Grooming, climbing, and mmm-mmming

This past weekend sure went fast!  For our anniversary, Saturday, we headed up to South Bend for a quick trip.  We ate at Papa Vinos (yum!) and visited Notre Dame and Saint Mary's (of course).  It was an absolute beautiful day, of course half way there I realized we had forgotten the camera!  While hitting the bookstore at SMC, we noticed that my brother isn't the only teenager wearing slippers out in public-apparently it's the cool thing to do for all teens!  It feels a little strange being back at SMC with baby in tow.  Here are Artie and I looking old, pushing around a stroller, while all of these young sprites stroll into the DH around 2pm for lunch-probably because they sleep until noon on Saturdays (I don't even remember what it's like to sleep past 7am)-wondering what old folks like us are doing in their student center, clearly without the company of a current student.  I guess that's the way it goes and in a few short years, most of them will be in my position.  It just doesn't seem possible that my life has changed so much since I left that wonderful place!  But, SMC has changed so much since I was a student, the new student center, the senior dorms, the new classroom building is up and looks awesome!  Notre Dame is up and growing, as always.  There are SO many new buildings going up on that campus!  We weren't there long, we made the drive back home in time for the second quarter of the game...not a great way to end our anniversary-Artie takes these losses very hard! Ok, so to the title of this blog.  We have had our beagle, Rocco, for over 3 years and our retriever mix, Domer, for almost 2 years.  We decided it was finally time to get our dogs professionally groomed.  Avery is having a small celebration for her birthday this weekend and we wanted the dogs to be nice and clean.  Rocco isn't generally scared of anything and likes strangers.  Domer, he is a shelter dog that we adopted and is very skittish.  Anyway, they were at the groomer for 3 hours and Domer was very scared and whined (we were told).  But, to be fare, Domer got a haircut and Rocco didn't.  I would be scared too if a stranger was coming towards me with clippers and I'd never had that done before!  Well, they look and smell great and it was well worth the money to have other people bathe our dogs and brush their teeth!  The climbing part of the title refers to the little princess herself.  Yes, so the time has come.  Avery is starting to climb on everything!  First, it was small things, like a little basket that she could just step on or a pile of laundry, her diaper bag, etc.  Now, it's the fireplace and, as you see in the picture, the TV tower!  I could not believe that she was able to climb on that because it's so vertical!  She even tried to climb over the pew during a baptism on Sunday...oh man is it fun (sarcastic, of course)!  The final thing also has to do with Avery.  She started the cutest thing over the weekend (well it's cute to hear anyway).  In the past, she hasn't wanted anything to do with pizza.  But Saturday, when we got back from South Bend, we didn't feel like cooking so we ordered pizza (from the hut).  Well she loved her personal pan cheese and would put it in her mouth and go "mmmmm" in a high pitch.  Then she did it again Sunday when Artie warmed up some left over pizza, she walked over to him and pointed to it and mmmmed.  Last night Avery tried fish sticks for the first time (we're very open parents considering neither Artie or I can stand fish-the smell alone is enough to make me puke) and she put one bite in her mouth and...mmmmm.  Oh man, it's cute!  Except now we have to have a stock of fish sticks in the freezer, ew.  Well, this has been long!  I'm just a happy mamma this week, to both my daughter and my two furry boys!  If Avery could just say mamma, instead of every other word first-including dadda, bye, dog, up-I would be even happier! 

                   The boys looking cute after being groomed with their bandanas on

 Here she is, climbing her tower-she's even tried to climb in the purple bucket!