Muench Family Happenings: Yvonne's back at work

Well,
Clara is closing in on 5 months old and that means Yvonne is going back to work at Microsoft. Today was her second day and all of us are doing well despite it. Clara's going great - she already weighs 18.5 lbs and is on track to be as huge as her brother was. A random list of recently acquired skills:

Hadden: declaring something and then adding, "...but not really" to indicate that what he just said is totally untrue.
Clara: laughing. Sometimes even at funny stuff.
Hadden: singing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star when he hears Clara crying to try and get her to stop. It often works...even though he really can't carry a tune.
Clara: drinking from a bottle. It's all still Mom's stuff but now some comes in a convenient bottle form. I think she's waiting for the new wide pour aluminum can.
Hadden: watching Cars and Kung Fu Panda. Wait, that's not a skill...unless you're a parent out of ideas on how to entertain your kid.

In September we went camping with Sara/Dan and Beth at Lake Chelan. The family did great on the drive over (translation: they slept). We did, however stop at a park with a jungle gym so "we" could get out a let off some steam. At the Lake, Hadden drive Dan's boat (see picture below). He was pretty happy about that one as you can see in the picture. Note the responsible boating life jacket.

On the drive back we did not fair as well. If one child wasn't crying the other was or was fixin' to. We stopped at two parks with jungle gyms, a Safeway, Blewett Pass and, I think, one other place. I think when you get directions on Google Maps (pardon me, Microsoft Bing Maps or whatever that service is nows called) there should be a radio button to click that says "with kids" - it adds 2 hours to the calculated travel time.

Went "hiking" a couple of weeks ago with the family. Actually, we walked around a trail in the Arboretum near UW. The round trip was 2 miles and Hadden made it about 1.99 miles. I walked the last bit to get the car while he had cheese sticks. Not a bad deal for Hadden. Clara (as you can see below) spent the hike in her backpack.

The "hike" took us through the parking lot of the Museum of History and Industry (what, you don't hike there? We USED to do hikes in the high dessert of Utah) and Hadden dug the 5-inch gun there (see below).

Hadden also helped me bake a cake for the family. Most importantly, the chef gets first crack at licking anything that got batter on it. Don't worry, it's still an Yvonne-style cake - it's got 3 zuchinnis in it.

Halloween over again and everyone had fun. This year Hadden got all fired up about being a tiger for Halloween even though we didn't have a costume for a long time. Needless to say, that really applied the pressure. I went to something like 5 stores the weekend before Halloween and finally found a tiger costume at Old Navy...ON SALE! Sweet. Clara got to be a pumpkin as all baby's get to. We went up and down Greenwood Ave. in the afternoon when the businesses had the typical Trick-or-Treat deal. After a while Hadden got smart and started cherry picking the lollipops out of their baskets rather than wasting time with a bunch of stuff that wasn't as good.