Mid Summer update

Wow, summer is flying by. Here is what we have been up to:
- Ricky spent a week on Christ Power and is focusing on his Wed Night prayer group at work.
- Tania is enjoying her summer as a teacher and likes all her Craig time
- We are both still unpacking and preparing for the baby. We have been putting up storage shelves and even painted Craig's room last week. We still have to actually finish the baby's room.....
- Tania is due August 21st, which puts her somewhere in her third trimester. She is feeling it, both from being tired and the baby kicking.
- Craig is picking up words and wants to be either a)watching PBS(Curious George especially) or b) playing outside. Outside trumps PBS. He loves water and any pool as is noted in the picture below.



That's about it. We have a wedding we are a part of next month, but otherwise we are focused on our new arrival.

The St. Louis Zoo for Mother's Day

For Mother's Day we went to the zoo (on Saturday) with Grandma and Grandpa Willmann and Aunt Maureen. Craig has been to the zoo a few times and already has his favorites. It was crowded and had the threat of rain so we couldn't see everything. Here are some photos of the day.

Grandpa and Craig with the giraffe.



Craig loves the bird house at the zoo. Whenever a bird calls, Craig calls back. We couldn't get any footage of that, but we did get a picture of a bird that jumped on a railing about a foot from where Tania was standing.



Craig is very good at holding your hand while walking....until he sees something interesting, but overall he is quite good.



I believe we are examining the prairie dogs in this picture.



Here is a video of Craig feeding the ducks. The highlight of the day. We left right after this and good thing we did because it stormed on the way home.

He's gonna be a soccer player!

I just took inventory of my pics and videos, and I am excited about the next few blogs. First I have some documentation of our back yard. Craig loves it. He feels he should spend every moment of everyday outside.

The video is Craig playing soccer on his own. Even back in high school everyone had a suspicion my children would be soccer players. Don't worry, I have all summer to work on baseball too.

First-Quarter pics

Here is a random selection of pics from the first quarter of this year. I wish I could call them springtime pictures but there is nothing spring about them.

Here is Craig in his PJ's apparently drifting off to sleep while standing up.



Chocolate goatee! My favorite!



Craig at an arcade driving game with his Aunt Maureen. He loves to get behind the wheel and push any button he sees, even if you don't know what it does.



Craig playing outside in the last snow of the year. I think he used Mom taking a picture as his chance to escape!

Easter review.

The spring has been so busy that it will take a few posts to get caught up. But here are the results from Easter weekend. On Saturday we went with the Mantia family to Purina Farms to see the various non-zoo animals.

Here is Craig and his cousin Jesse playing with corn feed and John Deere Trucks.



Craig next to a live chicken. He is looking into a pig pen. He desperately wanted in to play with the 2 pigs inside. He was out-voted.



Craig looking at the incubator with all the baby chicks. This seems to be an appropriate time to tell you he loves Chicken McNuggets.



Here are all the Mantia cousins. Who knows when they will all sit still for a picture again.



We woke up Easter Sunday to discover that it had snowed! Therefore the Easter Bunny had to hide some eggs inside.

Here is Craig waking up.....



The Easter Bunny brought him 101 Dalmations and a coloring book. And chocolate.



Craig took to the Easter egg hunt pretty well, although he would have rather just used two eggs as maracas than find the rest.



But in the end all the eggs ended up in the basket.



Then we went to mass and headed out to spend time with the Willmanns. Here we are all dressed up for Mass.



Craig and his Aunt Maureen.



By this time it had warmed up and the hunt was outside. Craig was a pro at this point.



Before we knew it all the eggs were in the basket!



That's about it from Easter. I will have various other springtime pics up hopefully sooner than later.

oooo....Why'd you slice off my hand?

This situation was also documented by JuggleDoug. A couple weeks ago the Royals came over with their children Isaac and Lily. At some point both Isaac and Craig picked up inflatable lightsabers. After about a half hour of prompting we were finally able to realize the dream of our children having a lightsaber duel. Ok, the video only caught the tail end of it, but you can tell by us laughing that it was a good fight before I started filming. Craig and Isaac had been at it a while, so when Isaac says "Please no" it is more about being done playing than being pwned. (I promise the video works)



If you haven't seen it before, or just want to remember, I highly recommend the Star Wars Gangsta Rap Special Edition.

AtomFilms.com: Funny Videos | Funny Cartoons | Comedy Central

Craig vs. the Box

Moving into a new house creates lots of boxes. One day we unloaded a particularly large one and tossed Craig into it just to see what would happen. Something cute happened of course.