And even more fun in the snow!

Prayers

Last night Grampie was saying prayers with R before bed. He did "Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep" but when he was done, R said, "No, that's not the prayer!"

So he asked her what prayers she said. Here's what she told him:

"Amen, Grammie and Grampie. Amen, GiGi and PopPop."

4-month stats

RUS's 4-month appointment was last Tuesday and he weighed 15 lbs (50th-ish percentile) and was 24 and 3/4" long (50th-ish percentile).

Question asked at the dinner table today

R was asking J a string of questions at the dinner table today. Most were fairly ordinary type questions. But then she asked this one that stumped even J:

How do fish cry?

This looks fun!

Ice cream in a bag

Maybe we'll try it. I'll keep you updated.

Apologies

J was disciplining R because she hit him with a book (not hard, but, it's the principle of the thing).

J: Iiiiii'mmmm . . .
R: I'm sorry
J: For?
R: Five!

It's snowing again

So I thought I'd throw up a few photos of R in the snow last week.

Chocolate High

My friend JK gave me a chocolate sucker to give R today. It was big and round and molded to have the "I Love You" hand symbol on it, and boy was R happy to get it.
Things she said after eating it:

to J: "You're cute. I love you, Daddy!"

to me: "I love you, Mommy! I love Mommy and RUS and Daddy and Mommy and I love RUS and I love Daddy."

Happy Valentine's Day!

I'll add pictures when I get them loaded, but for now-- Happy Valentine's Day!

R made a ton of valentine's cards this year. First, she made 10 valentines for each of her friends at school--I cut sheets of purple paper into quarters and a bunch of hearts out of red paper and she glued the hearts on the purple paper and colored wherever she felt like it. I wrote the kids' names and "Heart" R on the cards.

She also made cards for all of her cousins--Little Frog, Little T, Trucker, and G. We'd gotten some adorable foam stick on letters from Grammie and Grampie, so I picked out all the letters we'd need to spell each cousin's name and she helped me color sheets of purple stationery and stick on each letter for the name.

Then she made cards for her grandparents and great-grandparents, gluing hearts to purple paper again and coloring where appropriate. She also enjoyed picking out stickers to stick on each card.

Then, J helped R make me a card!And I helped R make J a card.And R made a card for J and I at day care.I'm frankly kind of impressed the girl isn't sick of making Valentine's crafts by now!

She had a little party at day care on Friday and several friends sent her home with some candy. She's eaten two suckers and a wrapped up Asian candy of some sort. There're still a few treats left, and she's looking forward to having another one after dinner tonight. After that they might be "all gone," if you know what I mean. Wink, wink.

RUS 4 months

Dear RUS,

How did you get to be four months old already? This is crazy. You're growing and growing--and GROWING! I've got a big plastic bin of all of your 3-month size clothes sitting in your room, and I think I am still in shock that you're already outgrowing them. I confess, though, it's fun to break out the bigger stuff as there's some leftover gender-neutral stuff from R that I'm enjoying rediscovering, as well as some adorably cute stuff you got from Grammie & Grampie, Grandma & Grandpa, and Aunt M & Uncle A for Christmas. My favorite right now is a green and brown-striped fleece sleeper with a lion on it that Aunt M picked out for you.

You're not rolling over yet. You're a really really REALLY mellow baby. You love to look around and watch what R is doing (she brings out the BIGGEST smiles in you!) and when I put you on the floor to do tummy time, it seems that you're capable of rolling and strong enough to roll over on your own but that you just don't really have all that much inclination for it. It's as if you're saying to me, "I get it, but WHY?"

So, you don't really roll. But you love to be propped up in a sitting position, all the better to see what everyone else is doing. You're still sleeping through the night although the last 3 or 4 days I've had to feed you in the middle of the night at some point-- once at 11:30, once at 1:30 and a couple times at 4:30 a.m.--so I'm getting nervous that our luck might have run out. But you still go down for the night like a champ, right around 8 or 9, and you sleep wonderfully.

You're definitely cooing and laughing, and you've recently started grabbing at and holding toys in your hand. It won't be long now before you start really shaking them and rattling everything in sight. Teething seems to be right around the bend, too, as you're drooling more and you LOVE putting things in your mouth. R, in fact, likes to pick things up for you to put in your mouth, and we're very vigilant about not letting her do it even though she clearly wants to because she sees us giving you things to put in your mouth.

We've got your 4-month appointment this week, and I'm guessing you're around 15 lbs. That's my guess. We'll see!

Love,
Mama

R 32 Months

Dear R,

You are 32 months old today. If I had to pick one thing to describe this month, I'd say it's been a month of Daddy.

You are in a major Daddy-loving period. You want him to get you ready for all of your naps. You want him to do all of your baths. You want him to be the one helping you go to the potty. You want him to be the one to lay you down at night.

You've also had some incredible adventures with him-- all the snow we've had this month has led to lots and lots of time spent outside with Daddy while he shoveled the driveway and the sidewalks. This afternoon in fact you specifically requested to spend time out there with him and made the adorableest tracks all over our front yard walking super-carefully to make sure you wouldn't sink too far into the snow. (If you had sunk all the way it'd be at least up to your waist before you hit ice or really hard snow!) On these outings, Daddy made you several caves, a snow bear in a snow house, a chair, and a couple of slides out of all the snow.

You've also gotten really into listening to Daddy read to you. He read you the entire book of Alice in Wonderland. Unabridged. Well, not counting Through the Looking Glass. You love to lay in your bed and listen to the story. You got really into it after receiving a Disney book based on the cartoon movie "Alice in Wonderland." Your favorite page was the one where Alice eats something in the White Rabbit's house and grows too big for the house.

Your sense of humor keeps us all laughing. I love you!

Love,
Mama

Two Steps Forward, One Step Backwards

Well, things with potty training are churning along. We hit a roadblock last weekend, when she had, over the course of the weekend, something like six poop accidents. She was peeing okay but pooping in her pants repeatedly, often just after going to her room for nap time.

We were pretty frustrated about it but I just kept reminding myself of what my mother-in-law told me a few times: you can choose to let it bother you and get stressed out or you can just let it go. R will get potty trained eventually either way.

So I've been trying to let it go. Mostly. It helps a lot to have J to bounce back and forth on. Whichever one of us would get aggravated about having to swish another poopy pair of underpants in the toilet would get relieved by the other.

I'm embarrassed to admit that usually it was J rescuing me. But I did try very hard to always be calm and never make her feel bad about having an accident.

We just kept repeating, like a mantra, "Everyone has accidents. It's okay. Let's get you all cleaned up."

This week has been much better. But we're still having accidents here and there. She had one today, in fact. But I think today's had to do with the fact that she was having all kinds of fun outside in the snow and didn't want to come in.

So. We're not completely there yet. But we're on our way. She'll be there really soon.

We're closed again tomorrow

It finally stopped snowing. There is SO MUCH SNOW. I don't think I've ever personally witnessed this much snow in my life.

Weather Update

J and I are off work again today (we were off Monday as well) due to blizzard conditions in our area. It really is pretty wild and hairy out there. J was outside shovelling and had to shovel snow off of our bushes because there was easily more than a foot sitting on top of them and it was dangerously close to falling off (and requiring that he shovel our walkway again should that happen).Those bushes you see in the middle of the photo are about as tall as me, to give you some idea of how much snow we have.Can you find R?
The bushes right in the foreground are the bushes J had to shovel snow off of.

Yippee!!

J and I just found out that Local Hero and Local Heroine are engaged!

The wedding is tentatively being planned for sometime this fall in Local Heroine's hometown of Okayama, Japan.

GUESS WHAT!!! This means we're going to Japan!!! I am so excited about this news I could pop. And I'm so excited to welcome Local Heroine into our family.

Aw, It Was Nothing.

R, to J, just before diving into her ginger peanut soup for dinner: "Thank you, Daddy, for making all in the world nice and good. Thank you."

One of the Best Things About Babies is

that there's always a new first coming along.

Here's a special first we recently celebrated:

First Time in the Exersaucer.

Outgrowing

the 3-month clothes, that is. We officially packed up RUS's 3-month sleepers tonight because he couldn't quite stretch his legs out all the way in them anymore. So I had an impromptu photo session to commemorate the last one he'll wear before they are packed away.

Happy Birthday, J!

J turned 32 last month. On the 31st, to be exact. This was a pretty big year for his birthday, as he got a PlayStation 3, 2 blu-ray disks, and a PS3 game. We celebrated several times, once with Grandma and Grandpa when they visited in mid-January, with the extended family during our quick trip to CT, and with Grammie and Grampie again when they visited on his actual birthday weekend.

R made him a card.

Here we are having chocolate cake--I missed him actually blowing out his candles so you get to see a pic of him with smoking candles instead.

D is For . . .

Dog
Dalmatian
Dot
Dress made from a
Doily

"Fun" in the Snow

We have more than 20 inches of snow, and it's still coming. Latest forecast calls for snow until well into the evening, so we'll see how much we end up with. The problem with this much snow though is that R can't really play in it because it's so freaking deep. This is one of those times that I wish I was 14 years old again and had my brothers all at home to play in this with. We would have SUCH a rockin' time in all this snow.

Here's J shoveling and me and R goofing off in the snow a bit.Then we came inside and had hot chocolate.

One other update...

Awhile back I thought RUS was about to start rolling. I was wrong. I thought he was going to soon because he seemed to have so much upper-body strength in terms of pushing his chest off of the ground during tummy time. However, he doesn't really act very interested in rolling--or trying to roll. I always to kind of nudge him or pull him to get him to roll over, and while it's clear that he's getting stronger and more and more able to move himself, he isn't very interested in working really hard at it.

So, he's not rolling yet, although he HAS, a few times, done the accidental roll-back, you know, where they roll back in the direction they just came from almost immediately as soon as you get them rolled over. I'm not sure those count as being able to roll over.

State of Emergency

Well, as you can see from this weather update, things are pretty hairy around here. Nobody in Delaware--except for emergency vehicles, etc.--is allowed to be driving right now. It's snowing pretty hard but not accumulating very much. I'd say it looks as if we have maybe an inch on the ground right now, and it's been snowing since 4 p.m.

They're calling this "The Storm of the Century" and "Snowmageddon" and other sorts of things--and they're predicting anywhere between 12 to 24 inches of snow by the end of tomorrow. We'll see.

The big excitement, aside from the snow, is that J and I watched a fox frolicking in our front yard this evening after putting R to bed. It was clearly playing with a somewhat large rodent, picking it up, throwing it in the air, chasing after it when it tried to move, that kind of stuff. It was kind of weird to see a fox in our front yard. Good thing there's nobody on the roads tonight or I'd be worried about it getting run over by a car.