Claire and Mia

The Shaffers came to Milwaukee to spend Memorial Day Weekend with us. This was Claire and Mia's first chance to meet each other face-to-face (as opposed to face-to-stomach).

It was amazing to see how much Mia had changed since I last saw her, when she was just a week old. She's just SO adorable, and her cute smiles were a nice preview of coming attractions for us with Claire.

As for the older kids, Elsa was ridiculously excited about the chance to spend time with Carter. She flipped out and started shrieking "Carter, Carter!" the minute they pulled into the driveway on Friday afternoon. They headed straight for the playroom as soon as Carter walked through the door and hardly slowed down for the next two days.

On Saturday, we took ALL the kids to the play area at Bayshore Mall and then out to lunch at Appleby's. Miraculously, all four of them were pretty good throughout, and we adults actually got to eat our lunches in relative peace.

For the first time, Elsa and Carter bunked together, with Carter in Elsa's little air mattress on the floor of her room. As Ellen said on her blog, it was the first official sleepover for both of them. We weren't sure how it was going to work out, since neither of them are exactly famous for sleeping soundly, but they surprised us by going to sleep almost immediately the first night. (But not before we got a few laughs from listening to them chat over the monitor.) In fact, we wondered if Elsa being in the room actually helped Carter go to sleep in an unfamiliar place. Here they are reading books before bed.

The group photos were challenging of course—this was the best one I was able to get. (Elsa was making weird faces all weekend due to a chronic runny nose.)

Elsa got a huge kick out of how much more interactive Mia currently is than Claire. Here she is tickling her youngest cousin.

And Bob demonstrated yet another reason I'm glad we didn't have twins.


We really enjoyed our time this weekend with the whole Shaffer family. Ellen and I got to commiserate about being up in the middle of the night, dieting, and balancing our time between a two-year-old and an infant. And it's always fun watching Elsa and Carter playing together—I can't wait for Claire and Mia to be old enough to enjoy each other's company like those two do. We sure do wish we could see all of them more often!