September

We finally got ourselves to the Virginia Discovery Museum downtown. It has a lot of fun learning activities for kids. They can roam and explore as they please. Josh had a lot of fun but there was too much to do so he was kind of overloaded and too excited to focus on anything for longer than a few seconds. But this activity (pictured) he stayed at for quite awhile.

We started attending a Mainly Music class on Friday mornings. Josh loves dancing to the music and is getting better at following directions from the teacher. For one class they were supposed to bring their favorite stuffed animal to sing some songs with. I enjoy the class too because it's a casual enough environment that I don't need to worry about keeping Emma perfectly silent or Josh perfectly behaved and I get to spend some time with Josh doing fun music activities.

Emma turned 3 months old. She is happier and cries less. She still doesn't really have a nap schedule and still wakes up a few times at night but I'm just glad she's overall a happy baby.

We went to a friend's birthday party and they have a few dogs. This is where Josh spent the most of the evening. He LOVES dogs. We don't plan on ever getting one so we're glad we have friends with dogs!

"Cleaning" the island with shaving cream.

The autumn weather here is perfect so we get outside as much as we can. We usually have the community park all to ourselves.

Naptime.

Breakfast at the orchard. Josh just sat there eating a donut staring at the digger.

Movie night.

A new chalkboard/art easel!

 A little Band Hero.

After-nap snacktime and Baby Einstein.

I snapped a few pictures of Emma smiling at her daddy.

Brandon's family has been doing a "Despain Family Fitness Challenge" about once a year the past few years and it's a great way to recommit to a workout or nutritious-eating plan to improve your health and a fun way to motivate each other to reach our goals. My goal for this challenge is to fit back into my pre-pregnant pants by Thanksgiving. So I committed to working out 5 times a week to help me reach that goal. For this fitness challenge we were given some money up front to use for things to help us reach our goals (if we didn't reach our goal we had to give the money back). I'd been looking for a Phil and Ted's double jogging stroller on craigslist forever and just in time for my fitness challenge I found a great deal on one and boy did it change my life! Greatest stroller ever. So I used my money to buy this stroller and a new pair of cross trainers.