Courtesy of Evan Bybee Photography

I thought Evan got a pretty dramatic picture here. Ha! I love that little lip. She's such a sweet girl. So, since Maren hardly ever gets any blog space, here's an update on her. She has started making kissy lips and will always do it after you do. Michael even got some pretty sweet kisses from her yesterday. I was jealous. She so wants to be a walker. She just loves to stand so much. I can't believe her so-short body will be walking around this house before we know it. She likes to wave and clap, although her clapping skill went completely away for about a month. I wondered what happened to it until one day, out of the blue, she started clapping again. She adores Evan and is pretty much happy any time he is around. She is still chubby and we love it as much as ever.

Her two favorite things in the whole world are taking a bath and riding in the shopping cart. We have a game we play when it's bath time. We put her far away from the bathroom and engage her with a toy. Then we tell Evan to turn on the water so we can watch her face turn to excitement and see her book it, in her military crawl, down the hall as fast as she can go. The other day we didn't even have to wait for the water to turn on. As soon as she heard the shower curtain move back, she was off and "running".

As for the shopping cart, the other day all it took was walking into Fred Meyer and seeing the carts sitting there. She started pumping her legs like crazy. She just loves it. About 20 minutes into the trip she seemed agitated and appeared to want out, to my surprise. When I took her out, she wanted to face out and then she was grabbing for the cart handle. She wanted to PUSH the shopping cart! So, I let her as I held her (quite a workout for me!). Oh, the squeals of delight! Oh, the leg kicks! She was absolutely in heaven. You could hear her squeals eight aisles down. People kept looking, smiling, laughing at her. Michael and I took turns being the one to hold her so that the other one could walk in front of the cart and just watch her elated face. She is a joy. We love her so much!