Family / second birthday pics

Here's the link to Ant's second birthday pics / family pics.

And we get to meet Fwed in under a month! (My due date is September 19). Yippeeee!

Rinaldi family update

Hi all!

Long time no posts here... It was a nice idea, hopefully one of these days we'll manage a bit more communication. In that spirit, here are pics of Ant from the last three months.

And another pic of me and Fwed (about 5.5 months):


Hope everyone is doing well!

Antony, 18months.

I just finished putting together my quarterly photo album of Ant pictures. I tried emailing it to the family as usual, but got lots of returned emails. So I figured I'd post it here instead/as well. Check them out!. I had lots of fun picking the pictures and adding captions, as usual!

Happy Birthday to me.

Thanks for the birthday wishes, everyone (here and on facebook :-)

I think Kate is next on Feb 16, then Ann on Feb 18. Anyone else with a bday coming up soon?

Mark asked me a few days before what I wanted. I said, "I would like Antony to say 'Happy Birthday Mommy!'." Since he says "Happy Birthday George" at the end of a Curious George story about George's birthday surprise that we read a lot, I thought it wasn't too much of a stretch. They went out on Saturday to get me a birthday cake, and apparently mark was talking about it as they were walking through the store, because they came home, and Ant said "Happy Buhrday, Mommy", a couple of times. With no prompting whatsoever. Totally made me teary :-) Then when he woke up on Sunday morning, my actual birthday, and was chatting to himself in the crib, he was saying it again. I really couldn't ask for a better birthday present!

I took a video of him saying it this evening. Clearly not unprompted. And then we go on to have some more fun :-)

Pics from Kate

Since my sister doesn't seem to be able to manage getting on here to post (ahem, poke poke poke), I thought I would post a couple of pics that she just sent me in an email. First, here is my cutie-pie nephew, we had a ball the other day getting him to smile. He has two cute little dimples just next to his mouth!

And a pic of Ant with about the most Sykes expression one can have - the tongue sticking out while concentrating. I know my Dad did that, and Kate and I do to - anyone else?

And a happy new year it was.

Ant and I spent the day today with Kate, Sami and Christopher. Ant was just so adorable, I had to share.

First, as soon as we pulled up outside the Kapanakis house, he said, "Seemi... home... happy!" (Seemi is how he now says Sami). Later, they were playing together with this little toy vacuum Sami has. Sami started with it, because she was the one who got it out. I was telling him that he had to wait until she was done, then it would be his turn. So he followed her around like a puppy dog, saying "Antny's turn, antny's turn". It was so damn cute it made me teary! (She was very accomodating and gave him a turn shortly after. I'm very impressed with their sharing - it doesn't always happen, but more often than not it does.)

Christmas tree

We finally got our Christmas tree up this morning. We had intended to get it last weekend, but what with all the snow we were digging out from we just didn't manage. (I'll post a picture of that soon, we've been *buried* this year - three snowstorms already!) Finally got the tree on Wednesday, but didn't manage to actually get it into the stand and up until today.

Mark was outside chopping up the ice that has been building up on the stairs so I was trying to avoid having Ant see the tree without him, but when we went to get Ant's milk after his nap, he caught a glimpse of the tree in the living room.

His first reaction was to laugh - I guess it is surprising to see a tree in the living room all of a sudden!

The he exclaimed "towah!" (tower). I replied, "actually, it's a Christmas tree", to which he responded "ho ho ho". We've been telling him that Santa Claus says 'ho ho ho', I guess he associates that with Christmas.

Since then, every time he walks into the living room, he says "teeeeee!" (tree).

On a completely different note, I'd like to request that everyone post a family picture from Christmas day!

More bragging!

Since we're showing off our kids, I had to post this video - Ant is talking amazingly well for a fifteen month old, he has well over two hundred words, and is putting together two-word phrases regularly! In this video we're going over some of our animal noises and body parts. He loses interest at the body parts, but at that point I turned the camera LCD screen around so he could see it - that's when he says "BAYBEEE". He doesn't quite get that it's him yet - although at Mom's house on Saturday he looked at a picture of himself and said "Antee" or something like that which is how he says his own name.



He also says "hone" and "hinging" during the video - 'phone ringing'. He substitutes H for a lot of beginning letters in words; S, F, R and L so far. Interestingly, Sami also subsituted H for S, (although she's outgrown it now), so her name is "Hami". Did anyone else have unusual letter substitutions?

I don't know if everyone got my email with Ant's fifteen month pictures - if not, here's the link