One In the Oven: August

Compared to June and July, August was a pretty tame month for us! Here are some of our favorite shots from the month....

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Kate continues to be a great eater! She now has two teeth, and certainly uses them to her advantage. I know that everyone probably tires of seeing pictures of her stuffing her face, but we continue to be amazed at how adventurous she is, and how she goes at food with such gusto (plus, even though it involves a pretty lengthy cleanup, there's something so cute about the little bug being covered in lunch and grinning from ear to ear).

-- Yogurt continues to be one of my favorites...I like it so much I put it in my ears...up my nose....smear it in my hair.... --

-- Sometimes I even pretend that I'm a vegetarian (although I love me some meat!)...here I am eating spaghetti squash with veggie marinara and cottage cheese......AND check it out, I'm using a spoon!! --

We discovered that our local farmers market offers crates of produce every week for $20. You can see what you're getting when you order it, and they deliver to your house every Thursday. We've been taking advantage of this for almost two months, and it's been great! It's a good way to get fresh produce while supporting some of the local farms, and it's cheap and easy. When I order the crate I meal plan for the week based on what it contains, and then we put almost everything to use (except for the time we got a bag of radishes...that one kind of stumped me). It's been a great way to diversify what Kate eats. I would probably never buy plums, peaches or plouts because I don't generally like them--but we've discovered that Kate sure does.

-- Enjoying my breakfast of blueberry oatmeal. We get blueberries in our farmers market basket, and I love, love. LOVE them!! --

-- Copper is waiting to help cleanup --

-- Enjoying some chicken, peas, and one of my favorite...CHEESE! --

-- This is my Cindy Crawford look --

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We actually managed to take Kate's 10 month pictures in a pretty timely manner this month! We were able to get her outside in the sunshine and snap a few pictures. She's finally starting to get used to walking in the grass, and loves to explore the things she finds in the yard. She enjoys picking up leaves and sticks and chasing after Copper (chasing is a pretty loose term...he's still much, much faster than her). We had to come up with another way to get her to pose with the magnets, but this little sign seemed to work pretty well.

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Kate continues to enjoy the water, and we added a little baby pool to our collection of outdoor toys. She's not a big fan of her beach hat, but here are some pictures of our little bathing beauty.

-- This water is cold! --

-- I'm the poster baby for sun protection --

-- Playing with my ball --

-- I love swimming! --

-- Enough of this stupid hat! --

-- This is my thoughtful face --

-- Copper pulls lifeguard duty --

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Kate said her first word! And no, it's not mama or dada...it's ball! That's right, we have a future athlete on our hands! Kate loves to play ball--to roll it, to bounce it, to chase it around--and Brandon and I had been trying to get her to say the word. It would go something like the...

Mom or Dad: "Kate, do you want this BALL?"

Kate just looks at Mom/Dad and thinks, "Duh, of course".

Mom or Dad: "Kate, let's play BALL. Should we bounce the BALL? Let's catch the BALL. Where's the BALL?"

Kate looks at Mom/Dad with a look that clearly says "Good grief, I get it, it's a ball!! Just because I don't talk doesn't mean I can't hear!"

Anyway, it paid off, and one morning, Kate picked up a ball from the floor, held it out to us, and said "Ball". Then she brought it back in to her body, looked down at it, and said it again.

And we were amazed by our genius of a daughter :-)