Howdy!

We've been having a blast on our Texas trip! The weather has been absolutely perfect-- 75 and sunny every day! (rain is predicted for the second half of the week, but we really can't complain). We've  been enjoying long walks, lots of dogs, and especially the people!

Here are some pictures from the week:


On our way to the Houston Rodeo:

Yee-haw! (we sadly lost this hat about an hour after buying it):

The baby chicks were a favorite with Katherine. She giggled at them for almost 10 minutes straight:

Katherine has LOVED playing with the dogs, and learned to make friends with them by sharing her food. Here she figured out how to open her bag of Cheerios, dumped a pile on the floor, and crawled away. Hapmton was a happy dog!

It's been a perfect trip so far, and we can't wait to see what the rest of the week brings!

Picture Perfect

One of Katherine's new favorite past-times is looking at pictures of family that we keep around the house. This morning during breakfast she started pointing to the fridge, indicating that she wanted to see pictures. I gave her a favorite picture of Oma and Opa as you can see below. She happily points to them, and even gives them kisses (I had a hard time capturing the kiss picture)! 

We're all super excited because tomorrow we'll get to go to Texas and see Oma and Opa for real! Katherine is sure to have some kisses saved up to share with them then too. :-)

Moo, Baa, La La La!

Katherine has started to notice and love all animal noises. Whenever she sees Buttercup (our cat), she bounces and says "ma ma mow," and she loves roaring at the tiger on her wall during diaper changes. She also makes monkey and doggy noises (although doggy sounds oddly like "ooh ooh ah ah") and she loves when Mommy makes elephant noises. :-)

Since she's also getting more into books, we decided to splurge on a couple favorites for her... "Moo, Baa, La La La!" will be a birthday gift from Mommy and Daddy, and "What do you Say" is just for fun. :-)

Here's a picture of our little animal lover acting like a "little goose!"

Sweet Kisses.

With a little girl as sweet as Katherine, it's easy to imagine Mommy and Daddy just about smother her with kisses. Lately we've been fortunate that she'll sometimes even return kisses too. On rare occasions, she's even leaned up to us, asking for a kiss from us.

Here's a sweet shot of her blowing kisses back to Mommy:

And here she is blowing kisses to you!!

11 Months!!

Today we reach the last month of "month counting" before Katherine's first birthday!!

Katherine's been growing rapidly lately. It seems like each day she's an inch taller. She certainly is able to reach more things-- this morning she reached the milestone of being able to reach items on top of the table (yikes!). 

She also has already almost outgrown her 9-12 month pajamas and pants. In just a couple weeks we'll find out how big she really is at her 1 year check-up!

Katherine seems to also  be attaching to a new "lovey." Mommy tucked Katherine with a blanket a few weeks ago, and Katherine hasn't wanted to part with it ever since. She snuggles up and tucks her blanket under one arm, often using it as a pillow, with George under her other arm.

Here's a picture of our big girl dreaming happily:

V-Day... no not victory day... That's May 9th!

Happy Valentines Day all! We here at the Block family just wanted to wish everyone and their loved ones a day of warmth and happiness!

Here are some pictures (it's kind of like our valentines present to all of you!)

Here's Katherine enjoying her first sled ride!

And her awesome new hair!

Speaking of which, here is mommy's awesome new hair!

And here they are together!

News Report

Yikes! It's the middle of February, and we haven't posted in weeks! Here's a brief summary of the Block Family happenings:


Daddy's been hard at work with classes and taking care of Katherine. He did an awesome job studying for midterms, and has also been enjoying the (mostly) warmer weather by playing Disc Golf:

Katherine is officially a "4moms" baby! Mommy decided she was ready for a career change, and has accepted a job with Thorley Industries, working in sales support. She'll start working for 4moms on February 23rd. Although she loved working for the WIC program, and whole heartedly supports WIC, she's very excited to grow personally and professionally.

By the way... we DO feed her things other than giant bagels... she just looks so cute eating them that we tend to take a lot of pictures....

We've also been enjoying spending time with family. Here we are celebrating Uncle Dave's birthday... Katherine is also lucky to spend 2 afternoons a week with Grambie and Grandpop while Mommy works and Daddy's at class.

Mommy was all ready to finally chop her hair off.. Here you can see the "before" picture we prepared. Immediately after dropping Katherine off at Aunt Mary and Uncle Dave's, however, she got into a minor accident due to icy roads. We were extremely blessed that no one was hurt at all-- Mommy's ego took the biggest hit, but praise God that everything worked out as well as it did. Our car is getting some repairs, and Mommy will have  to wait a bit longer before we show off an "after" picture:

Speaking of before/after-- this weekend we've continued the project of working on our basement. In the first picture you'll see a wall that Daddy built, as well as the door we're planning on installing to close off a storage room. The second picture is of our "play room" where Daddy built a wall and added bulkhead, and Mommy closed off a closet and painted some walls. More to come as we finish this project!

Overall, we're happy to report we're all doing very well! It's hard to believe how fast February is flying by-- hopefully we'll do a better job blogging during the second half of the month! :-)