn't think that using that word would invite the kind of traffic that it did, and you were just following our lead. It was a good lesson to learn anyway, and we'll be more careful about the language we use in the future.

This has got me thinking about how we're balancing our need for privacy with our desire to stay in contact with family and friends. I really like the fact that family and friends with whom we don't keep in direct contact can look us up on the Internet and get a quick update of what's been going on with us. I really dislike the fact that people I don't know from Adam can do the same. While I think the majority of people who happen onto our site are harmless and generally uninterested in what we have up here (we have a fairly high bounce rate - meaning the majority of people who click onto the site leave almost immediately), there's no way for me to know if people are using the site for nefarious purposes. For now, I think the risk to our family is fairly low, so we'll keep things the way they are, but I can see a time in the future where we'll want to have a higher level of privacy - particularly when the kids' peers are old enough to use the Internet.

Finally, I'd like to invite those of you we know or have known who visit our site but otherwise don't have contact with us to drop us a line in the comments. I'm specifically talking about people who aren't already on the blog roll to the right. If you don't like commenting (it's okay, I prefer to lurk myself), then feel free to email us at dbweber at byu dot net. Chances are, if you're taking the time to keep up with our family, we're interested in keeping up with you as well.

And yes, the real purpose of this post was to strengthen our stranglehold on "milk maid's elbow".

About My Son

This is a special post for my son (warning--- this is just me bragging about my boy). For those of you that don't have sons and daughters, you may not realize the special connection that exists between mothers and their sons. My mom always told me about it and I didn't really get it, but I do now. Perhaps it is the knowledge that one day he will leave me and belong to another woman or knowing that he won't always want to be in my lap giving me hugs and kisses. I am not sure what it is, but I sure love this little boy.

Owen is a busy boy that is constantly on the go and getting into trouble. His first words were "get down" because we were constantly telling him to get down from whatever he had climbed up on. He has an innate love for cars, trains, trucks, tractors, swords and anything else with wheels--- I didn't realize that this was so natural for boys, but it is! We never had any of these things in the house before but he just started making blocks become cars and would make the noises so we bought him a car to play with. Whenever he hears a truck, he will raise his head to see and say, "truck"; same thing when he sees airplanes.

Owen is adventurous. In addition to the endless climbing he does, he watches others and then tries to do like them. He climbs right in to pools, runs right up to sprinklers, joins right in to play with other kids-- he is so fun like that.
For the first 18 months, Owen has hardly said anything. I have tried not to worry about it because I realize only a few words is normal for this age, but it was hard since Ellie was talking quite a bit by a year. However, this month, Owen has just exploded with talking! He says about 10 new words everyday. He knows almost all of the letters in the alphabet (no doubt thanks to Ellie's incessant singing of her ABC's). He can count to 10 and down from 10. He knows and says many shapes like circle, square, triangle, star and crescent (yes, crescent).
One of the best things about Owen is that he is an independent kid. He doesn't mind playing on his own or finding something to do by himself. However, he really loves his mom (thankfully). He always is eager to climb in my lap and rub my arm (not the elbow pit like Ellie but still equally as annoying). He gives the best hugs and kisses ever! I have to kind of force the hug sometimes, but he gets in these moods where he will just give kisses away and I am right there to take advantage!
I think I have a special connection with Owen also because we are both 2nd born. I always have made the extra effort to make sure I took lots of pictures of him (and subsequent child) and recorded special moments because I didn't want him to feel lost in the shuffle. It is something that I worry about with Owen because he is so independent and I don't want to forget about him and not spend equal time with him just because he doesn't demand it as much (for those of you that don't have more than one, once you have another you are in constant fear that you are not giving each child everything, and truth is you aren't and you have to just do your best). I suppose this is just going to get worse now that there are 3 kids and now that he is the only boy.

I am so in love with my son! He is growing up so fast and he has just changed so much since the beginning of the summer. When I got pregnant this third time I demanded that it be a girl and it was, now the next one-- I had better get another son!:)

Bowling

A couple days ago, out of the blue, Ellie said she wanted to go bowling. We haven't gone bowling since Christmas, but she has an incredible memory and suddenly remembered and wanted to go again. So, this afternoon (after her preschool lesson with Grandma Weber-- she has been doing them for the last couple weeks), my brother Evan and I took Elise and Owen to the bowling alley.

This is why we love Uncle Evan! He loves his nieces and nephew so much and always helps out with them. And of course they just adore him! Evan used to bowl for school so here he is teaching the kids how it's done.
Owen looking at the pins he knocked down.

Scary! Yes, the kids carried their own balls and it was frightening each time. Out of shear luck there were no fingers or toes crushed. Thankfully.
Owen bowling.
Uncle Evan bowling... I am sure this one was a strike! :)
Owen helping keep score.
Elise bowling.
Smile... or at least the weird one she gives me when I tell her to smile for the camera.
Ellie bowling.

Blessing Magdalyn

This past Sunday Maggie was blessed. The blessing was performed in my parents' ward and Daniel, Ryan and my dad were there. We wish Daniel's dad could have come but he was busy working in Nigeria... we missed him. The members of the bishopric as well as the stake president joined in. Daniel gave a beautiful blessing. Here are some of the pictures from the photo session prior to the blessing.

Daddy and Maggie.
The whole crew (minus Carolee-- Daniel's mom-- who was taking the picture).
My parents and their attempt to get a picture with all their grandchildren.
Daniel, his mom and Mags (I am sure one of the other 3 cameras got a better shot!).

It was a really great day and Maggie didn't make a peep during the entire blessing AND the other kids weren't screaming either!

4th of July

We had a fun 4th of July. My sister and her family came down from Dallas and we celebrated her youngest daughter's first birthday. We also went to a get together at someone in my parents' ward. It was fun. Anyway, here are a couple pictures of the kiddos to show you their 4th of July outfits. :)

Ellie and Uncle Ryan.
Look at those sandals!

Maggie's First Swim

Magdalyn went swimming for the first time on the 4th of July. She sure looked cute in her patriotic swim suit!

The kids in their suits... fairly good picture actually. It is so hard to get good pictures of 3 kids!
Mags sporting her suit. So fitting for going swimming for the first time on Independence Day.
Mommy and Mags.
Sweet little girl enjoying the water... kinda. The water was a bit of a shock for her, it was pretty cold. In fact, cold enough that we will probably hold out on swimming with her again for awhile. (When we took Ellie at 2 weeks, my parents pool was like bath water).
Family picture... we tried.

Dad and Owen going down the water slide.

Elise and her dad swimming together.