I and J Week (and one more plea for votes!)

This week Charlie and Lily learned about the letters I and J. We read In the Jungle and talked about the animals in the pictures. We sang "Peanut Butter and Jelly," and of course ate plenty of that for lunches! Charlie and Lily also tried Jell-O for the first time. I attempted to make Jell-O Jigglers, but clearly did something wrong because my Jell-O never got firm enough to cut into shapes - it just stayed Jell-O-y. But it didn't matter much, because Charlie and Lily were not huge Jell-O fans.
Although Charlie did enjoy dipping his goldfish crackers into it before eating them.

For art we made paper plate jellyfish. I folded paper plates in half and stapled the sides together. Then Charlie and Lily helped me rub a glue stick over the bottoms of the plates and stick on strips of sparkly tissue paper to make the tentacles.

(I just realized that the letter I was kind of poorly represented this week. I meant to give Charlie and Lily ice cubes to feel, but we had a pretty hectic week and I didn't get around to it. Sorry, letter I!)

In other news, please see the previous post for Charlie's first steps! Yay, Charlie! We are so proud of him - and now we have two babies staggering drunkenly around the house :) Sometimes I just can't believe how quickly they are growing up and how much they're learning. Every day they do something new and Joe and I just marvel over it. Just in the past week Charlie took those first steps, Lily learned to say "ball" and to identify her knees, hair and tushie (thanks for that one, Joe), and both learned to maneuver the stacker rings like champs. They've also mastered the art of climbing stairs and have started practicing feeding themselves with spoons. That gets quite messy, but Charlie is actually getting the hang of it!

And totally unrelated to anything else, I just had to share a few more cute pictures. Here's Lily practicing her runway walk...or auditioning for the cast of The Real Housewives. I'm not sure which. (Thanks for the awesome coat, Trish!)

Charlie and Mommy - BFFs forever.
Daddy and Lily, just chillin'.
There are still two more days to vote for Three Cheers for Babies as Best Overall Blog! (Voting ends Tuesday, November 23 at midnight.) Please vote for us if you can - we're up against a lot of awesome blogs and I don't anticipate a win, but it can't hurt to try! Thank you!