Sweet 16 Months

Emma is such a sweetie at 16 months.  Well, except for the times when she is hungry, tired, just woke up, or in the thick of sibling rivalry.  But back to her being a sweetie.  She had a busy month as usual, and her vocabulary continues to grow.  She said her first full sentence this past week too - after watching a dog go to the bathroom on our lawn she pointed while shouting "Doggie go poo poo!"  Which was funny, because the owner obviously heard her and was super embarrassed - so much so that the owner asked us if we had a bag so that she could dispose of it.  It was hard not to laugh when Emma kept yelling, "Doggie go poo poo!"  I think Emma had just made the connection that dogs poop too.  So, thank you neighborhood doggie, for teaching my kid that everyone poops and thank you Emma, for teaching my neighbor to carry a bag to dispose of her dog's poop while walking on other people's front lawns!

Emma got to see her cousin Ellen again this month as my sister-in-law and niece came back to town from Minnesota for an encore tour while my brother Mike was on a business trip.  Emma now calls her cousin by name, "Ewen".  Here they are below playing Hot Cross Buns on the piano.  And, because I couldn't decide which picture was the cutest, you get three variations.

Emma's other word highlights include "nap nap" which she now says when she is tired and ready for a nap, or "nigh-nigh" when she is ready for bed.  And again, I couldn't decide on my favorite pictorial representation of her sleepy time vocal, so here are three more pictures depicting the same thing.

As you can see in the above and below pictures, she loves to cuddle her stuffed animals and doll when she goes to sleep.  I remember Lucy was in that stage and I just had to laugh when I was rocking Lucy with Hopps, Polly, Huggums, etc. on my lap with little room for Lucy.  Now it is Ducky, Teddy, and Emma's Huggums plus her blankie with little room for Emma on my lap!  And believe me when I tell you that she knows when one of them is missing.

Sometimes Emma wakes up prematurely from her nap and then she is super cranky and clingy.  In the below picture I took her downstairs so she wouldn't wake up Lucy who happened to be taking a rare nap and Emma fell back asleep on me.  I managed to get my iPhone out of my pocket and take a picture and then proceeded to get my Pinterest fix while reveling in my snuggly baby.  Just look at those cheeks - now I know where she gets them from!

Even when Emma gets a long enough nap, she still prefers to snuggle and be held for at least a half hour after she wakes up.  This sometimes makes dinner prep a bit difficult, so we came up with the below solution, which usually helps her get over being clingy faster too.  She then yells "down!" and off she goes.

Emma seems to prefer the letter "D", and cat sounds like "Dat!" and bye sounds like "Die!"  Her byes are funny when we are leaving someplace and she is yelling "DIE!!!  DIE!!!" repeatedly.  She makes us laugh all the time though with the cute things she is saying or doing.  She loves putting her bare feet in our face while saying "Stinky!"  Here she is below making faces on the glass of the back door.

 Emma has been eating a ton lately it seems.  She isn't picky and has even been tolerating more dairy products too, which makes life easier for us.  While on vacation this past month she consumed an entire hamburger.  It took her about an hour to eat it, but she just kept plugging along until it was gone!  Here she is below, eating the hamburger like a big girl.

Emma loves hanging with the big kids and wants to do whatever we are doing.  She even helped move her Aunt Jane into her new apartment this past month.  Here she is below making sure Auntie's air conditioning was working properly.

Emma is finally big enough to hold her end of the deal on the alligator see-saw we have.  I bought the see-saw at a garage sale when Lucy was Emma's age for $3 - it is on my top 10 list of best garage sale deals ever.  But when I brought it home Emma was but a dream on the horizon and Lucy had no one to play on it with.  This made me so sad missing Luke and feeling sad for Lucy too - who should have had an older brother to play with.  It is always interesting what makes me miss Luke, and it still seems to catch me off guard.  When we found out we were pregnant with Emma, I couldn't wait until Lucy had a sibling to play with.  Almost two years later, and Lucy finally does.  That makes me smile, while fighting back the tears because look - there is still an empty seat in the middle where Luke should be.

No matter how many children I have on earth, no one will replace Luke and that is hard to deal with sometimes.  There will always be an empty place until we are all reunited again in heaven.  Emma is just starting to listen when we talk about Luke.  That Teddy and Ducky that she cuddles with were given to us at Luke's baby shower.  It is a good reminder every time Emma cuddles them of her older brother in heaven and I always refer to them as Luke's.  And just because I tear up when thinking of and missing Luke, hearing his name and saying it out loud is some of the best therapy there is.  It helps me validate his life and remind me that no matter what has happened, he is still my son and I love him just as much as his sisters on earth.

July Bumps and Beauties

We celebrated our 8th wedding anniversary this past month.  To celebrate, we rode our bikes downtown for dinner and then attended a lecture on researching old houses at the library - dorky, I know.  And although it takes a special occasion these days to be on a pair of bikes without a trailer of kids behind us, we have probably logged over 3,000 miles on these two bikes in our 12 year relationship.  I think the above picture sums up our journey together so well - we are still leaning on each other even after all of the rough bumps, flat tires, steep hills, saddle sores, glorious descents, and breath-taking scenery.

If trouble comes in waves, we definitely rode the home repair wave this month.  At times it felt like we were residents on a rough and tumble farm with animals and equipment in constant need of our attention while the weeds grew up around us.  Maybe this is what happens during the eighth year of wedded bliss.  All of those items we purchased or were gifted to start our new life together are starting to feel their age.  As if to prove the point, when we came back home from the old house lecture on our anniversary, we curled up together on the love seat (so romantic, I know) with our laptop, excited to apply our new found history resources to our house.  Our romantic mood was ruined minutes later however, not by a crying child, but by the computer screen going dark and stating in a primitive typeface, "Dumping all data now."  The next day we decided to cut our losses and bought a new Mac Book Pro.  Despite the price tag and a bit of a learning curve to transfer all of my PC files to my new Mac, I am definitely loving the freedom and efficiency of having all of my technology linked together now with the Mac Book Pro, iPad and iPhone and am enjoying my leap from 2004 technology to sleek, light, and fast 2012 technology.

Our woes didn't end there.  Our washing machine broke with a full load of laundry in it the night before we were expecting house guests.  Here I am thinking, great, this is not in the budget since we just bought the equivalent to a washer and drier in the form of a laptop.  Fortunately, Will was not phased but began looking up part numbers on our new computer.  Imagine my amazement when the next morning after an 8am trip to an appliance parts store he had the washer up and running before our guests arrived!

Will's phone has slowly been dying and in true Will fashion, he found a way to keep it working.  The screen no longer works by tapping it with fingers, but apparently using a fork is pure magic.  I don't know if it's guilt over my having an iPhone or as a friend put it - he looks hungry - I knew I had to find a way to get him a new phone.  After a trip to the Verizon store, we left with no phone but plenty of complaints about The Man, contracts and fees.  After eight years of marriage, I knew I would have to get creative to find a phone solution for Will, a man who is known around these parts as never saying die.  I decided to put a shout out on Facebook and someone generously donated a like new phone she was no longer using to the cause.  Will has since put his fork down and no longer has to play his own version of Words with Friends where you have to text without using the letters G, H, I, Q, R, S, or T.

 

Will may have compromised by accepting a like new phone, but he is still valiantly trying to keep our lawn mower running that he salvaged from my parents garbage two years ago.  After ungodly noises erupted from the mower on our front lawn this past month, I was certain that the weeds were going to swallow Emma up and that our mower had mulched it's last blade of grass.  But wait!  After a quick trip to Home Depot and a new spark plug later, the mower is running again and although I still think it is on it's last leg, we have avoided a citation from the city for unsightly weeds at least this month.

And, as if all of our technology and appliance fails weren't enough, two of our chickens came down with some sort of strange illness.  After several YouTube videos and advice from our local feed shop and friends with poultry we have determined that they have Newcastle disease, which we believe they obtained from the robin that built it's nest above their chicken run.  It has been very sad to watch and one of the birds died from it already.  The second one, Bearded Lady has been fighting it for over three weeks now and it has been a lot of work keeping her comfortable while feeling helpless at the same time. We love our hens and it is sad to see them suffer.  We have tried to keep Bearded Lady as comfortable as possible, and have even given her warm baths, fed her with a syringe and dare I say, gloved up and used a tube of Vaseline to make sure she wasn't egg bound.

To say that I am in awe of my husband would be an understatement.  I wouldn't even know where to begin in most of these situations and he just calmly takes things apart, assesses the situation and comes up with a plan.  I am overwhelmed where as he is challenged and intrigued.  Fortunately for us, all of our broken things were either mended, replaced or stable by the time my brother, sister-in-law and niece came to stay with us for a couple of days from Minnesota.  We had a blast watching the three cousins play together.  Below is Lucy, Emma and Ellen playing at Ellen's first birthday party.

Here are the three girls riding a favorite vintage toy at Grandma and Grandpa Hines'.

 Lucy loves her Uncle Mike and Aunt Jenna and while they were in town, Aunt Jenna could get Lucy do pretty much anything.  Lucy adores her and had lots of fun bonding time.  Here Lucy is below, getting her nails painted by her Auntie.

 We also had a brief but great visit from my oldest friend Lindsay who was in town for the day from Chicago.  It was so nice seeing our daughters play together.  If you would have told me twenty years ago that we would someday watch our daughters grow up together I would have said, "No way, I'm not having kids!"

Finally, we got to spend some great quality time with my cousin and her daughter this past month too.  Again, if you would have told me fifteen years ago that my cousin and I would live close enough to watch our kids grow up together, I would have said, "What?  You're moving to Europe too?"

Lucy seems to be going through a growth spurt.  She has grown an inch since April and is starting to complain that her froggy potty is too small now.  It is kind of small when you are trying to go fishing while sitting on it.

 Lucy has done lots of grown up things this month.  Here she is below running her very first car wash...

 Painting outside...

 and watching her very first movie in a theater...

...which happened to be Dora 4D at the Detroit Zoo.  I think she would have done fine if it was Dora 2D, without water squirting in our faces and the images so close it felt like we could reach out and touch them.  She spent the duration of the movie on my lap with my knee blocking the water source. When asked if she liked the Dora movie, she chooses to remain silent.

 She isn't silent for too much else though.  Lately she has developed quite the sense of humor and enjoys making us laugh by creating funny faces - surprised face, mad face, happy face, sad face, etc.  She is the most creative when we are trying to turn out the light for bedtime.  She also is developing her  comedic routine for all things potty related.  The other day Grandma T. asked Lucy where she lived and Lucy responded, "At the corner of Poopy Street and PeePee Lane!"  Will related this story to me later on, and told me that he had never been prouder of her.  What three year old knows the difference between a street and a lane, and the fact that she lives on a corner?  Lucy loves telling us while driving, "Uh oh, I pooped!" in a hilarious voice and just keeps cracking herself up as we try and explain the concept of crying wolf.  Her ability to work the words pee and poop into most any conversation truly is inspirational.  Here she is below, making us laugh in the garden with her outfit and her expression.

Two of our hens have begun laying this month!  It has been a definite learning curve since we first acquired baby chicks back in February, but finally five months later we are starting to reap the rewards.  We have an unnamed Isa Brown that is laying brown eggs quite faithfully every single day.  Mother Superior, the Americana and head hen is laying about 5-6 eggs a week.  Her eggs are a pretty greenish-blue.  She has been giving us a run for our money though and refuses to lay her eggs in the coop.  Instead, she prefers to literally fly the coop and lay her eggs in cozy and private nests under our neighbors black raspberry bushes or nestled under one of our hostas by the garage.  When she is done laying the egg she flies back into the coop and settles down like nothing happened.  Every day Will continues to apply netting to keep her in the coop, but every day she still manages to escape.  A couple of times Will tricked her into the coop and locked her in until she laid her egg, but this isn't ideal.  Lucy thinks it is great fun though, and gets a kick out of going on egg hunts to find where the day's egg has been laid.

 Besides eggs, our garden is now producing a plethora of green, yellow and purple string beans, lettuce, green and yellow onions, basil, five mint varieties, rosemary, oregano, carrots, beets, rutabaga and potatoes.  The tomatoes should be ready any day now and our strawberries are getting ready for their second harvest.  My favorite crop however are the two beauties in the below picture.  Wow, do we love gardening!

 

Emma at 15 Months

Emma has definitely been enjoying the warm weather and loves being outdoors.  She is a very movement-oriented girl, and has a ton of energy.  She stomps her foot when she is mad and when she runs, tucks her chin to her chest and bulldozes full speed ahead.  She loves climbing and the only thing stopping her from serious injury is her height and our constant vigilance.  This past month she learned how to climb into the bathtub by herself which definitely freaked us out.  We were filling the tub up for a bath when Emma decided that she just couldn't wait any longer and hiked herself up and over, landing head first into the water.  You would think this would teach her to not climb into the tub, but it hasn't stopped her.  She also learned how to climb up onto the dining room chairs, which actually was a gateway to her next accomplishment - the kitchen table.  Here she is below getting ready to climb the next mountain.

It has been super hot this month.  The girls and I went to the beach with some friends to stay cool and had a great time.  It was Emma's first time this summer experiencing sand and she was okay with it as long as I kept her sandals on.  After a while she got used to feel of sand and demanded her sandals off.  There was no stopping her after that!  By the time we came home there was sand in nooks and crannies I didn't even know existed!

We also went to the zoo this past month, and had a great experience with the chimpanzee exhibit.  There was a baby chimpanzee the same size as Emma and it was like the world stood still as the two checked each other out.  The baby monkey started showing off for Emma and we were highly entertained.  I'm really not sure what Emma thought of this, but you could tell she was definitely trying to figure out why the baby was so hairy.  Also, as you can see in the below picture, Emma had a death grip on her sippy cup - she was not about to share!

Here Emma is below in the butterfly house.  She was mesmerized with all of the fluttering butterflies.

Emma also enjoyed the fountain at the zoo where she loved pointing and yelling "DUCK!"  Here she is below with her classic smile for the camera pose - squinting her eyes shut tight so the flash doesn't get them!

Friends of ours daughter is just a couple of months older than Emma.  This past month they have both 'noticed' each other, and have started interacting together.  Their first conversation went something like this at the dinner table:

Chloe, touching her food said, "Hot!"

Emma, surprised at the fact that she understood what the little person next to her said, responded with, "Hot!"

Chloe, smiling that the little person next to her seems to speak the same language she does, replied with "Hot!"

Emma, pleased that the little person next to her understood what she said, responded with "Hot!"

This went on for several minutes and I think they are BFF's now.  Here they are below on a different day, intently putting wood chips on the see saw together.

I haven't had the heart to tell Emma that her BFF is moving to Japan this week and will be gone for a year.  The good news is that Emma and Chloe can be each other's first Skype Pals!

Emma's vocabulary highlights include:

-"Boon" for balloon

-"Truck" anytime she sees or hears one go by

-"Boom" whenever we set her down or she crashes into something
-"Hmm Hmm" - which I guess isn't really a word, but she makes this sound whenever she wants something - toy, food, water, etc.  It reminds me of the King of Queens episode where Doug's boss says "whoo whoo" to indicate that he wants the swoosh ball tossed to him.

-She calls Lucy "Sister" now

-"Hank Ew" for thank you

-And Lucy's favorite, "Poop".  We discovered this new word after it rolled out of her diaper and onto the floor during a diaper change.  I set Emma on the ground so that I could go and get the proper disinfectants to handle the bio hazard spill and that's when she spotted it on the floor.  Her eyes went wide with surprise and she pointed and said, "Poop!"  I'm just glad that this otherwise yucky situation turned into a great new word that has given Lucy endless giggles and laughs.

Speaking of poop, Emma has been having bad diaper rash this month from us being bad parents and giving her dairy.  She is dairy sensitive and when she has it her butt gets super inflamed.  I have been trying to let her have some time every day with no diaper so that the air can help heal the rash.  Will came home from work the other day and picked Emma up, not  realizing that she was sans diaper until he demanded to know why I was practically rolling on the floor laughing or why I took a picture of him rummaging in the fridge.  He claims his arm hair kept him from feeling the bare butt cheeks on his arm.

 Not that it would matter if his baby had a diaper on or not - Will adores Emma and I believe the feeling is mutual.  Will went upstairs to put Emma down for a nap the other day and after some time passed and he hadn't returned downstairs I went to investigate.  I found them both asleep on the floor.  Fortunately, my camera flashes only woke Will up and Emma was able to finish out the rest of her nap while Will became quite conscious of an aching neck and reduced airflow to his windpipe.

 Emma's last molar came in this month and as long as we remember to keep the dairy away from her she has been sleeping really good.  Now we just need to work on getting Emma to stay quiet when she wakes up at 6:00 a.m. because that is too early for Sister who doesn't have the mood benefit of two naps to keep her happy till bedtime.

Here Emma is below, taking some time out from her busy life at 15 months old to smell the flowers!

The Fruits of our Labor

June has flown by for us.  We have been busy trying to finish our outdoor to do list so that we can relax and enjoy the fruits of our labor.  Compared to the previous two years, it seems this season is operating about two weeks ahead of time and berries that were usually ready to pick in July, were ready by the end of June.  We spent the past several weeks up to our elbows in berries - berries on top of brownies, berries made into sauce on top of our ice cream, berries in our pancakes, muffins and cobblers and berries on our cereal and oatmeal in the morning.  We canned a new type of jam this year that used a mixture of the four berries around our house (supplemented by the Meijer produce department) - blueberries, raspberries, black raspberries and strawberries.  I am pleased to say that it is the best we've made yet.  Here's Lucy below picking the wild black raspberries by our house.

And here we are on a walk in the woods by our house gathering more of the wild black raspberries.  The crop was actually quite small this year compared to years past, so that is why we actually turned our usual black raspberry jam into four berry jam.

This past spring, the woods across the street from us were designated official "Green Space" by our town which we are really excited about.  Pretty much it guarantees that the view out of our front windows will forever be natural and undeveloped.  There are great trails there too, which we no longer feel like we are trespassing on, since it has been labeled green space.  Here is one of the trails below with beautiful orange wild flowers painting the hill.

We feel so blessed to have this nature conservation steps from our front door while still having a great downtown with unique restaurants and interesting boutique shops, grocery stores, drugstores, our bank, library, schools, parks and hardware store all in walking distance as well.

Besides picking the wild berries, our garden has produced a four berry array this past month, along with lettuce and peas.

 Lucy loves picking the berries and some even make it into the bowl for the rest of us to enjoy.

She also got kick out of shelling peas.  I have to admit, Will and I have never shelled peas in our life either, so in fact, we all got a kick out of shelling those cute little peas!

We were practically fighting over the pea pods, and kept excitedly showing each other how amazing those peas looked all lined up, snug as a couple of bugs in a rug, tucked into those pods.

Next year we definitely need to plant more peas.  They were delicious raw and cooked.

Lucy is deep in thought in the above picture while she watches our chickens.  We still haven't gotten any eggs yet, but our hens are starting to show symptoms of egg laying.  They are beginning to make divots in the dirt and seem content just sitting in their newly made nests.  One of our hens however prefers the fresh mulch Will put down this past month in our garden to the dirt of her chicken run, causing Will to get creative to keep her out of our garden.  He keeps constructing higher string lines on top of the fence, poles and gadgets but so far she keeps getting into our garden.  Fortunately she hasn't done any damage yet, but just keeps creating nests in the wood chips.  I have decided to call her Mother Superior, as she seems to be at the head of the pecking order in our little flock.  I've named another hen The Bearded Lady because her feathers look like a beard around her face the way they puff out and I'm still thinking of good nun names for the other girls.  It seems Lucy has given up on naming the hens, as the ones she named have all gone to that great nest in the sky.

We are still eating outside as much as possible which is keeping my house clean and the kids happy.  We've even shared a meal or two with our neighbor who happened to be out while we were eating dinner.  It is just so nice to eat outside, and I am enjoying the fact that my kids like it too.  I remember as a teenager sulking over dinner at our family's picnic table on the back deck thinking that eating outside was annoying and inconvenient - swatting bugs and feeling hot while completely missing the view and the breeze (and the fact that I didn't have to purchase or lift a finger to make the food in front of me).  Sorry mom and dad!  But because of this, I am fully expecting karma to bite me in the behind with my own kids, so until then I will count my blessings as we eat as a happy family in the great outdoors.

Lucy has been great this past month.  She seems taller to me these days and a little more grown up too.  So far, I am really liking her at age 3.  It seems like we are finally seeing the fruits of our labor as she is becoming more and more self-sufficient.  She is a great listener in the store, especially now that Emma is too heavy to put in my front carrier and has taken Lucy's seat in the shopping cart.  Lucy helps me around the house now getting wipes when I run out during a diaper change for Emma, setting the table and being another set of eyes to keep Emma out of harms way.  Her naps are hit or miss, but she does a good job staying quiet in her room while Emma sleeps.  I found her the other day absorbed in her books when I came in her room to tell her that Quiet Time was over.

I mentioned in the May post that Lucy has become very conscious of her appearance.  Lately she has been wanting to have her nails painted.  We haven't painted them in the past because Lucy bites her fingernails (and toenails!) and I don't want her to ingest the paint.  She has been more persistent as of late to have her nails painted so I decided this could be a good incentive to get her to stop biting her nails.  We are still working on her fingers, but her toes were ready last week!  To say that Lucy was excited was an understatement and I couldn't help but feel like I was in the middle of creating a memory that will stay with me for the rest of my life while I painted those little piggies.  I think I was almost as excited as Lucy and I am so proud of her for letting her toe nails grow out.

I will end this post with a couple of things Lucy said this past month that brought a smile to my face:

Lucy: "Mom, can you take the gate down?  I need to go upstairs."
Me: "What do you need up there?"
Lucy: "To have some time in my room to get the grumpies out of my head."

While we were over at my brother John's house for dinner, Lucy took Emma by the hand and whispered, "Emma, let's go get into trouble."


Happy Summer!