Easter 2013

This has been an Easter to remember. I've already posted about our egg hunt, so let me talk about just this weekend.

Thursday afternoon Rachel's Terry Grandparents arrived and brought her home from day care a few hours early. Matter of fact, I'm pretty sure they got there just after she woke up from her nap. Apparently she was crying really hard because another little boy had stolen her shoe. Ha!

We had a wonderful evening playing until she went to bed then the adults stayed up to visit.

Friday I was able to leave work for a half day and come home early to begin cooking. We were having special guests with us on Saturday and I didn't want to have to do everything last minute.

It was another evening of fun with Rachel then adults visiting. Grandma brought out part of Rachel's Easter presents, which included this "soap paint". It's finger paints you can use in the tub and it turns into soap! Rachel enjoyed this each night her grandparents were here, and thankfully they used it all up before they left!:

Saturday our special guests arrived: Rachel's Great Aunt Connie, Great Uncle Paul and Great Uncle Barry! They drove over from Richmond, Indiana and spent the afternoon with us. Rachel was (in my motherly opinion) unusually uncooperative and wanted nothing to do with anyone but Grandma. I felt bad, I had really wanted her to be able to spend some time with Connie and play with her since Connie sends a lot of wonderful gifts and ideas and they rarely get to see each other. She played with her in small doses, but overall she seemed out of sorts that there were people in the house she doesn't know very well. Normally she'll warm up to people after they've been here for a while. Regardless, we made the most of it and had a wonderful day!

We started the visit by coloring Easter eggs, which I hadn't done since I was a kid. I think we did pretty well, considering this is the first time I've ever read the instructions on how to do this. My parents always did it for me!

Look at that! I'm in a photo! (I should try to have someone else take the camera more often).

Connie brought over a gorgeous present for Rachel for Easter:

Like I said, she was pretty uncooperative so the only photo I got of her from the front in her dress was this one. It's an adorable pink tea dress with flowers. It's also a 3T so it's just a bit too big now, but she'll be able to wear it all summer long! Thank you again so much Connie!

Grandma brought out this neat badminton set she had brought and tried to get Rachel to play with everyone:

After our guests left Rachel snuck into my room and started looking through one of the photo albums I have from our wedding. This was too adorable not to share:

(What you're not seeing are the 7 pillows I had put on that bench Rachel threw on the floor so she could create this pose. Regardless, adorable!)

Next comes Easter Sunday. Jason and I had actually picked out an adorable Easter Dress. I was not disappointed when I was able to get this photo:

The dress is still clean. Her bow is still in her hair. Her shoes are on the right foot. And she's actually looking at the camera and almost smiling!!! I caught her face in between expressions, but at least I caught this! By the time Geri and I picked her up from the children's area at church, she had water down her front, the bow in her hair was missing and she looked a mess. I didn't care. I managed to get this picture, which was worth everything :o) She's getting so big!

We got back from church and Geri and David packed up and headed out. Once they left, all 4 of us (including Monty) took a much needed nap. It has been another absolutely gorgeous day! So we took a trip to the park. I LOVE that we have a play ground so close! We get exercise, she wears herself out, and lots of memories are made.

Also a little announcement....we just found out that we are going to be the recipients of an awesome deal from Craigslist....

We were hoping to pick this up today, but the guy is going to take it apart and meet us, so we have to wait until next weekend. Regardless, I've made arrangements to pick this up on Saturday. I know we have a great park up the street, but we just found out a few weeks ago that the family that moved in behind us has a daughter that's just a few weeks older than Rachel. Sometimes we don't want to walk to the park, we like to play in our backyard. Unfortunately, there's not a lot to do and we don't want to put in a big swing set. This, however, was an awesome price and in great shape. We should have some photos of her in it for me to post next week!

Finally, this last photo is one I took a while ago but just came across again this afternoon. One night Jason gave Rachel her bath and when he put her pajamas on, decided to make her look ridiculous.

If they were pulled up any higher, that diaper she's wearing would be really uncomfortable.

Happy Easter everyone!

Weekend Errands

This weekend Rachel resumed running errands on Saturday morning with me. Last week was was uncooperative. This weekend she was delightful! Since we're expecting yet another round of snow, I wanted to get to the grocery before everyone else did who panic-buys. It was pretty bright and sunny, so I took her sun glasses along. As we were getting out of the car at Marsh, I said, "Rachel! Look at mommy and smile!" The result....she squints her eyes.

Oh, and that hat? It sets the stage for her hair for the rest of the day. She insisted on wearing it (it wasn't that cold) and it left her hair so full of static I couldn't keep it out of her face.

Here's what a shopping trip at Marsh looks like with her:

See the hat? Yeah. She wouldn't let me take it off of her. Not a battle I chose to fight....

While in Marsh she's pretty good, but a typical toddler. At one point she was hanging out of the cart so bad I had to pull her out of the car part on the front and put her in the cart part by me. She seemed contented enough there. Until we're about half way through and she spies a bag with Tinkerbell on it near the registers. For the next 10 - 15 minutes she kept saying "Depot! Depot! Depot!" I was flummoxed. What does Depot mean?! It finally dawned one me that she was saying "Tink Bell", not "Depot". No wonder I wasn't understanding her! So as we go to check out I went ahead and bought her one. It was the highlight of the morning. Who knows if she'll actually play with it later? Regardless, she was so excited and the lady in line behind us thought it was adorable.

From the grocery we hit up the chiropractor, the post office for me to mail off a recent sale, then she was in such a good mood I decided to stop at Target for no reason whatsoever.

Her day care had an Easter Egg Hunt scheduled for yesterday at 11:30. My concern was that she would fall asleep before we needed to leave and then be completely grumpy. Since she'd been so pleasant while we were running around I thought we'd stop at Target for a diaper change and grab a reward cookie.

Little did I know that when we got to the snack bar we'd have to 1. wait forever and 2. the cookies would be the size of her head!

She picked it out herself and she ate the whole thing. I let her eat on it while I walked through the store and it kept her entertained. Again, I didn't need a darn thing, I was just excited that I was out and running errands with her! She used to only let me stop ONE place and that was it. She didn't like going in and out of her car seat, so I normally used to do all of this stuff without her. I'm thrilled that now I can take her with me!

We headed home and Jason helped me entertain her until it was time to leave.

We could tell she was getting tired, so earlier than we had planned we grabbed her and ran out the door to go to the Easter Egg Hunt. In the rush, I forgot her hair things :o(. We get to the day care and got her photo with the Easter Bunny (I'm assuming we can purchase them later, which I will since this is the first time we've seen the Easter Bunny with her). As we were walking back to her classroom, I noticed all the kids has Easter baskets. *Facepalm* We've not ever been to an Easter Egg Hunt, I didn't even THINK to go get a basket and bring it with us! We have several baskets we could have used. So Jason offered to run over to Marsh and get one. However, he decided on the way to go to Hallmark because he figured they'd have a nicer selection, and he was right! You can see the basket in the following photos of her Hunt. We'll be using this one for years to come I hope. It's adorable!

She managed to get quite a few! They were all full of candy, of which we had to hide from her. She had that big cookie and a few pieces of candy and she didn't hardly eat the rest of the day.

When we got home she immediately crawled in bed for a nap.

 I thought we should play outside since it was so gorgeous out and we're supposed to get all this snow. She had a ball in our backyard playing in the mud. She came in covered in mud, so we took a bath pretty early.

After her bath she insisted on putting on the floatie I'd gotten her for our upcoming vacation. I've not seen anything like this, but it was worth it!

Now we're up early after a night of being up about every 2 hours and we need to get ready to go to church!

Silly Saturday

This weekend was a weekend of silliness. Rachel's at that stage where's she's absolutely adorable one minute and completely frustrating the next.

It was another long week at work for me. I hadn't slept much or well so by Saturday I was wiped out. I got up with Rachel as usual Saturday morning and we made breakfast together. I don't remember ever making pancakes for her so I turned to her and said, "Would you like to help me make pancakes this morning?" Her eyes got really big and you could tell she was excited and exploded with a "Tamcakes!" and a happy giggle. I put her on the step stool and let her stir as I poured in the ingredients. I won't lie, they weren't the best pancakes I'd ever made, but she was so excited about breakfast.

I gave in after we ate and went downstairs with her to watch Finding Nemo for the 1,536th time. I have always loved that movie. I'm finding that I really don't anymore. So we've gone from Elmo to Monsters Inc. to Cinderella to Shrek to now Nemo. OMG, I am SO tired of all of the aforementioned items. Please, Dear Lord, let her move on to the next obsession! And the real complaint I have with all of those (then I promise I'll stop complaining) is that the DVD player in the laptop we use upstairs for a tv has gone out and the little tv I have with a DVD player in it doesn't work well. So in order to watch her favorites, we have to go downstairs. And when we go downstairs to watch tv, it's up and down, up and down, up and down. Hence; I don't want to go downstairs to watch a movie I'm already really worn out on! So when I can find other activities to keep her busy that don't involve any of the above, I take it! But we somewhat contentedly watched the movie.

When Jason woke up it was getting close to time for me to head to the Chiropractor, which I go to every Saturday morning around 9. Lately I've been taking Rachel with me because she'll sit quietly while I get adjusted then I take her with me to the grocery store. However, this Saturday that didn't happen. She let me change her shirt, but fought me on the pants and by the time I got to socks I couldn't take anymore and just left her with Jason. They apparently had a great time while I was gone! However, when I got back home after going to the grocery she had fallen asleep on the couch for about 10 - 15 minutes and this is where the day got REALLY dicey. She got up when I got home and we ended up playing until around noon, which is when I put her down for a nap if she hasn't already gone to sleep.

For an hour and a half I got up about every 15 minutes to go into her room to try to lay her down and tell her it was time to go to sleep. NOTHING WORKED. This child went the whole day without a nap. Which means I went the whole day without a nap. This situation is a no win situation. Jason ended up taking her to play for a few hours so I could lay down. It was the first decent amount of sleep I'd had all week!

By early evening she was getting really fussy so we put her to bed an hour early at 6:30.

So Sunday I woke up completely refreshed and ready to go. Rachel didn't wake up until 6. As she played and did her thing I went about our usual Sunday morning which ends with me getting the both of us ready to go to church. I had gone in to get dressed and say goodbye to Jason when I walk into the kitchen and see this:

Those are the drawers in my kitchen, and if you can't see it, those are CRAYON markings. I was so annoyed.
Me: (angrily) "What are those?" Points to the crayon markings
Rachel: (happily) "Circles!"

Bah! How do you continue scolding that?! I gave up and we left for church.

On our way home Rachel fell asleep about 5 - 10 minutes from home, which made me nervous. Whenever she falls asleep in the car or at home for just a few minutes, she won't take a nap later when she's supposed to. You just read about what happens earlier in this post. It's not just her that needs the nap, we need her to take that nap! So imagine my surprise when I get her out of the car and into the house to take her coat off, and she's barely keeping her eyes open. I ask her, "Do you want to lay down in your bed?" Completely expecting her to snap out of it and tell me no. Nope, she nodded her head and tried to climb into her bed on her own. So I tucked her in and that child slept SOUNDLY for over 2 hours. I wish that would teach her not to forgo the naps again!

When she woke up I changed her clothes and didn't have much left in her drawers as I was in the process of doing laundry. As she ate lunch I got a few photos. Check out the outfit I put her in:

Check out that sweatshirt, tight pants, and super high pony tail! She's like circa 1980!

The kid loves grapes. What can I say?

I'm noticing even more words coming out of her into sentences. Still a lot of jibberish, but also a lot more "real" words. She still gets a few words a little wonky:

Monty = Mossey
Come on = Tome on
Cookies = Tookies
Chips = Sheeps
Octopus = Ocpuss
Jump/Hop = Pop
Blue = Boo

Some of her favorite phrases is, "Oh, deer it is!" "I did it!" "I found it!"

Right now whenever she's throwing a fit I normally hear a wailing "aaaaaaaahhhhhh my mommy!" or "aaaaaaaahhhhhh my nigh nigh!" (pacifier). Sometimes I can't help but giggle when she's crying out for "my mommy" and I'm right there holding her. 

Rachel was also kind enough to point out to me multiple times over the weekend that we have an ant problem. "Mommy!!! Ewwwww! Bugs!" She likes looking at bugs, but it really seems to bother her when they crawl on her stuff. I tried showing her how to squish them since they're the really tiny ones, but she won't have anything to do with it.

On Sunday I was trying to clean up the house a bit in between play time and I turned on some light jazz music for noise, but nothing obnoxious. She LOVES to dance when she hears music or sees characters dancing while watching a movie. "Dancing" consists of mostly spinning in a circle and hopping around. Sometimes I join in. Why not? Nobody's watching but her :o)

Busy and Boo Boos

The first weekend Jason was gone Rachel had stayed with my Grandma and Aunt Gail. The following weekend Jason was still out of town, so I took the opportunity to go and stay with my parents on Friday night so they could spend time with Rachel and I could see people other than coworkers and Rachel. It was a lazy Saturday when we got up in the morning and no one really started moving around until about 2:00. I think Rachel liked the change of scenery! Sunday I was completely rested after being asleep so much on Saturday that I was up and worked through her naptime, which I rarely do. In an attempt to keep her occupied I decided we should bake cookies. So I let her try to help. Really all she did was move the spoon around in the bowl, eat as many chocolate chips as she could, and batter once she realized she liked the taste:

Around playing with her and cooking I was also trying to clean up the enormous amount of dog hair that is all over the house. Rachel liked the hose attachment on the vacuum cleaner and took it upon herself to learn how to turn the device on and even wave the hose around:

When Jason got home, he of course brought souvenirs with him. At the Tower of London he bought her this:

She was so excited when she woke up and daddy was home and had presents for her. It took a few days before I was able to cut the tag off of it. He also brought her home a Queen teddy bear and Henry the VIII teddy bear. (I got paper pounds and coins!)

Recently we had a lot of snow. While we didn't get snowed in and thankfully the snow didn't stick around for long, we did have enough that Rachel REALLY wanted to go out in it. Mostly she likes to eat the snow and walk on it. That's about all she needs and she's excited. We have these princess boots that someone gave us and they are about a size too big, but perfect for outside. She loves them because:

1. They have Cinderella on them (which comes out "See-da-lell-ee"....sometimes there's extra "lell"'s in there)

2. She can easily put them on by herself

This means on Wednesday when we got home for the day she REALLY wanted to go outside and play. Her gloves were at school, so I gave her the gloves I had in my pockets:

I've been amazed how quickly her vocabulary is coming along. For about a week there were pictures of animals posted around the classroom. Each child had an animal placed on their cubby and I'm told each child chose which animal they wanted on their cubby. (I'm assuming they had a stack and just let the kids pick a piece of paper because none of them were duplicated). Rachel's was a giraffe. Not long after that I began to notice when we'd watch whatever show she'd picked on Netflix that she would identify most of the animals.....and I was stunned when the word "Alligator" came out of her mouth really clearly. She won't even say her own name! But she can say Alligator? And Lions, Tigers and Bears (oh my!) along with elephant, giraffe and octopus. Lots of safari animals. Today I pulled out a book that shows lots of different animals and seriously she could identify more than half of the animals in the book. I was impressed!

(I forgot to mention that last weekend my mom managed to coax her into saying her own name which is the first time I've heard her do that).

She's also saying "Thank you" in context a lot more and I catch her apologizing now and again. (Of course, not often when I say, "That wasn't nice. Please tell me/daddy/whomever you're sorry).

Today we've had kind of a big day. She got up early (and for some reason I was up even earlier than her) so we spent a lot of time together before Jason got up. We were in her room playing with the magnetic dress up dolls I'll sometimes bring out and when we were done she saw her piggy bank on the counter. She likes to put the two quarters I gave her in and watch them come out. She'll carry it around and play with it now and again. This morning I was pulling something out of the oven when I looked over and realized she'd fallen down in the kitchen with the piggy bank and the pig had hit the tiles. The pig split in two with tiny pieces on the floor. So I quickly picked her up and swept up as many of the small shards as I could with my small electronic vacuum. There wasn't much, and it was cheap porcelain so it's not like small glass fragments that'll get in your feet. I was sad we lost the piggy bank....

She kind of whined in disappointment but didn't act like she was really all that hurt. I mean, the pig DID break her fall. Afterwards she decided she wanted to play in the sink. I was moving all the knives and glass out of her reach like I always do when I noticed what I thought was strawberry on her arm. Then I realized we hadn't had any strawberries that morning and looked closer to see she'd actually cut her arm. Not bad, but enough to draw blood and enough that it was starting to get on her clothes. So I quietly took her into my bathroom and explained we were going to put a sticker on her arm because she had a boo-boo. She seemed to understand boo-boo (as she should.....she's had enough of them and I have the incident reports to prove it). It didn't seem to bother her that she'd cut herself or that she was bleeding, which was good. (Most of her boo-boos are bites from other kids or bruises.....and most of those are on her head where she can't see them). Afterwards she kind of messed with the bandaid because it was annoying, but then forgot about it.

She wouldn't let me take a picture of her arm, so I had to catch it in motion:

I can't remember a time where she's needed a bandaid, other than for shots, ever. So, first bloody boo-boo!

At some point this morning she wanted to play with her hair things, so I got them out. She doesn't always put them in her hair right....

(headband on completely backwards and upside down)....
But I like how she thinks outside the box....

(that's the purple headband on the horse and another around her neck).

When she went into her room and decided it was time for the tutu to come off (as seen in the photo above) I laid a blanket on her floor and we read books. She pointed to her bed and said something about a nap. I asked her if she wanted to take a nap and she said yes. It was close to noon, which is naptime anyway, so I put her in bed, tucked her in and said good night. I had just walked downstairs and given the monitor to Jason so I could take a nap as well when he said she was out of bed and banging on her bedroom door. I get back upstairs and find her in the hallway. This is really out of the ordinary for her. Rachel is really good about going to sleep. She doesn't put up much of a fight and when she wakes up she'll stay in her bed and say "Mommay!" or start talking to herself or the objects around her room. She's really good about staying in her bed until someone comes and gets her. Once in a while she'll be mad about being in there and crawl out of bed....but it's rare. I think she thought I was teasing about going to take a nap because I had hopped in her bed first and laid down. I put her back in her bed and told her it really was nap time and she went to sleep. Her naps last typically anywhere from an hour and a half to three hours. On a bad day she'll only sleep an hour, and the rest of the day is dreadful. Normally if I take a nap while she's napping and she gets up before me Jason will go get her and give her a snack and play with her until I get up. So I was surprised when I was woken up by little hands patting me and a little creature wallering on me and it wasn't Monty. Jason said she woke up after only an hour and half and before he could get upstairs she was out of her room, shut the door and came in to find me. This is a new phase for us and I'm interested to see if she starts getting out of bed on her own and coming in to wake us up or find us. If that's the case, I believe we'll probably not use the monitor as much anymore. We'll keep it around for those occasions where we have a sitter or she's sick. Just another sign that she is really growing!

This afternoon I was struggling to keep her entertained without driving myself crazy (two minutes watching a show, two minutes doing something else, two minutes....two minutes....two minutes....) I get tired of chasing her from one room to the next. So I opted to get us both out in the fresh air for exercise and we went to the park!

It's muddy, the park is pretty crowded as other folks are happy to get their kids out of the house as well, so it was kind of hectic. She seemed scared on the little kid stuff. But I had to keep her from going down a fairly daunting (at least I thought it was really steep) slide on her own. I was afraid she'd go down and not stop at the bottom and land on her face at the end. So I went down with her the first time, then the second time, she was on her own:

It may not look like it in this photo, but that's a pretty big slide for such a tiny kid. There were some kids much bigger and older than her that wouldn't go down it.

At one point Rachel kept running after this little girl and I thought she was saying, "Alana! Alana!" That's my niece, her cousin whom she identifies in photos all the time. I kept trying to explain that Alana wasn't here and that little girl wasn't Alana. The little girl's mother turns to me and asks if she goes to the Goddard school. After some small talk she explains that her daughter's name is Lila and she and Rachel were in the same class before Lila moved to the next class. So she was saying "Lila!" and trying to play with her because she knew her. DUH! Didn't at first occur to me that other kids from the school probably live right next to me, probably play at the same playground, and Rachel probably knows them. *facepalm* I'm so used to the other day care we used to go to where we lived kind of far away for that one and wouldn't ever run in to any of those parents. I don't know as many of the kids at this school as I do the last one as Rachel didn't start out as an infant with those kids and move along with them, so I wouldn't readily recognize them. But I was thrilled that she saw this girl out of context and remembered her name!

As I was trying to get us back to the stroller to go home because she was insistent on running up to the creek and getting as close to the water as she could before I grabbed her and pulled her back (and I was getting tired of running after her) I kept pulling her out of the mud so she'd stay on the sidewalk. We were just about to the stroller when I said for the 30th time, "Stay out of the mud!"

ARGH!!!! She tripped and fell getting mud all over her shoes and her hands. We were so close to getting home without incident!!!