-My sister, Susanna, and Seamus had too much fun at the Happy Sumo, where we went the night before Shay's birthday. Here's them eating edemame and drinking Sake. Ok, his was apple juice...
-Then there's our good lookin' bunch, minus one sister and her brood who couldn't make it from Virginia.
-Seamus opening some of his birthday presents.
-Helping me wash the dishes is one of his favorite "chores", along with setting the table and emptying the clean silverware from the dishwasher into the silverware caddy.
-Lookin' good with some more of his birthday presents.

Abby and Seamus out for Abby's first walk in the stroller. She did great...didn't cry at all during the two-block walk to my mom's house.


My cute kids hanging out on the couch together. You can see how big Abby is getting from this photo. She's already more than 14 pounds and she's not yet 6 months old. Seamus, at a year, was 16.5 pounds.


We got out the high chair this weekend and put Abby in it. She really enjoyed it. We've just started with rice cereal and apples in the mesh munchy thingy. I think she likes being involved in the kitchen activities.

We've also moved Abby to her own room (aka Dylan's office). She's sleeping great in there. She's only getting up 1-2 times a night instead of the 4-5 times a night in our room. I think our snoring was waking her up too often. Now she's up at 11 pm and occasionally 3 am. She goes down at aobut 7:15 pm and isn't usually up until after 7 am. Hooray!! Pictures of the new room to follow...I finally got curtains made and put up, but I want to finish with the artwork and decorating before I take pictures.

I finally loaded our pictures onto the computer and used Picasa to work with them. Can you tell?

Seamus takes the most amazing pictures sometimes. He just walks around the house and snaps them. Here are a few of his better ones from the last few weeks.

My Little Valentine all dressed up.

I haven't been blogging lately because sickness has descended upon the Thurston household. First Seamus and I were sick. We had fevers, sniffles, and headaches with achy joints. Nasty stuff. Then my mom got sick, and it turns out she has pneumonia, again. Almost the same time as she had it last year. She's still getting over it. Then Dylan got sick (and still is). He has a really high fever and cough and no energy. Abby, not one to be outdone by her family, decided to have a double ear infection. She had a horribly high fever, which I thought was just the same sickness that we had so I didn't do much about it. But when I touched her ear and she all out screamed I decided to make an appointment on Friday afternoon. I'm so glad I did, too. Even though we spent two hours in the doctor's office waiting to be seen (this is two hours past our appointment time. Honestly, why do they bother making appointments?) when we finally got in there and checked out her ears they told me it was goon that I came in. Seamus never had an ear infection, so I had no idea what I was dealing with. Now I have to give her liquid antibiotics twice a day that seem to help her ears, but give her terrible diarrhea. Sometimes you wonder if the cure is worse than the illness...

So Dylan leaves tomorrow for the TNI conference in Florida. (that's where he works) He's taking his laptop with him, so there will probably be another dry spell on this blog. Sorry! Stupid work trips. Who schedules a distributor conference over Valentine's day?

In honor of the Chinese New Year today, the kids are wearing their Chinatown New York shirts that Mimi and Sumer got for them. Seamus loves the dragon on them, and he loved that Abby was matching him.

We're also watching Disney's Mulan today. We should probably have Chinese food for dinner, but I think I'm going to make Mexican instead. Mmmmmm, tacos.

My youngest sister is on a plane right now to New Zealand. She's going to spend 6 weeks over there doing something called "The Kiwi Experience". It's an amazing tour of the outdoors aspects of New Zealand. It looks awesome. You just ride around in buses and stay at hostels while you do some fantastic things. Things like black-water rafting (that's rafting down a river that goes through caves) or bungee jumping or sea kayaking. She is going to have the best time! She figures that she's 23 with no husband or kids. She just got out of a 3 year relationship and is moving from LA to North Carolina. She has nothing to tie her down and no obligations to anyone. Why not have an incredible experience while she can? I would give my left arm to go...but that would make kayaking pretty hard. Maybe I'd give several thousand dollars. As long as it could cover my expenses.