Vroom! Vroom!

Gianna loves this car and I've mentioned it before but I wanted to show a picture...

She loves the cell/car phone part the best.

And here's a picture of her with her pom pom from the rally.

UCD v. SJSU

Today was the first time UCD has played SJSU. The game was in San Jose so we decided to go.

We took Gianna to the Alumni tailgating event before the game so that she could watch Mommy play in the Alumni Marching Band...but for the game she went to stay at her Great Aunt Mary's house to have some play time with Courtney and her family. Then Justin and I got to watch the game without worrying about her being exposed to the sun, noise and wind outside.

We went to the game with our friends Jenny, Steve and Sophia from playgroup. Sophia is such a good girl that she slept through 2 hours of the game and then was in great spirits the rest of the time. She must love football!














It was fun to play drums again, the drum was heavy and awkward as always but I was happy to be able to participate in an Alumni event since I have been pregnant or the weather has been terrible at every alumni event since we graduated.

I loved watching how excited Gianna was by the marching band. We also thought it was adorable that she showed such an interest in my drumsticks. I love this picture of her holding onto the stick in my pocket. It is too cute! Homecoming is in about a month and we're bringing Gianna to that too, but this time she'll get to stay for the whole game. We are really looking forward to it. GO AGS!!!

Love,
Jessica

PS In case you couldn't tell by my not mentioning it, we lost :( But the Band won! SJSU's band left after one song!!! :)

Running from Daddy

I read in a magazine a fun game to do with your baby to teach them cause and effect and to also teach them to anticipate and associate. Anyway, the game is the Tickle Bee game. We started playing it with Gianna when she was about 6 months old and she really loves it! She is super ticklish and laughs histerically whenever we start the "Buzz" of the tickle bee. Tonight she was really crawling around and Justin was chasing her around as the tickle bee and it was hillarious! We captured the end of the chasing on video. It's especially funny in the beginning when you can watch her running away from Daddy. This also shows how fast she's getting!

Bear-y Cute!

Today was a really gloomy day, and it really just felt like winter. Gianna and I stayed inside most of the day expect for one quick errand. Luckily her being so mobile makes it easy to spend a day inside without getting bored. She especially loves it when Mommy drives her up and down the hall on her little car. Man, does that make her giggle (although, in all fairness almost everything makes her giggle these days).


Anyway, when daddy got home we decided to go for a walk and since it was so chilly outside Gianna got to wear this cute Bear onesie that Lisa gave us for our shower. She thought it was pretty funny to look at herself in the mirror and got really laughing for the pictures. She is so adorable in this outfit and it was nice and cozy. This will have to go with us to North Dakota (if it still fits then). Please ignore the left-over food on her face...she hates getting clean unless its bathtime!

Play Group

We've been having a lot of fun at playgroup lately, a few of the babies are moving around so its fun to watch them actually really interact with each other. Gianna is still the bully...this week, at dawns house, she wrestled with Hayden a little and used him to prop herself up on. He was very understanding...what a nice boy!

He is so big that even though he's not quite moving as much as Gianna (he's about 5 weeks younger), he can still hold his own. Don't worry, she didn't hurt him and in this picture it looks like she was holding him down a lot, but he was okay and there were lots of Mommies standing around watching too.

Here's another cute picture of Hayden and Gianna, there were other babies there, but for some reason they were hanging out a lot. I think Gianna liked Hayden's green motorcycle shirt! And I think Hayden liked watching Gianna crawl around.

The most exciting thing for playgroup lately is that we finally have our reservation for the Holliday Train of Lights. It will be a fun outing for all of the families and we can't wait!

Personality Plenty!!! and Portia is 2!

Gianna is developing some very distinguishable personality traits that we love to watch developing. Here are a few of my favorites:

She loves to poke! Especially buttons, puffs, teeth, noses, a spot...anything.

She loves to give kisses and has a special kiss for Daddy and a special kiss for Mommy.

She likes purses and shoes and to take everything out of any purse or bag.

She loves peekaboo more than anything in the word. (Object permanence anyone?)

She loves to crawl, the funniest part is when she decides to sit and she backs up like 2 feet before the butt finally lands. This is especially funny when she crawls to something she wants to get up on to. When she stops crawling she is in arms reach but when she finally gets to sitting she is so far away that she can't reach whatever it was she was going to pull up on! So funny.

She's a total flirt...especially with strangers. We rode the train and Bart today and she was charming people left and right. She gets them laughing too and she loves it when she can exchange smiles with someone.

She is not a good sleeper...but that just means its more hours of playtime!

Oh and she loves Pizza crust (no cheese, please)!

Here is a video of her riding CalTrains all by herself today.


In other news...Portia is 2!!! Wow, it's hard to imagine that someday Gianna will be 2 also. She looked so cute in her dress and blowing our her candle. It got us thinking about Gianna's first birthday, it's just 4 months away. Wow. I've posted some pics from the party including an updated one of Portia (2), Gianna (8months) and Courtney (4 months) with their parents. All of us 1983 Kav babies had kids within 20 months of each other. Crazy! It will be so fun to watch these girls grow up together.
Love,
Jessica
Update: I decided to post the original picture of las tres amigas as Uncle Larry so appropriately named them, so you could see how they've grown (well, mostly Courtney). How time flies. In this one Portia is 20 months, Gianna is 4 months and Courtney is 8 days.

My girls :)

I just thought I'd put some pictures up of my girls. Here's a great one. I can't wait to fly with these two beautiful girls when we go to North Dakota in November!
Yes, you are cute!Like mother like daughter. They both love the beach.
I just thought these would be nice for people to see.
love,
Justin

Some more Japan Pics

Hey, someone at work sent me this. This is us working in what we call the "vendor room", basically our office while we're at work in Japan. We hang out here until we need to head into the clean room. We appear to be deep in thought, maybe about what to have for dinner? From left to right you have Cap, Don, Kane, Me, Chuck(hidden, maybe trying to find a snack to eat or trying to find a way to tunnel out of the place), and Larry
- Justin

Whew...what a weekend!

Well, since we last updated we have been so busy! Wednesday night was so exciting with Gianna just starting to crawl...and we have gotten to witness it so much since then too. I am glad because sometimes you hear of babies who try crawling and decide that they're not that into it and just hold off for cruising and walking. Not our baby! She is a crawling machine. Each movement is still very calculated but she is starting to pick up speed especially when she notices a forgotten sandal, watch, cell phone, purse, etc. She is so cute. She also loves to crawl up to the ottoman and climb up it to standing. It is very fun to watch her readjust over and over until she gets to standing.

Thursday we started Baby & Me class with Livermore Parks and Rec. It is especially fun because there is a 10 month old in the class named Peyton who is a very quick crawler and Gianna loves to watch him. I also forgot to mention, in recent playgroup news that Gianna grabbed Ryan's tooshie and tried to give Hayden a big Kiss/bite all in the same day. Watch out boys she's a wild one!

The weekend was great because Gianna's Grandpa and Grandma B came to visit and even stayed at her house! It was great to have them here and to spend some time with Gianna. Today (Sunday) we had a BBQ at our house with both sets of grandparents, the Thompsons and the Mathews. It was fun to have a big group here and we love entertaining at our new home. Gianna also loves playing with Jadyn and Cole (especially their hair and trying to get their cookies). She also loved playing on the floor with Jadyn, Cole and Grandma C and her big pink ball. It was very fun to see that Gianna is finally getting to be old enough to start to play with the boys.

This weekend we also had some time to put some finishing touches on the decorating of the house. We finished our family picture wall in the living room and I finished the curtains for Gianna's room (white eyelet with a very subtle lavender ribbon). I am glad that they are both done and very happy with the results. We also decided on the curtains for our room and decided to go with the more plain curtains. Sorry for those of you who voted for the tasseled ones, but Justin Vetoed them saying that they were way too girly. Ha ha!

Well, that's all for now, I hope everyone had a great weekend!

Love,
Jessica

We're in trouble...

Because Gianna is CRAWLING!!!!

And we got the first time on video!

In case you didn't catch that, here it is again!

Justin is frantically putting in the rest of our outlet covers as we speak!

Lots of Love,

Jessica

Otto-MAN!!! YAY!

Our Ottoman has come in. I'm excited, can you tell?! Gianna loves standing holding on to things, so our solution to figuring out what ugly hair-scrunchie looking thing to put around our coffee table was to scrap the coffee table all together and get an ottoman! It's so pretty, and Justin loves that you can turn the cushions over into trays then it still functions for holding drinks.

My favorite part is that it stores things. Right now one side is board games and other junk we kept on the shelf of the old table and the other side is Gianna's toys. I am so stoked for her to wake up and see it here in the morning :).

Here's the reason that we needed an ottoman (she did this for about 10 minutes today) and it shows our old beast of a coffee table:


Double Yay once more!
Next: End Tables...any advice?

Love,
Jessica

Dad and Gianna at the zoo

I took Gianna to the zoo today while mom stayed home. Mom got some time to herself and some cleaning done. Gianna and I had a great time looking mainly at all the kids running around. Gianna thinks all the people are so much more fun to watch than any of the animals. Except for the pig. She loved watching the pig walk around. She got really excited when we were walking up, she started laughing and jumping as soon as she saw this monster of a pig!






We also had a good time hanging out together. Although she wouldn't share her banana puff snacks with me! They really are good. She loves it when I shake the container full of the puffs. Come to think of it, she likes it when we shake anything that makes noise :)

Well, we had a really great time. Gianna was perfect the whole trip. She even managed to nap both ways and feed herself a bottle on the trip home! I was pretty proud of her for that! OK I've gotta go.

Love,
Justin

Bouncy! Bouncy! Bouncy!

Well, Gianna has finally figured out how to use the Johnny Jump-up and she loves it! I think that practicing in both Nicolas' and Hayden's at playgroup helped though. Thanks for sharing guys! One caveat: she totally knows when I leave a room so today I thought I was being clever by putting it on the bathroom door while I took a shower but the second she couldn't see me she was so upset! Lately shower time is getting shorter and shorter and I can only imagine how it will be once she really has the crawling thing down. Any advice from seasoned moms is appreciated :)

Wow, okay back to the topic at hand...

Anyway, now that she has the whole jumping and bouncing thing figured out, I can't get her to stop!!! It was so funny a few weeks ago when Chelynn put Nicolas on her lap and he started jumping up and down...but I guess Gianna and Nicolas have been spending a lot of time together because now she does it everytime she's standing on my lap, or standing at the couch, or in her exersaucer, or trying to crawl or kneeling at her activity table, or...well, you get the point! It is very cute though and she gets the biggest smile on her face. The picture at the beginning of this post is during one of her bouncing episodes, you can see how happy it makes her(and her big teeth)! The adorable thing is now when I say "Bouncy Bouncy Bouncy" and bob my head she smiles and starts bouncing. It's like she's really starting to understand. Now only if I could get her to understand, "Let go of my hair that really hurts a lot,"!!! She's too cute to care when she does it though. Oh boy, she's gonna be a hand-full!

It's hard to believe she was ever so small

It's hard to believe that just a few months ago Gianna was this small. Last night she was soo close to crawling. It seems like she might do it any day now. If she could only get that right leg to move like the left one :) I just always liked this picture, it's an old one but a good one.
Love,
Justin

Escaping the Heat

We had to get out of the crazy Livermore heat for the weekend so on Saturday we took the long way around (due to the Bay Bridge closure-ahh) to San Francisco.

It was fun, we were so happy to get out of the heat and Gianna got to take her first trip to the Japanese Tea Garden and Golden Gate Park Conservatory of Flowers. She loves plants and being outside so it was the perfect trip for her!

We also got some amazing pictures of her on the lawn in Golden Gate Park. She thought she was getting away with murder because we set her on the grass and let her play with the flowers. It was so cute!

After a great day out we found out that Grandma and Great Grammy were in San Francisco too so we met them for Dinner. The after dinner we headed down to Great Grammy's to stay for the rest of the weekend.

On Sunday Gina (happy birthday!) came by with Alexia and Portia so the 2nd cousins got to hang out, although the age differences are so great they don't really play together. But we did get a few pictures. In this one they are all looking at my mom, ha ha! At least no one is blinking :)

On Monday we went over to Stanford Shopping center for a walk. We didn't walk long though because Justin's bee sting that he got on the arch of his foot Saturday just as we were leaving Golden Gate park was still all puffy and bothering him. Next we headed back to Great Grammy's for a BBQ and visit with some of Mommy's cousins and Gianna's 2nd cousin, Courtney. Courtney has gotten even bigger since we last saw her! She is the most mellow baby though. Even when Gianna tries to attack her she just keeps hanging out. She is so cute! And she is definately heavier than Gianna.

Well, now we are back in Livermore and we went on our walk this morning, Gianna was so cranky! Sorry to everyone who was there. She's having a hard time napping, but hopefully the weather cooling down will help her sleep better.