Hypothetically in some cases, that is.

1. Took a course in toddler speak. I learned that coke means coat, or it means milk or it actually means coke, depending on the situation. I also learned that when your toddler points at something and you don’t know what they want, they will end up wanting the last thing you offer them.

2. Learned how to dance. From The Wiggles. I now know the “Wiggle Groove” and the “Hoop Dee Do” Dance.I also probably look like a complete idiot dancing to The Wiggles but Molly loves it.

3. Learned to let go. A couple nights away from Molly doesn’t kill me and she enjoys the break as much as I do.

4. Applied for lots of jobs. Had one interview and was never called back even though I thought it went well. Hey, it is okay. I will find something eventually.

5. Read books. Lots of books. I also watched the movies and TV shows associated with some of those books.

6. Napped. Sometimes. Maybe like twice.

I used to look at my blog like a job and I started resenting it. Now that I took a break from it I feel refreshed and ready to write about things that are important to me and actually enjoy doing it.

I love Target. I would live there if I could, although I am kind of mad at them for getting rid of my favorite cookies (they were Target brand oreos that had fudge in the middle….mmm.) So, when I saw that their fall girls clothing was ADORABLE and droolworthy, I immediately wanted all of it.

I have gotten the girls a few pieces of it, Molly wore this shirt from the Genuine Kids line today:

It reminds me of the Tea Collection shirt I posted about yesterday, thankfully it was $30 less! Her jeans are from Old Navy and have a tie waist, which I love because even adjustable waist jeans fall off of her.  Her shoes are Ralph Lauren, I got them on clearance from Amazon.com when they were running an extra 25% off. They ended up being $16 and they match way more things than I thought they would, they are the blue madras plaid ones.

Kate wore a shirt from the Cherokee line today. She is in the 75th percentile for height and I have a hard time finding clothes to fit her properly, she is in 9-12 already and can wear some 12-18. Her leggings are Carters.

I am IN LOVE with the Missoni line for Target, even though my only real source of getting it is EBay and some awesome friends from the messsage board I am on. So far I have gotten the girls these pieces:

Molly loves the trench coat, she says “Coat Coat!” and wants to wear it all of the time.

The following are the pieces from the Target fall collection I am lusting after:

Genuine Kids from OshKosh™ Infant Toddler Girls’ Corduroy Drop Yoke Skirt – Cream

Genuine Kids from OshKosh™ Infant Toddler Girls’ Short-Sleeve Dot Corduroy Dress – Purple

Cherokee® Infant Toddler Girls’ Long-Sleeve Dot Top – Green

Plus they have the cutest ruffled cardigans, I couldn’t find those online. I love all of the fall colors!

Do you have anything you are currently drooling over for your little ones? Tell me about it!

I have written so many posts about the girls and the funny things that they do and then I just don’t finish them. Kate is crawling everywhere now and Molly has officially hit the terrible twos (the girls pediatrician called them the “terrific twos”, I’d like some of what she is smoking please.) The combination of the crawling and Molly’s temper tantrums make it so I have the attention span of the dog in “Up”.

Here are a couple recent pictures of the two of them (taken at Portrait Innovations):

I have also done a lot of thinking about where I want to go with the blog. I thought about renaming it “two and a half kids”, but then I gave my dog to my parents because I was having a hard time keeping up with her and the girls, so that name doesn’t make sense anymore. I have also thought about making it more of a childrens fashion blog. One of my FAVORITE things to do is buy clothing for the girls. I have been lusting after this shirt for Molly from Tea Collection:

This past week Gap was running a 40% off sale, and I got Molly (&Kate although Kate doesn’t need much) these things:

Quilted Barn Jacket (For Molly)

Side Bow Top (For Molly)

Corduroy Floral Print Top (For Kate)

Sparkle Sweater Knit Tights (For Kate)

Bow Pocket Striped Dress (For Molly)

Zebra Shift Dress (For Molly &OMG this is the SOFTEST dress ever ever EVER!)

Zebra Cropped Cardigan (For Molly. They have this paired with the side bow top but I think it would be cute with just a black tee and skinny jeans underneath)

Flower Power Sweater (For Molly)

So, I am leaning towards making it more fashion oriented and renaming it “Molly and Kate’s Closet”. We will see. I probably won’t buy a new URL, I haven’t decided what I am doing yet. Hopefully I can find the time to write more often than I have been!

Note that Molly keeps stealing Kate’s binky.

Thank you to Yahoo! Mail for sponsoring this post about staying connected. I was selected for this sponsorship by the Clever Girls Collective, which endorses Blog With Integrity, as I do.

My email account is an obsession for me. Every morning when I get up, I check my phone to see what email came in overnight. None of it is overly exciting, but it still is something I look forward to everyday. Sometimes (okay, a lot of the time) I get sale emails that prompt me to purchase something I’ve been eying for the girls, or myself, or the dog…. Sometimes I get emails that tell me I’ve won a random contest I entered (most recently I won points to my fav consignment site), other times I just get junk. There is just something about that little envelope at the top of my phone that just gets me so excited to see what it is about.

The best email I have received lately is one that had a really cute picture of Kate and I at my brother’s graduation party attached.

Please excuse my face and just look at how adorable Kate is. She is such a little squishy! She is almost 5 months old and weighs as much as Molly did when she was one.

Anyways, back to my email… I often wonder how people would communicate if not for email. How on earth would I know about my favorite sales? How would I talk to other moms about how to get out of teething hell? How would I know my orders have shipped and be able to stalk them? Would we just write letters and wait for them to arrive? This world has gone from a slow pace to having the expectation of instant gratification in the matter of just a couple decades and I really don’t know how I could survive, if not for email.

To be honest, I really can’t remember a time when I didn’t have almost instant access to my email. In college I worked in an office where my student email account was also my work email account, so I was in front of that constantly. After college I worked a salaried job where I was attached to my Motorola Q almost all the time. After that job I had a position where I had a BlackBerry that was expected to be on at all times and my boss emailed at 2am.  Even being home with two kids I just cannot let go of the need to check my email, in the hopes that I will be given some sort of task to work on to bide my time.

How people could survive without email is something I hope I never have to find out.

I leave you with this Yahoo! video, which I find to be adorable and funny about how people use email.

Getting two kids ready to go anywhere is a challenge, let alone a toddler and an infant. Today I wanted to go to the store and told Molly that we were going to go soon….the conversation went something like this:

Me: Molly, were going to go in the car soon!
Molly: da? Dadadadadadada? Go?

::Molly runs to the door screaming gogogogo? Wiggle?::

Me: Molly wait a minute, I need to feed the baby and you need shoes!
Molly: (banging on the door) baby? Dad? Gogogogo? Wiggle? Sooos?

By this time Molly has the dog all excited, so now the dog thinks she’s going in the car and is jumping on the door.

I fed the baby and got her in her seat (did I mention Kate is 4 months old and 15 lbs? Her seat is getting so heavy!) and got Molly her shoes. We went out to get in the car and the dog, who has decided she is going even though she isn’t, runs out and starts circling the car. I got the babies in the car, at this point Molly is yelling “wiggle wiggle wiggle wiggle wiggle!!!!” because she knows she gets to watch the wiggles in the car and wants to watch them RIGHT NOW! and Kate is crying because she hates the car. I wrangled the dog, got her back inside and we set off to the store, finally.

Until I realized I forgot my debit card in the house.

Thank you to Yahoo! Mail for sponsoring this post about staying connected. I was selected for this sponsorship by the Clever Girls Collective, which endorses Blog With Integrity, as I do.

Have you ever received exciting news via email? I think most of my emails involving exciting news were precipitated by phone calls. Two job offers have come via email to me, including my first real job. My mom likes to email me pictures, which are always fun to look at and sometimes she will send candid shots like this one:

My grandmother on my moms side passed away the year before I was born, so I treasure pictures of my mom and the girls, because you never know what will happen tomorrow.

The best emails I get currently  are those from other moms. Through being a part of a community of moms who blog, I’ve become friends with people I never would have met otherwise. When I used to update my blog more often, I could write a post about how much I hated teething, and I would get emails from people with suggestions and remedies that I hadn’t thought of. There are other moms I have met through email/blogging that I’ve become good friends with, being able to talk to them via phone and text message when I had a mom question I needed answered immediately.

However, the best email I ever received was one from my academic adviser in college. She wrote me, asking me to stop by as soon as possible regarding my graduate assistantship. I originally hadn’t qualified for the assistantship that would have paid for my MBA. My adviser got me a position in her office and since I was already working there towards the start of the school year, I was kept on board and given the assistantship. One of the proudest days of my college life was receiving the email saying that I was going to be kept on to be a Graduate Assistant. I had gotten such horrible news before then via email, like declines from Business schools I had wanted to go to, that I will always remember the moment I knew everything was “ok” in my life. That email changed my future and I wouldn’t be where I am today had I not gotten that position.

Molly was eating penne pasta and when she was finished she started throwing her leftovers on the newly groomed white dog. The dog now has red stains on her once clean coat.

Kate has started giggling like a little crazy person. It is absolutely adorable and it makes me laugh until I could cry.

Molly finger painted for the first time yesterday and didn’t like getting her hands dirty, so she rubbed them all over her face and hair. She had blue bangs and red streaks on her face—the harder I laughed at her the more she laughed.

Kate HAS to be on her tummy at all times or she is angry. When she is on her tummy she looks around and sometimes tries to watch tv or generally just watches Molly running around like a maniac.

Molly chases the dog like a zombie and laughs hysterically the entire time. She especially loves it when the dog barks back at her.

I am sure it’s all to obvious that I haven’t had time to update—I’ve written several posts but haven’t posted them and by the time I get back to them it’s like a week after I originally wrote the post and it isn’t relevant anymore.

Here are some newer pictures of the girls:

I am going to try and be better about posting!

When you have a toddler it is so easy to forget that you once celebrated moments like this:

First laugh on camera.

This one was one of Molly’s (she was around 3 months here, but it’s a favorite):

And today, Kate held her head up for the longest time I have seen her do it. I was so excited and proud that I almost cried (though that may not be saying much, post-baby hormones have made me an emotional wreck).

Celebrating the little moments is what makes having kids the best. It amazes me what I started to take for granted in Molly, because it wasn’t that long ago that she was Kate’s age and I was cheering her on for rolling over or smiling. Now Molly rolls over while I am changing her, smiles and runs away from me half naked.

Every single day is an amazing one and I am so proud to be the mother of these two little awesome people.

I think the above picture says it all. Molly is the proudest big sister in the world. In fact, in the picture above, Kate is trying to latch onto Molly’s face, but Molly thinks she is kissing her, so she’s so so excited that her sister is showing her love.

Currently they are both sleeping, which is a total miracle and won’t last long.  Molly has been a toddler terror lately. She’s sweet as sugar one minute and then when you turn around she’s freaking out because her stuffed giraffe looked at her funny. What’s so hard about figuring Molly out is that she doesn’t “really” talk yet. She says “more” and signs it, but it could mean innumerable things, including nothing at all.

Molly has been dancing a lot lately. She loves music….especially Yo Gabba Gabba. She jumps up and down at the opening credits. She also talks to herself and loves to draw. Her favorite animal is a giraffe and when she wants to take a nap she finds every single blanket she can and makes a nest.

Kate is totally different creature than Molly. Where Molly was vocal about things, Kate just goes with the flow. She sleeps well at night (for the most part) and generally doesn’t mind anything you do to her.The only thing she gets worked up about is if Molly gets too close to her or hits her or steals her pacifier (which is every five minutes).

I never knew it was possible to love this much (is that cheesy or what?). Every day is challenging with two girls, but it’s totally worth it.