Happy half birthday!

So, now that we're posting, here are some more recent updates.

Thomas is 6 months old, crawling around and eating solid food quite happily. He's a lot more relaxed than Ellie, not that she was a difficult baby either. He loves chewing on things, and gravitates toward shoes and cell phones if not redirected. He just started pushing himself up to sitting today - before he would get stranded lying down, and could only get up as far as his "Cleopatra" pose. Loves to watch Ellie dance and giggles wildly.

Ellie is enjoying the summer, especially swimming, running around, and playing "road trip to Alaska." She starts soccer camp next week, which should be exciting. She is "hooked on phonics," and can read the first three books in that series, through all the at-ap-ad-an-ag words. Here are some fun pictures from a trip to Disneyworld and visiting Grandpa Campbell this April:

Welcome Thomas

Thomas Paul Severino made his entrance - or rather, exit - at 9:48 pm on Monday, January 26, 2009. He weighed 7 lbs. 12 oz., and was 19 inches long....

And, as a testament to my potential for distraction, I wrote this months ago and only now am finally posting it!

Happy Birthday Ellie!

Ellie is now three - I can't believe how fast the time has flown! We went to Pennsylvania for her birthday, and visited Dutch Wonderland in Lancaster and Hershey Park in Hershey. She loved the bumper cars, the carousel, the big bumpy slides, and the excellent play area in the hotel. We had a birthday party at playgroup this week, including a pinata that Ellie helped make herself. Watching toddlers and preschoolers try to break a pinata is great. Even when we put it on the floor and let them hammer it, most blows ended up more like golf swings and bounced off it without a dent. A four-year-old finally got the technique and power right to break it open, and Ellie grabbed as many lollipops as she could get - her current favorite candy.

Current favorites:
Ellie loves role-playing. She's always suggesting that we "change our names," and the current favorite characters are Bob and Larry (from VeggieTales), Cinderella, St. Nicholas, Sts. Benedict and Scholastica, and being a doctor. She loves dressing up and reading books with "my own words." I need to get on top of teaching her other words! Her other big entertainment at home is playing with clay, but I need to get her to do more of it herself rather than simply directing me to make various things.

Skill development:
Kudos to her Sunday School teacher who taught her her first word she can really read: God. She can find it on a page full of other words now. We're also learning lots of good life skills, including making her bed, putting on and buttoning her coat, and going to the bathroom almost by herself. She likes getting our toothbrushes out and putting both her own and my toothpaste on. And the other night she cubed a whole block of tofu (a good starting point, since it can be done with a plastic knife). She also rolled some pretty serviceable rounds of pita bread dough out to be baked. My favorite is her flour measurement - for the non-bakers, you're supposed to level flour and sugar to make sure the quantities are correct. She always asks "is it time to do the 'whoop' yet?" and then runs a knife or the scoop across the top, saying "Whoop!" She knows to mix the wet ingredients together and then add dry ones (for most recipes). I encourage anyone with kids this age to involve them in cooking projects - it takes a bit longer, but she loves being able to help on real things and I'm getting time with her combined with actually getting something done.

Here's a couple photos of her in her Christmas dress and at a recent party at the Supreme Court. She's painfully cute, but she hates it when people tell her so!

Halloween and first camping trip

We spent Halloween weekend and election day in California visiting family and on a work trip for Roger. Here's some cute photos of Ellie in her Cinderella dress - nowadays we're either acting out fairy tales or a superhero. Papa usually gets to be her prince, and I'm the resident fairy godmother, always re-doing her dress after it disappears at midnight.




While in California we got to Joshua Tree National Park, where we camped and hiked. Ellie loves camping, and keeps asking to do it again. She had her first s'more by the campfire, which she also liked, except the marshmallow oddly enough. She was quite impressed by the desert, which she keeps calling "Egypt". :)






We also took the rotating tram to the top of one of the mountains near Palm Springs. It was very cold and sunny at the top. Great trip if you're into hiking in the cold - which Ellie decidedly was not.

Thomas' Ultrasound Photos

Finally I figured out the scanner! Here is an ultrasound shot of Thomas, now several months old. I'm almost at 28 weeks now, and he's very active - more so than I remember Ellie being even though I was convinced she was a very active baby. We're making the rounds of family visits in the next few weeks since we'll be grounded for Christmas and avoiding the Thanksgiving weekend traffic. So hopefully more pictures of Ellie coming soon. She is out of her lobster phase (the unused parts of her potential lobster costume are in the closet) and is all princesses and ballerinas. She'll be Cinderella/Cenicenta for Halloween and thankfully we'll have warmer weather to trick-or-treat in California because she never wants to wear anything under her short-sleeved dress and it's getting really cold here! She wants to wear either that dress or her ballerina tutu all the time, and we're running into more and more resistance getting her dressed for church because we don't have many other dresses that reach the floor (as all princess' dresses should). I'm either going to have to start sewing myself or find a local Muslim childrens' store - I have had no luck with finding little girls' dresses that are longer than knee-length! Any leads welcome... and have a great end to October, everyone!

Big news!

It's been a while, I know, but I'm starting to get in the swing of being at home and getting things done. My clerkship ended in July, and we've been pretty much on the move ever since. We were traveling most of August, first visiting the Severinos in California for Mina Marie's baptism and lots of quality cousin time, and then visiting the Campbells in Michigan for a great reunion of high school / middle school friends and more family time. I'll get photos of both up soon.

But our biggest news is that we're now expecting again! Baby Thomas (no middle name yet - email with your suggestions!) is due January 28 and the whole family is very excited. We have ultrasound photos that I will scan as soon as I can figure the scanner out, and they even threw in some 3-D ones for fun. Ellie is a wonderful big sister already. She talks to the baby all the time and has felt him kick once while she was sitting on my lap. The first thing she does when Roger gets home from work is to insist that he give the baby (my stomach) a kiss too, and it's all I can do to keep her from pulling my shirt up anywhere and in front of anyone to tickle him or give him a kiss.

Roger is at a new job since May - he's working at the Department of Justice in the Housing section of the Civil Rights division. To the non-lawyers, that means he's part of the biggest law firm in the nation - the US government. He helps enforce several different civil rights laws, including the ADA, Fair Housing Act, and Religious Land Use and Insitituionalized Persons Act. It was hard to leave the Becket Fund, but he's learning a lot at DOJ and we love the flex time: he gets every other Friday off now!

My new job is just starting, too. I have an Olin Fellowship from the Federalist Society that I'm doing at Georgetown Law this year. Basically I'll be spending the year trying to get a paper (or two) ready for publication and taking part in the academic life on campus by meeting faculty and attending workshops. The research and writing I'm planning on doing mostly from home (knock on wood) and the campus-life stuff will mean I'm gone for lunches several days a week. We have a wonderful homeschooling mother who is watching Ellie with her own two sons while I'm gone, and they've been having a great time. Her boys love having a little sister for a while, and Ellie gets to learn from them - she even does her own tracing and cutting projects when they have schoolwork to do while they're here. She's excited to learn about school!

I can't post without including a picture or two, so here are a couple recent ones of Ellie visiting the Natural History museum. She got to hold a grasshopper and a caterpillar, and was disappointed there were no slugs. I was disappointed there was no hand sanitizer.

Sad News

Early on the Monday after Easter our second child arrived earlier than we had hoped. Lucas Anastasio Severino was born at home into the loving hands of his parents at around 2 am on March 24. The Lord has been very merciful to us. He gave us eleven joyful weeks with our little one and allowed us to see his precious face which we hope to see again one day. Christ's resurrection has made joy possible even in times of deep sadness.

Thank you all for your prayers, and Happy Easter.