The Parrillo Family

Our little baby - who goes by so many names (Frankie, Topper, Tommy, T-Bone, Big Beefy, Beefcake) is now nine months and EVERYBODY is getting ready to move.  Speaking of moving.... Frankie is on it! He's cruising between furniture. Climbing stairs is an excellent source of exercise.  He'll eat almost anything. He's still as happy as can be!  And guess who loves him more than anything?  His two big sisters. Compare these photos of Frankie here to these photos of SD at the same mark of 9 months .  What a head of hair she had!  They're doing a lot of the same things - pulling up, standing up.  Moving around. And...compare Frankie at nine months to his oldest sister Ellie at her nine month mark.  Check out how closely they look - from the hair to the features .  These two are clearly siblings!

We're getting A LOT more help these days in the birthday-candle-blowing-out-department! The girls lent Natalie some 'wind' to blow out her birthday candles (on her Lemon Cake!) yesterday and we had a great day celebrating Natalie and Noonie who share a birthday. We started the morning with an apple pancake breakfast out in Naperville with the full Moran Clan including Uncle Charlie and Aunt Sasha who came in from California.  From there, we went up to Park Ridge where Aunt Linda and Uncle Shaun hosted the Parrillos for a hot dog celebration for Noonie and Natalie. Here's the post where the kids helped Jake blow out his candles this year . Here's the post showing Ellie blowing out her own candles on her fifth . Here's the post showing SD blowing out her 2 year old candles .

Frankie took in a backyard right-of-passage by sitting down on our backyard slip-n-slide.  He spent most of the time playing around in the little pool at the end while SD was running back and forth on the rest of it. He's growing up so fast and is taking in everything the world is throwing at him!

It wouldn't be summer without a little ice cream dripping down the chins of the girls, right? Here's the girls as they looked like in the summer of 2015 after getting a Sponge Bob Square Pants Ice Cream treat from the ice cream truck.  (What parent can resist the sirens call of the ice cream truck, amirite?!?) Topper didn't get any ice cream, but *we* did get a really awesome smile out of the guy while he watched his sisters dig in!  Check him out! There's some history here on the family blog of chronicling the ice cream eating!   Here's a post showing Ellie having her first-ever Rainbow cone .   And her first cone .  And the first time she had gelato . For a good rundown of all-things-Summer, check out this set of posts showing our summer activities .

When you turn your mobile phone camera around to being a 'front-facing' camera and Frankie can see 'the baby' in it, he turns all smiles.  It is so easy to take 'good photos' of this kids because he's smiling ALL.THE.TIME. He's getting close to nine months these days and is becoming so multi-faceted. I took a similar 'multi-face' photo collage of Sadie when she was just about this same age.   Here's the four-faces of SD for comparison's sake from back in 2013 when she was 11 months old .