Find The First Half here.
FINALLY! I finished this freaking post! It took a long time going through all of our pictures and then trying to narrow down which ones to include. Next year…I mean THIS year I will try to post about our various exploits when they happen so I don’t have to combine a gazillion posts into a short (haha) year end review. Anyhow, hope your 2012 has started off nicely and best wishes for a happy rest of the year!
Don’t forget you can click on any photo to open it full size in a new browser window. Just click on the photo.
July
Without a doubt July is always our most jam-packed month of the year with travelling to Florida. This year was particularly crazy as my nephew and sister-in-law were in residence at my mom’s house for my youngest brother’s current deployment in Afghanistan. So there were 4 adults and 3 small children running amok at Chez Mom and it was nuts! But before we left PA, we threw an unexpectedly huge birthday bash for Dagny. So huge (aka exhausting,) in fact, that I abandoned plans to do a Florida birthday party playdate. Once we got to the Sunshine State we got busy with visiting Casa Pineda, going to Weeki Wachee in a torrential downpour, going to the beach with my cousin from Detroit and his kids, trying out semi-private swim lessons, visiting the Florida Aquarium, and hanging with Aunt Ashley and Cousin Jake. We missed some fun stuff in PA like the annual neighborhood garage sale, so we might tweak our vacation time frame this year. We shall see! Looking at all these pictures has given me a bad case of I’M READY FOR SUMMER!
Bode Liked the Mermaids
Swim Lessons with Miss Delores
Cousins Playing in the Kiddie Pool
Getting adventurous at the Florida Aquarium
And they have a spray park at the Florida Aquarium too!
D & B's second cousins, Parker & Hunter (my cousin Michael's kids) at Indian Rocks Beach
Favorite Family Shot, wish it was in focus 
August
I’m trying to remember just from reviewing pictures, but it looks like Bode maybe started to crawl around as well as pull up on various furniture around the August time frame. It also appears he started cruising along the couch or at least pulling up to stand. We ventured out to the local spray park with our friends Amy (awesome mama who lives up the street from us) and her son Joe (awesome little dude who Dagny plays really well with.) We had loads of fun although I was spread a little thin between the kids. And I’m ashamed to admit we haven’t done very much else socially (in terms of the kids) with them (or anyone else for that matter) since. One sad fact of having 2 kids in 2 years is that it’s incredibly hard to juggle them both at playdates. While other moms are socializing, I’ve got one kid I’m trying to prevent from electrocuting himself and another I’m trying to keep from breaking anything. Good times. I’m sure there will come a time when it’s a bit less stressful, but I can’t see the light at the end of that tunnel yet. And last, but nowhere near least we went to KENNYWOOD! And Dagny has mentioned Kennywood at least 3 or 4 times a week since then. Seriously. She mentions it several times a week.
TEA PARTY!
Fun at the spray park with our neighbor.
My joyful little dancer
One of the best image captures of the year!
Dagny has started expressing an interest in make-up :/
Sibling Love!
Kiddieland Motorcylces at Kennywood
Family Picnic Lunch at Kennywood
Baby Jogger City Select, for the win!
Watching Dagny ride the swings!
How can I not put in a picture of the bear trashcan?! This is reliably named as her favorite thing about Kennywood almost every time we ask.
A favorite thing to do in the summer...this year Bode will be big enough to take some turns!
Ah, that fuzzy, smiley, little head.
Believe me when I say, I exercised as much restraint as humanly possible when selecting this limited amount of photos from my August photo folder.
September
We went to the 7th Street Sportsmans’ Club Picnic. That was interesting this year. Dagny was not as enthusiastic about the corn on the cob, and it truly was not very good this year. She had fun looking for money in the sawdust pile and choosing a temporary tattoo. We rode the little “train” truck, which scared the living daylights out of me. Another interesting thing happened in September. I stopped uploading all my pictures to Facebook and for a while I stopped taking many pictures at all. And to this day (now it’s February) I am still not taking very many photos on a daily basis like I used to. There are a lot of contributing factors, I’m sure but one in particular struck a chord with me. I’m not really sure how or if I’ll continue sharing our life with the people who care about it as time marches on. But for now it is what it is.
Next year we will be bringing our own helmets.
Watching the trees for the front yard getting delivered.
October
In October we took advantage of RADical Days at the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, which is currently our favorite place of all the places we’ve checked out with the kids. Which is basically just the Carnegie Science Center, the Carnegie Natural History Museum and the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh. It is AWESOME! The Science Center is a close second, but is better suited to slightly older kiddos. So yeah, we got in for FREE since it was RADical Days, but it was incredibly busy and jam-packed with people. Which means I was stressed beyond my capacity. One time when I was little…definitely under 8 years old…my mom had us at Sears and I was running off like kids do and she scared the living hell out of me by telling me that a store like that was where Adam Walsh was kidnapped and all they ever found was his head. I’m pretty sure she probably has no recollection of ever doing that. BUT I DO. And that fear is still with me when I take my kids ANYWHERE outside the house. So, although I don’t look it, I am an internal wreck if I don’t have both kids tethered down and/or in my line of sight at all times in public. But where were we…October…right. So we also took a trip to Colorado, wherein Dagny made the big switch to a big girl bed and I got my hair cut (fixed) by my beloved stylist, Monica. Upon returning home, I gave Dagny her very first haircut and tucked the first fallen lock into her baby book. After that the big news was the first snowfall, which yielded a pretty nice snowman which stayed fairly well intact for Halloween. Dagny dressed up as The Cat in The Hat and Bode was an adorable little monkey. Looks like I never posted about Halloween. We did the neighborhood parade, which is one of my favorite annual events. Then we went for a brief trick-or-treat as it was very cold outside. Dags had a blast until her fingers and toes started to hurt. So we went home and handed out more candy. Somewhere in the midst of all that fun, Bode started walking and he hasnt slowed down since!
Dagny's First Sleep in a BIG Bed
RADical Days at the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh
Dagny's first try with chopsticks at Noodles & Co in Broomfield, CO!
Dagny's First Haircut! I did it myself and I think it looks adorable!
Our first snow, and our first snow man 
Trick or Treating with my little Cat in the Hat
Our Life <3
November
The fact that I never posted about Halloween might have been a tip off, but somewhere between August and December I lost my way. Depression took me down hard. I quit yoga. Lots of napping and going through the motions like a robot. There isn’t much to write about as a result. I think it all sort of came to a head in November, which is good because I think things have been slowing looking up ever since. We joined the YMCA and started going to Spin classes twice a week. Then we spent the month battling the falling leaves, which was a great boon to the kids. They had so much fun running through the piles and getting buried and throwing toys into the pile. Of course, November is when Thanksgiving happens and we had a lovely one this year. I honestly can’t remember who’s house we were at, but I think it was Lauren & Dave’s. Or it could have been Jim & Jamie’s. I didn’t take a single picture so now we’ll never know.
Dagny is now well-versed in "licking the beaters." As well as licking the spoons, spatulas and bow
The never-ending pile of leaves! We STILL have leaves piled against the fence right now...in FEBRUARY. I don't know where they come from!
December
We got to go to the Children’s Museum again for a Christmas Party! The month of December is a blur up here in PA. There are parties and festivities and putting up decorations during every free moment. Every weekend there is something to see or do. And this year we were blessed with a visit from my brother, Matt and his (now) fiancee, Rachel. I hadn’t seen Matt in at least 2 years, so this was a very special even for me, probably what finally pulled me out of the funk I was stuck in. We cleaned the house and organized the basement and set up a little basement guest area (of which I am very proud.) They slept a lot and we never even managed to open the bottle of Caduceus we ordered just for the occasion. We did manage to get them to Primanti’s, Pamela’s and the Dusquesne Incline. Speaking of the incline…it made a huge impression on Dagny. She mentions it almost weekly, just like Kennywood. And ironically she just came down the stairs hollering, “I’m going to the incline!” Weird. Maybe she has ESP. Gah! We also went to the Shriner’s Christmas celebration as a guest of our neighbor, Glenn…who also gave us a huge artificial Christmas tree. And it turned out that for a week or so in December, right before Matt came to visit, Tom Cruise was in OUR TOWN, literally a few hundred yards away from OUR HOUSE, filming some action movie. Word is, they were shooting inside this run down warehouse looking building called the Allegheny River Terminal. A building that drive by almost daily, and every time think to myself what a great movie set it would make. My good taste has been confirmed. Ha. Apparently Tom was seen in Parnassus, just down the hill from our house, and at Fox’s Pizza in downtown New Ken/Arnold. While I’m not a crazy Tom Cruise fan, it was pretty crazy to think of him walking around in our town like that. Anyway, we capped off the month with one of Kelly’s soccer games. Dagny loooooooved it. It was an indoor game and the field had see-through walls around it. She would run along the wall with the girls, following the ball. One time the ball came right to the wall and she about lost it with excitement. It makes me smile, just thinking about it.
The trailers that were parked by the marina during the Tom Cruise thing.
The building Tom Cruise & company were allegedly filming in...with some big light things outside.
Snow Siblings
Matt & Rachel gave the kids an early Christmas.
We took Matt & Rachel to Pamela's in the strip district.
We rode the Dusquesne Incline with Matt & Rachel. Dagny hasn't stopped talking about it since.
Matt took this awesome shot of Pittsburgh's golden triangle from the viewing deck at the Dusquesne Incline.
Well, so that was our year. I’m sure there were things I left out, but hey, these are just the highlights. This year I’ll try to do a better job with posting. In fact, I think I already am. Lots of pictures going up. I try not to do to much but I guess there’s really no point in worrying. So yeah, I’m just going to do what I do and if you like it keep coming back. If not…well, I guess I’ll carry on without you.
Love, Carly
XOXO
