Ricardo & Kylie

Ricardo's mom came to visit last week and it was truly lifesaving to have her here. I was working a bunch of days in a row and Ricardo was studying for finals so it was really nice to have another person around to take care of Russell. She also went above and beyond and cooked and cleaned and helped me throw a baby shower in the midst of all the craziness. In Portuguese, Grandma is called VoVo and that was an easy name for Russell to pick up on. He loved having her here and is still asking for her now that she's gone. She ended up being in town for Ricardo's birthday and we went out to dinner at a Brazilian restaurant with some of Ricardo's Brazilian friends. Ricardo had a great birthday, it was probably one of his favorite ones yet. Best group picture-ha. Russell was eyeing down the cake the whole time.

November flew by! So did the first half of December actually. I can't believe Christmas is less than 2 weeks away. In November Russell turned 18 months old and he is definitely starting to act more like a 2 year old than a 1 year old now. He's still a sweetheart but he is soo curious and at times a little mischievous. You'll see what I mean. P.S. Excuse the quality of my iphone pictures. He's too fast for me to take the time to go grab my camera most of the time! Doesn't this look like a mischievous grin? Got this bouncy ball for $1.50 at Walmart-he loves it. It started to get cold... But he still wants to be outside as much as possible. He doesn't seem to care about being cold most of the time. He's not a Florida kid...yet. He's really taken an interest in climbing everything. The only thing he hasn't tried to do yet is climb out of his crib and I'm definitely grateful for that! But this is a little o...

I'm a little behind on blogging, but we had a great fall and Halloween! Ricardo unfortunately had a conference he had to go over Halloween weekend so he was in Chicago, but we did spend some time together before he left and took some pictures in Fairmount park! First, here's our cute boy going to work on his laptop. We were impressed with this self-timer shot! Russell likes the sound of the timer so he starts smiling and it's perfect! Schulkyill River. I still have to google that to get the correct spelling. I had planned for a long time that we would have a Wizard of Oz themed Halloween. Russell loves dogs so he would be Toto, I had a dress that would work for Dorothy, and I figured Ricardo could be the tin man pretty easily with some tin foil and gray face paint. But-I ended up having to work the night of our church Halloween party and Ricardo ended up leaving town for Halloween so the whole ensemble never actually panned out. But-we still had an awe...

We have been having a fun fall so far! I can't believe it is October already. We've even been having some summer-y weather linger a little longer, so we have definitely been enjoying the time to be outdoors. I don't know what I'm going to do with Russell when winter comes because he looves being outside all day. He continues to be a sweet boy with such a fun personality. He is learning a lot of words which is really fun for us. His favorite one is definitely "car" and he can spot a car or a picture of a car anywhere. He also loves saying animal sounds (baa, moo, sss for snake, etc). Dogs are his favorite animal though, probably because that's what he sees around most often.  Loving the sandbox at the park. He doesn't really get dirty because he very carefully shovels sand into his bucket over and over again. When we do go inside, his activity of choice is definitely reading. I know this picture is blurry, but I just thought his lounging on the c...