7 months old

I wish we could freeze time, you are so perfectly wonderful right this second. You laugh at everything. You grunt when you're displeased. You grunt instead of talking. You talk when you wake up from your naps so we know you want us to come up to the bedroom and see you. You still cry when I lay you down for a nap. When you cry, you usually cry "mama." You only say mama or something akin to it when you're upset. You always smile when I walk into the room.

You hate getting bundled up, but you're fine when we're outside. You freak out with total joy when we hold our arms out for "uppy." You whip your head back and forth really fast for fun. You love jumping in your jolly jumper and have really gotten the hang of turning and reaching for whatever is near, like your exersaucer or the jolly jumper stand. You love your whale rattles because you can hit things hard with them – like the window at the pool at Lily's swimming lessons yesterday.

You are big enough to sit in a shopping cart seat, not that we venture out much. You quit lunging forward from sitting into a crawling position because the last time you did it, you hit your mouth and had an owie on it for a week. You just bounce wildly and excitedly now but are cautious not to go forward.

You have two teeth. You've bit me a handful of times while I was nursing you. You quit eating puréed food a couple weeks ago so we only offered you real food. You changed your mind, though, and had five whole cubes of apples the other day, then almost a whole mango and some watermelon. Last night you were thrilled to share our actual supper for the first time; you devoured the root vegetable curry soup with brown rice – kinda like this. You will fit right in to our family's spicy tastes.

I'm guessing that it's just going to get better, huh? I can barely imagine...

Style notes: Nov. 2010 edition

After some ruthless clothes purging, Lily has adopted many of my "fancy" shirts as dresses. Throw in a little up-do and a tiara and you're set!

Looks like we missed October, mostly due to the illnesses that would never end – and then there was the ear infection that she's still on antibiotics for:

But we're practically all healthy now. Just in time to make Christmas presents and goodies... And go to Christmas parties and concerts where there will be ample opportunity to make fashion statements.  Like this one:

Lily was a purple princess for neighbour Carly's birthday party.

And what's better than wrapping a scarf (left) or a shawl and a piece of fabric of Mom's to make you feel all dolled up? She spends many an afternoon getting gorgeous...while I chase her around and ask for just one picture for her website... Isn't it worth it?

Life lesson #1

The sky was a beautiful pinky purple this morning so I called Lily to come see it. When she looked out the back door, she saw that the gazebo frame was all destroyed and asked what happened. I told her the tent never got taken down and the weight of the snow collapsed it.

She was surprisingly upset. "Well, what are we going to do?" I told her we'd take it apart and take it to the dump, that it had probably had it's run anyway. (It had; most of the tabs were ripped off and the fabric was thin from years of sun exposure.) "We'll have to get a new one then. To have shade for my birthday and summer. Okay. So we're going to have to save our money then. Dad's birthday is next, then yours, then Finn's. I'll use the money in my piggy bank, Dad can use his birthday money or you know, those gift cards he gets sometimes? So then we should have enough money to get one."

I thought that was a great idea. While she doesn't really grasp how much things cost, she knows we have to save our money and work together to buy the things we want for our family.

It's a party!

Your printing is getting more effortless. Next on to lowercase letters!

Today Brynn finally had her 5th birthday party...not quite a month after she turned five. You made her this card, we put together a photo album of all your pictures together since you first met, and we gave her an Ariel heart locket that we bought at the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique in Disneyland. How nice to be home and have time to do this stuff.

You're explaining the card you made...just in case she didn't get it.

You wanted to look so nice for the party and picked out this shirt well in advance. You even had Nana curl your hair after you specifically requested to have a bath so you could wash your hair. (Huh? That's a first!)

  

You did look nice. Always our little fashionista... Nothing better to run around in than a skirt!

L'il Chomper

It's a bizarre picture, I know, but we'd like you to meet L'il Chomper on the left and the corner of Bitey McBiterson just poking through on the right. It took about twenty pictures of me holding down Finn's bottom lip and trying to get an in-focus shot of these little troublemakers without his tongue in the way. Mission accomplished.

We've been using these little guys to try out all sorts of new things. Finn's a huge fan of chewing on day old French bread, pickle spears, steamed broccoli florets and apple and mango slices. He seems to really HATE IT when we spoon feed him cereal – or anything. After three or four bites, he's angry so we've given up for the most part. And since he's a second child, all the "rules" have been thrown out the window about how we should be feeding him; he probably knows better than us anyway. We're pretty sure he won't starve.

How nice that he can sit in high chairs at restaurants now!

Someone else who isn't starving is Lily. She's even on a food kick. She's been eating a lot, so it's kind of high maintenance. Sure, half the time it's tomato soup, but she ate two hard-boiled eggs and two carrot muffins today – on top of her strawberry porridge for breakfast and her butternut squash muffin at school. That's a lot for this girl.

Oh, and a lime.

The drool, the tears, the snot. (Oh, and the screaming.)

And that's only Finn. Lily was sick AGAIN from Friday until now. So sick she had two naps on Friday and I could barely get her to the photo studio to get her Kindergarten photos done. Then when we finally got there, she cried and cried and cried, clutching my leg. "I don't want to get my picture taken!!! Mama come in, too. Mama be in the picture!!!" Wouldn't that have been a nice look? The tear-stained, blotchy face is nice enough.

So now she has an awful cough and cold and was totally wiped out all day Saturday, too. On Sunday, we sent her to Brynn's to play. We needed a break from her constant whining!

Uh, I think he's trying to tell us something.

Then there's Finn. The baby who never really cried has been bursting into tears. Ouchy tears. For the past three or four days, along with the constant drool, his bottom gums have been swollen. Really swollen and we can see/feel some little guys trying to pop out. Lots of Advil (well, when necessary) and one rubbing of Orajel (which instantly stopped five minutes of earth-shattering middle-of-the-night screaming) has helped. Except now, as of last night, he has a brand new cold. Every sneeze shoots fountains of snot out, so now he's not pleased about us wiping his nose every other minute. What? That's not enough? His six-month immunization was this morning AND I topped that off with a flu shot. Sore gums, extremely snotty nose and really tender legs. Poor kid. (Got him weighed at the clinic and he's now 19 lbs., 12 oz., just under the 90th percentile. At least his girth isn't suffering...)

But oh, the carrots. The carrot soup.

This is right before I pureéd it into a rich burgundy colour soup. Look how the purple carrots turned the onions bright purple.

And oh, the bags and bags of carrots we have shredded and are awaiting us in the freezer for carrot cake and muffins. Sunday was such a nice day I finally pulled the rest of the carrots out of the garden. I washed, peeled and cut the carrots all Monday morning and Lily was a big helper and shredded carrots and washed dishes in the afternoon while Finn napped. (Well, we need someone to wash the dishes until our dishwasher arrives on Monday.)

I love purple carrots. And girls who actually wash the dishes sitting like this.

A visitor

We had a visitor last week. Khrystine, the girl I babysat for a year in between high school and college, just moved to Weyburn so being only an hour away she decided to come up for the afternoon.

Lily's really fond of her. Khrystine stayed with us last fall for a few days, and then for two weeks last December (during some of the time we were in Mexico). We saw her again in mid-April in Medicine Hat. She was finishing up her first year of college (then moving the following week to Mexico for a few months to work) and we were there for our 11-year college reunion (all 38 weeks pregnant of me).

We played Pretty Pretty Princess. Nana won.

Anyway, it's nice when she visits because Khrystine will play games and watch Hannah Montana until the cows come home. Lily even cuddled up to her on the couch...which says a lot.

Oh. Em. Gee.

You have got to be kidding me. No, really. You've heard of planned obsolescence, right? Well, no one could have planned this...

Woke up just after 5 a.m., less than three hours after Chris came to bed, to an awful, yet familiar, smell. I immediately shook Chris awake and said, "I smell something. What's that smell?" He jumped out of bed and ran downstairs. His use of expletives told me something was wrong, that I just wasn't smelling something foul from outside since I left the window open a crack. I got up to a house full of smoke. Again. That same smell as when our stove started on fire. But we couldn't really see anything. Opened the dishwasher and all looked well. Well, not really well but not abnormal.

Apparently the electrical panel inside of the dishwasher started on fire. Huh. Sounds familiar. Kinda looks familiar, too, but the damage this time was far worse. Thank god we had the stainless steel front. It seemed to absorb some of the fire. Imagine it we'd had the plastic front kind.

Last time this happened, we figured yes, this was a hazard, it shouldn't have happened. Contacted Frigidaire by phone and by email form on their website numerous times. Did they ever get back to us and say hey, that's not cool, what can we do to help you? But instead they ignored us. Over and over again. Fine. Bunch of corporate jerks know that if they don't acknowledge us or the problem, there isn't one. At least not to them.

So yeah, at a time when we have the least money, we are again shelling out for a brand new appliance. Gotta love that. Remember when appliances used to last? For more than seven years anyway...

Lately...

Last Wednesday we'd been having serious attitude problems with Lily. Thursday morning there was extreme diarrhea and vomiting, thus the then-obvious source of her inability to comply with the rules.

She stayed home from school on Thursday, missing the costume ball at the school that evening. She woke up in the middle of the night and said, "Are we going to the ball?" To which I replied, "Sorry, honey. It's over." She got very upset and cried, "You went without me?" Poor kid, she'd been looking forward to going for a couple weeks. Pretty upset the next day, too, when I kept her home again, missing the Halloween fun at school.

She feels better today, well enough to complain about almost everything and yell at Nana. That means she's back to normal.

She threw up all Friday night, so she was couch-ridden until Grandma and Grandpa arrived midday on Saturday. She mustered up a surprising amount of energy so she could play until they left midday on Sunday. Then back to the couch – minus five minutes for me to snap some Halloween pictures before the sun went down. She didn't quite have enough gusto to go trick-or-treating so Dad carried her to the houses around us for almost a whopping fifteen minutes. Plenty of candy, though she didn't consume any before going to bed at 6:30 p.m. Thankfully.

Lily threw up three more times that night and then in the morning, so no school again on Monday. Fortunately, she ate food on Monday. Well, more than none so she did start feeling better. Missed picture retakes, though. Had missed the original school pictures while we were in Disneyland...

* * *

In other happenings, Finn has gotten a new cry. It's louder and bigger than the baby teradactyl cry he had before. He was just laying there, not sleeping on Saturday night when he started belting this one out. He also has gotten very physical, jumping up and down while in our arms, thrashing his head back and forth for fun, smashing whatever's in his hand... He's rougher than Lily was. He also made strange with Grandpa and was sweet on Grandma while that was completely opposite with Lily.

He also has been drooling. Constantly. Non-stop. There's no better way to get a bucket of slobber out than blowing bubbles with his tongue out. Or blowing raspberries on whoever is nearest. His arm included.

And food. Seasonal food. I can't stop thinking and reading about food. Made pumpkin pie French toast, pumpkin chocolate chip squares, sweet potato bourbon bundt cake and butternut squash muffins with Lily yesterday afternoon. All yummy and orange. Previous to that was an apple obsession...

Finn tests out the Jack Daniels for the sweet potato bourbon bundt cake. He approves.

Finn has been eating apples (below left), pureed from our tree, green and yellow beans (combined, below right) from the farmer's market and mangoes tonight from this wonderful Thai curry dish we made for supper. How cute is it all frozen into Sesame Street characters and flowers? Too bad we have to melt them to feed them to him...

Happy Halloween!

A couple days late...but still adorable. Here are Lily the Daisy and Finn as Monsieur Skeleton.