Thursday, February 9, 2006

Time For An Update

So the Kellys are finally residents of the Bible Belt (official motto: a Baptist church and a Curves on every corner)! We've spent a lot of time helping them get settled and just spending time with them, so we haven't set aside much time for blogging. They are getting settled in very quickly, and we're really happy that they're here. We'll put up some pics of their new digs soon, but we want to let them get settled before we go publicizin'.

It is now officially hiking season, as we took our first hike last weekend. We started out by exploring our backyard, which we had yet to do because of the mosquitos and then the cold. It was a good hike, but a fence keeps us from getting to the creek. We didn't see any snakes or spiders, but we did find a couple of Christmas trees. Now we know what to do with ours, since the garbage guys won't take it. Here's a picture of Matty and Chip making their way through the wilderness:

Our hike continued in the Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield. Gabriel walked a good portion of it and rode the rest out in his Kelty.

As we returned to our car, we passed a very unconcerned herd of deer. Here is the biggest one staring us down:

We finally decided to contribute events to the MOMS Club calendar. This month, Gabriel and Mommy hosted a Starbucks outing, and Christopher brought his mommy, Lisa. Christopher is one month younger than Chip and has so much of the same personality and mannerisms, it's funny. They both have just started spinning in place until they get dizzy and fall down, and they both love to watch Elmo's World on Sesame Street. They're also both going through a slightly shy phase, but both were sharing books in no time.

Later this month, we are hosting a family night out at our house so everyone can meet everyone else's family. We're excited to host it and already know that there will be a few families here.

Gabriel is getting so darn cute. He's putting together lots of new sounds and can now say "th". He has quite long conversations with us sometimes. He also mastered the art of opening doors yesterday, to our nervousness, but he's learning a lot of good things by watching us, too. We were watching TV in the family room today while the Chipster roamed the house, and we came into the kitchen to discover that our little angel had emptied the silverware from the dishwasher and put it all away in the silverware drawer! Sometimes we wish we could give him a Good Boy pill, but other times we wish we could bottle up his sweetness and sell it at the mall.

We are planning on finishing our bathroom this weekend, now that Gabriel has somewhere to go and we have a drywall sander to borrow. We were able to make one really good home improvement this week already; Mom and Dad gave us an under-the-counter TV for the kitchen. It's making cooking, cleaning, eating, and blogging lots of fun, and it saved Matt today when the sound on our family room TV went on the fritz and he wanted to watch Seinfeld. It even has a little remote control that is magnetic so it can stick on the stove hood or refrigerator. So clever!