long time, no post

So we've been busy! I realized it's been over a month since we did an update, so I thought I should do one! We've been pretty busy for the last month.

At the beginning of October Mom and Mark came out to visit, and JJ came up from Portland as well. We had a full house (since everyone was staying with us)! It was a great trip, and it was so wonderful to see everyone and be able to show them around our new locale. A couple of weeks later Mark wound up in the hospital and had to have surgery, and about a week later Mom had to have surgery as well, so Rhia and I flew home to help them out with recovery and such. We were in Montana for 10 days, so we did a fair amount of family-visiting, complete with a trip over to VC to see Al's parents. She even got to hang out with Ashley a bit, who is her cousin that shares her birthday. We got home last Friday night, and then JJ flew in on Monday night. He's still here, and on Friday Al's parents are going to come out for the weekend--Al and I are going to go to the Seahawks game on Sunday (even though they're absolutely awful this year and will probably lose--but we haven't been to a game together yet this year, so we decided we should go and enjoy some bad-for-us sausage and Pyramid Hef.)

Rhia is getting so big and grown-up! We did her first professional pictures last month, which are very cute (except the thing on her eye was still a bit flakey, so that's a bummer). I didn't want her to outgrow her picture dress that Grandma bought her! She's eating all sorts of foods--so far we've tried rice cereal, apple juice, pears, bananas, squash, sweet potatos, avacado, and prunes. She gets all excited when she sees the bowl/spoon now--she's catching on! She's also sitting up a bit on her own--she'll usually topple reaching for a toy, but she bounces back up pretty quickly, and I finally got her to roll from her back to her belly the other day! She says "mama," although she hasn't put meaning to it yet--but she'll chatter all day if you let her. She's up to 16lbs and 25 inches, per a doctor's appt before we left for Montana to check on her eye--we'll have her 6-month checkup at the end of the month and see if she's grown again--but from her 4-month to her last one she'd gained a pound and half an inch. I can't believe she'll be 6 months old in a couple of weeks--they get big so fast!