Happy 4th of July!

Happy Independence Day everyone! Hope you all had a nice day and a good celebration. A big thank you to everyone in uniform - we are so fortunate to live in a free country and I know that I for one tend to take that for granted. I often forget the price that so many have paid for our freedom. Thank you for your patriotism, your dedication, and your bravery - you guys rock!

Now, there are 4 things that I tend to associate with the 4th of July celebration: swimming, grilling, watermelon, and apple pie. Not sure why, but those are things that I really want on the 4th. Really just in summertime in general, but especially on the 4th. And we got all 4 of those things today! We went over to my parents and had a great time. And I ate way too much food as usual. Aurora had a blast in the pool as always. I really wish she could wear sunscreen so she could stay in longer, but that's one rule I'm having a problem breaking...

We drove home around 4:00-ish and that was right about the time that the first monsoon of the season hit. There was so much wind and rain that we actually had to pull over because we couldn't see anything. And once the wind died down a little we realized we had pulled over right in front of our neighborhood! Yeah - visibility was awful. And when we got home we were greeted by a destroyed front yard. Both of our mesquite trees in the front yard had been uprooted and blown over! And we weren't the only ones - Cheryl and Daniel next door lost theirs too along with several others in the neighborhood. We also had ceramic tiles blow off our roof! It was a pretty good storm apparently. So just when Nick thought he was done with yardwork... Oh, well - could have been worse - it could have been something in the backyard that we really cared about. We were never that fond of those trees in the front anyway.

In baby updates the "cry it out" method was really only implemented that night that I couldn't take it anymore and then a few times the next day at nap time. But apparently that was kind of enough. Aurora has gone back to being a relatively good sleeper - she has a hard time falling asleep in the beginning still, but at least when she wakes up in the middle of the night now she puts herself back to sleep. I'm not sure if letting her cry had anything to do with it or if it was just a coincidence, but either way - things are going much better now.

She is really loving her solid foods. So far she has had rice cereal, oatmeal, sweet potatoes, bananas, carrots, and pears. She LOVES pears and carrots. And she seems to be pretty happy about the bananas too, but she hasn't had those as much since I want to gag every time I feed them to her. They smell awful!

I've probably mentioned this, but Aurora is playing with her feet big time. Especially when she is having her diaper changed. She actually got one of them in her mouth briefly yesterday morning. So cute!!!!!! She loves that changing table - she's funny. She actually even rolled over on it the other day. Fortunately she has enough room to do that and I never leave her alone on it - but that definitely happened when I wasn't expecting it.

She has been sucking on her hands a lot too. Mostly her pointer and middle finger. She also likes to put her hands in her mouth when I am feeding her. It makes for messy meal times. Interestingly she only puts her right hand in her mouth during food time and its usually when she eats oatmeal - she doesn't do it as much with the other foods.

Hope you all had a nice weekend!