lately...

Hundreds of pictures elsewhere, but only time to download stuff from Instagram. Just look at those sweet baby lips and forgive me.

Abigail holding Matthew when he was only a few days old--already he is soooo much bigger and looks so crazy tiny to me in this photo!

I've been trying to take a gazillion photos to document all my favorite bits of newborn-ness. Chief among them--tiny babies who can fit on your lap. (And I have about a million photos just of those little starfish fingers.)

And tiny babies who are just a little bunched sack of baby when you hold them up on your shoulder. I love this photo of Neil & Matthew in the wee hours. 

And this one of my mom with little Matthew--she stayed with us for almost two weeks and was an absolutely hero and lifesaver. I felt so cherished by her--it was so wonderful to be able to sleep in and know that she was getting everyone off to school with full tummies and loved hearts. And then she was there again to welcome them home and help with homework and after-school driving and dinner and all the million things that eat up our days. We were so lucky to have her!

Nathan has really taken to Matthew (maybe because Matthew brought him a puppy costume?). He is super super sweet with Matthew and so tender and loving with him.

Now if we could just get him to treat the rest of us the same way...#threenager #tyrannicalthree

One more I just snapped away for about five minutes while Matthew was waking up. These were my favorites. 

And then I did it a week later and he was so much bigger!

Trying to keep things a little bit normal around here with our fall bucket list--somebody has to make sure we eat pumpkin donuts and caramel corn and hike through the woods!

This really deserves a post of its own (says the 62 pictures I took that night), but we had a great night wending our way through the corn maze and checking out all the crazy fun stuff at the pumpkin patch (corn cannon? giant pile of hay? silo full of dried corn kernels and construction equipment? That was Nathan's idea of heaven!)

My first outing with all six kids (to the library, naturally!) went really well...until I went to fold up the stroller my sister had loaned me and realized I had NO CLUE how to do it. We ended up driving home with the fully open stroller in the back of the van, liftgate open, and valiant Juliet holding it in. Better than the first outing I took with Abigail and Juliet, in which I actually folded them both up in the stroller. I am doomed with strollers and newborns, apparently. 

 

Cheekies! Cheekies of glory!

Working on getting our house ready to put on the market...someday. Before...


and after!

Tapering for my race last week, so I had extra energy for projects...like using the KonMari method on all our books. I love looking at my reorganized shelves now--so much easier for the older kids to find an age and level-appropriate book with them all organized into specific bookcases so I can just tell them to go to their bookcase. We've had picture books and early readers organized like this for years, but now that the oldest 3 are reading more "adult" books, I wanted to separate out the ones that they would like at their current ages from everything else. And we also gave away a couple hundred books, which was nice too. :-)

Snuggling up to read stories. Love that tender little hand stroking Matthew's head the whole time I was reading to him.

A couple months ago I won a free entry to our local half-marathon. So after Matthew was born I set out one day to see if I could notch 10 in a decent time without a baby going crazy from hunger...



and that went well enough that I went ahead and ran the half-marathon today. Race report here. 

 and the kids ran the fun run, which was about the cutest thing ever.