4 months old!

Little Lauren passed another mile marker. She turned 4 months old yesterday. To help her celebrate, my sister, Annette, Amelia and Daniel were in town, and Marie, Michael, and Michaela came down to visit as well. Along with my parents, and Lars, all of us went to the usual celebratory restaurant, Canton Delights in Cupertino to have an early dinner.

Lauren has really discovered the use of her hands, and she likes to grasp on to things now, including her bink, which she's learned to take in and out of her mouth by herself. In addition she's grown very fond of soft furry blankets, which she likes to play with. She's on the verge of being able to turn herself over, and she continues to like to make loud spontaneous noises!

She has gotten more impatient with us, as it's harder to leave her alone. She likes company, and she likes to talk to her company. Lauren still doesn't like big gatherings though. She's okay with an extra person or two, but once you get a crowd of people she's not familiar with she will start bawling!

As for the rest of the family, Amelia just finished reading book 4 of Harry Potter and is looking for a paper back version of book 5. Daniel was a great sitter for Michaela and sat with her and showed her books (although he couldn't quite read them to her). Michaela is still as enamoured as ever with little Lauren. Wanting to see her every day.

My dad's CEA numbers were down considerably this last doctor's visit so he's in a much better mood lately. He's got chemo again this week.

Our windows in our house were replaced, along with the glass sliding doors, and all the work is now complete. So we've been able to get on with the unpacking upstairs. The downstairs remains troubled as we still have not resolved the issues with the pest inspector.

We also have a slight problem with house flies, as the property is filled with fruit trees. There's at least 4 orange trees, a grapefruit tree, lemon trees, etc. So we spent part of Sunday harvesting fruit to reduce the amount of over ripe and rotting fruit on the trees themselves. Hopefully that will help contain the fly population as well. We must have collected well over 100 pounds of fruit and I spent Sunday night, juicing all the oranges and grapefruit. The extra juice was frozen, so we'll have orange juice for a long, long time.