Sleepy babes, home improvement and more nerdiness

Monday we woke up to an exciting snowy surprise after a sneak peek of Spring.  Matthew's timidness about the snow has worn off and now I can't keep him out of it (or from eating it).  He's also learned to throw snowballs.

Thanks to the great weather and longer evenings I'm having a hard time getting motivated to get dinner on the table and the kids in bed instead of going for walks or playing.  This has been royally messing up naps, causing me to break the cardinal rule of waking a sleeping baby.  At least it gives me an excuse to get sleepy baby pictures :-)

This week Catherine had her 9 month check up (sniff! sniff!)  As the pediatrician noted when we walked in "if I hadn't seen her standing there I would have guessed just by her weight charts that she's mobile".  Our little peanut dropped from the 25th percentile to 15th for weight and is in about the 30th for height.  She must get her petiteness from her grandmas.  She however fits in with the rest of the family with her giant 93rd percentile noggin.  She's otherwise healthy and happy and I was thrilled to enter and leave the pediatricians with a well child finally!

We've otherwise had an exciting weekend of home improvement.  What started as a project to install a kitty door so we could keep the dogs out of the litter box and keep the kids from accidentally shutting the cats out of the room with the litter box turned into a pipe-capping, sink-removing, saw-buying, garage-rearranging event.  Then to make matters better (or worse, I'm not sure) on one of my million trips to Ace, I saw the ads for the Home Expo.  We decided to go check it out and glean some tips for the 8,000 other home projects on our list.   When we walked in, they were handing out buckets from the local hardware store.  Then at the first table some nice ladies gave Matthew candy.  Naturally, the boy thought it was Halloween and was pretty thrilled about the Expo in general.  He even asked to make a toolbox this time (well, okay he doesn't really get the toolbox thing but asked to either pound or make noise which was highly appealing):

And later at the park shared his construction hat with Catherine:

While he was busy climbing:

Back home, Catherine was a huge help as we got to work on installing the cat door:

 She was rocking Matthew's old Defcon shirt from Uncle Matt, but would let me take a picture:

 The girl's sure got attitude:

 There, that's better!  She's sure going to break some nerdy hearts!

It wasn't all work and no play, Catherine took a break to play with her puppies:

 Meanwhile, Matthew exhausted himself studying up for our big trip to Alaska.  He has a strange fascination/love of all the Shannon Cartwright/Alaska books I have from my teaching days and is already excited about picking up the ones we're missing from the collection when we're there:

 Matthew's taken to styling his hair after bath.  He looked all handsome with his slicked back hair but when I pulled out the camera he decided to show off a new 'do: