who goes there?

Since Carly was born, one thing that has never ceased to make us giggle, even, at times, in spite of ourselves, is walking by one of Carly's contraptions to see it already occupied by one of Rachel's friends.

halloween sans baby

First of all, the cute little Baby Ticker at the top of my page now just serves as a reminder that I am PAST DUE. But I'm trying to remind myself that we have a little time to take it easy before she arrives, and to be grateful for every second of peace and quiet I have for now. It's going to get crazy any day now! I am terribly uncomfortable, and I am really anxious to meet our little girl and give her a name, but other than that, I really cannot complain. I have been blessed with two uneventful pregnancies, and I am so thankful for that!

One of the bonuses of Baby Sister still being in her cushy little home is that I got to go to the mall for Trick-or-Treating with Daddy and Rachel. It was going to be a special Daddy-Daughter night, and I was planning to be home with Baby, but we got to go as a family instead! It is unfortunate that Baby has two very cute Halloween bodysuits that she won't get to wear, though. At the suggestion of a friend, I dressed her up anyway. We got lots of points and chuckles. Rachel was Little Red Riding Hood, and her best friend Wolfie was her Big Bad Wolf. I checked out a really simple (and not-scary) version of Little Red Riding Hood at the library this week, and we've been reading it every day. Rachel was very excited to get dressed up, and even agreed to TWO ponytails like Red Riding Hood has in the book. On a side-note, I was very proud of myself for making the basket liner to go in her Easter basket for her costume

I took Rachel to the mall last year and she had such a fun time. I didn't remember it being too terribly crowded, but I remembered terribly WRONG. It was a mad-house! We will not be doing that again. I guess I failed to consider that 16-month-old Rachel stayed content sitting in front of the candy store sorting a big bucket of gum, and then helping hand out candy the whole night. We never even ventured into the big part of the mall last year. It was almost unnerving how crowded it was this time. I was very thankful to have Jarrad there!

On the pregnancy side of things, I will be going back to see the midwife on Monday. They will give me some sort of stress test to be sure it's safe to continue. I think 42 weeks is the max they will let me go, and then they will try one drug-free option to get things started before ultimately sending me to the hospital to be induced with Pitocin. I will be really out-done if I end up in the hospital to have this little girl. I have been looking forward to trying a water birth and being in a home setting, letting my mother-in-law catch the baby, and just generally being supported in a different kind of way. I am trusting God that she will come how she comes, though, and I'm trying not to get stressed out about it...anxiety can't possibly help move things along.

love this girl

Rachel has been doing so well in her new room and her new bed, and she still is so excited about the whole deal. When people come over, she jumps up and down and begs them to come upstairs to see her biiiig room and her biiiig bed. We've started calling her old room "the baby's room," so I think we should be good and ready for this new little girl to take over in there. And the icing on the cake is that she's been sleeping a little longer, a little happier and waking up in a better mood than she was in her crib. What a blessing!

The funniest thing to me is how she's dealt with sleeptimes. At first, she didn't want to sleep under the covers, so I didn't try to "tuck her in" when it was time to sleep. I knew she'd get up and roam around probably anyway, and she seemed so swallowed up in that big bed, so what's the point? But after only a few nights, Rachel started tucking herself in. Now when I leave the room, she usually follows me to the door with an obligatory/courtesy whine/fuss, but quickly retreats into her room to play, read, and chit chat with her little friends. Fairly quickly, she climbs on her bed (if she's not there already), pulls back her covers, tucks herself in, and rests her little head on her pillow, falling asleep quickly. She also usually stays in her bed when she wakes up, and she just plays happily with whatever toys are left there from the night before. She'll eventually call "Mooooommy, MOOOOOmmy!" and I'll go upstairs to be greeted with a big silly smile, sweet hugs, and even sweeter kisses.

cute moment

Rachel gets more and more fun to watch as she plays. Lately, she's been doing a lot of "shopping," pushing her cart around and around and around, collecting various items to "take it to the store." She usually has her little green beany baby bear in the child seat, and he usually takes a potty break or two along the way, and he also occasionally gets a spank spank. She also loves to bathe her little animals, and pretend to lotion them after.

But her favorite thing right now is that I've begun letting her help me wash dishes. She sits on the counter by the sink, and I direct her to turn the water on and off for rinsing. I let the dishes drain and air dry, so we always come back later and she sits there again, pulling each dish out of the drain rack for me to put away. She loves these little chores!

Here's a picture of Rachel having a snack at the huge kiddie pool we went to last week. She had such a great time!

rachel 2.0

Today is our big girl's birthday! It's hard to believe how fast these last 2 years have gone by, and it's even harder to remember what our lives were like before our first pride and joy showed up. She has changed our lives in so many wonderful ways that we couldn't have predicted...we've even said we wish we would have started having kids sooner. I would not trade my current job for any job in the world!

For milestone-marking purposes, here's a list of a few of Rachel's best tricks and catch phrases:

• thinks she can reach anything if she stands on her step stool
• ends most phrases with "oooKAY?"
• finds "buggies" everywhere, and walks us through the process of disposing of each bug (even those that end up being a little piece of fuzz)
• enjoys being copied ("do dis, Mommy, do dis.")
• has a great imagination (yesterday, she made a train with her blocks, and it went through a tunnel I had made, which I intended to be a house)
• with a damp cloth, she will clean everything
• loves to "wash" dishes
• helps with laundry, including folding
• has finally grown hair long enough for a tiny sprig-like pony-tail, which she has suddenly deemed a necessity, driving her to tears when it comes out
• suddenly enjoys testing limits, including, but not limited to, grabbing at faces and hitting
• is quite good at jumping, a skill she has been perfecting for several months
• pulls out all the stops to show off for familiar friends and family, leaving her hyper for the rest of the day
• definitely favors her left hand. the world will seem so backward to her.
• appreciates chit chat--i often get this request (especially in the car), "Mommy, talk."

I may add more later, as things come to me. Rachel's big birthday bash is Saturday afternoon, with just the family. I am excited for her!!

ponytails, sprinklers, foam houses, and school

Rachel's hair is really getting long[ish] now! At least, it's long enough for her to complain when it drapes into her eyes. She has even requested a bow once or twice! A couple times this week, I was able to convince her to let me put her hair in a little ponytail, right on top of her head (it's the only option so far). We never made it out anywhere with the ponytail, but she wore it around the house for as much as an hour at a time before yanking it out. Progress, still!

It's been so so so hot this week that we haven't wanted to venture outside much (well, I haven't wanted to, but Rachel probably wouldn't have minded). Our [new] grass is even beginning to turn brown, so Jarrad hooked up the sprinkler yesterday. for some excitement, we slipped on Rachel's swimsuit and sunhat, slathered her with sunblock, and headed outside to enjoy the fun. Rachel couldn't decide how she felt. She mostly wanted to be held, so I ran with her through the sprinkler several times, and then Daddy did the same. She did walk around by herself some, but it was usually short-lived. She went back and forth from squealing with delight to saying, "no no no water, no water." Such fun!

non-toy toy of the day

Jarrad bought some new doors for our laundry room area, and Rachel loved playing with the big pieces of foam packaging. Her favorite was when we propped it up like a little tent, with the tissue paper from the box draped on top to add to her privacy. What fun!

first homeschool project

I am really looking forward to teaching my children, whether we ended up choosing to homeschool or not. I think I would LOVE to homeschool, though. Here Rachel's first 'official' project. We worked on this collage together. We flipped through magazines, and Rachel told me which pictures to cut. We then gathered all the little pictures, and she told me where to glue them on the paper (with a little guidance from me). When we were all finished, she was SO proud! She kept saying, "Daddy love it." I told her we were making it so Daddy could hang it up at work, but she wouldn't give it to him. She was excited to show him, but she would not let it out of her sight. She likes it to hang on our dishwasher (our fridge doesn't take magnets). I'll have to admit, I was pretty proud too.

who is she kidding?

Rachel was contentedly playing today when I said to her, per routine, "Rachel, I'm going to count to five, and then we need to go sit on the potty." I counted, expecting to be met with objection, but at the end of the count, she dutifully stood and headed toward the bathroom, where she cooperatively allowed me to sit her on the potty. "Wow," I thought to myself, "I didn't think she'd agree so easily"--she had been so focused on her task. Almost as I was having that thought, Rachel looked down and said, "Pssss, pssss, pssss, pssss. All done." She squirmed off the potty, and I rolled with laughter. It seemed as if this had been her plan all along, to somehow appease me so she could get back to her play.

Just an FYI, and because I haven't blogged about pottying in a while, Rachel does a pretty good job telling me when she needs to go, but she's not 100%, so I still try to preempt her when I can. She wears undies during the day (the kind with a little extra padding, just in case), but she does wear a diaper for sleeping, partly because I don't know when to believe her when she hollers "POTTY" from her crib--it's her favorite delay tactic. Sometimes I go to her, and she usually just grins, as if to say, "gotcha!" and then she says she does not, in fact, need to potty. It's been a long adventure, and still going!

sleep talker

A couple of nights ago, I had been asleep for a while, and Jarrad was just turning in, when we heard on the baby monitor, out of the silence of Rachel's room, "OKAAAAAAAAY!" followed by silence.

Rachel is apparently dreaming more now. We've caught her talking in her sleep on more than one occasion, but the "okay" incident was the funniest to date. Rachel uses this excited expression fairly often (ex. "Rachel, do you want to go outside?" "OKAAAAAAAAY!"). It is usually followed by dancing around in circles and trying to figure out which direction to go to make the suggestion a reality.

This afternoon, she took an unusually long nap. Forty minutes into it, she said "Elmo, Elmo, Elmo." She mumbled and grunted a bit more and stirred some before falling silent again.

She's getting funnier and funnier, that girl, and she talks so much now! She seems to narrate everything she does, even when no one is listening. She entertains herself well, so I find myself often forgetting to put her in her room for morning quiet time. I am able to get a lot done while she either follows me around, imitating everything I do or while she plays by herself with whatever toy interests her at the moment.

It is also most fun to see how she sees me. Last week, I was going through my closet and pulling out clothes to donate. Since then, Rachel sometimes goes into my closet, where she thumbs through my lower-hanging clothes, thoughtfully saying, "nooo...nooo...nooo..." She's so helpful. She copies my words, my inflection--everything. She even recreates our routines when playing alone with her stuffed animals and dolls, and I hear her tell her little friends things I say to her. As her vocabulary grows, life just gets more and more interesting...

the emperor's wipes

Rachel is suddenly talking up a storm--even putting multiple words together to make primitive sentences. Since she's relatively intelligible [to us] now, it's fun to listen to her imitate us in her play. She's learning a lot about pretending, and has developed quite the sense of humor, believing herself to be the funniest kid on the block.

Rachel likes to play with wipes. I don't know if it's the crinkle of the package, or what, but she'll carry around a pack of wipes, opening and closing them. She is understanding plenty now, that I feel confident giving her complex instructions, like, "You may open the wipes, but do not get any wipes out," and she listens well. Tonight, she was playing with her new favorite friends, Ducky and Monkey. She brought over a pack of wipes, and I reminded her not to get any out. She opened the pack, glanced over, then reached down with her index finger and thumb pinched together. She poked at the wipes and then jerked her hand back up and patted Ducky on the bottom with the imaginary wipe she held. She looked at me, grinning, proud of her invention. Jarrad and I laughed, and we ooo'd and ahh'd at her game, so it continued. By bed time, Rachel had bathed herself, her daddy, and me completely with imaginary wipes, and she even ate a few, although she was laughing so hard I'm surprised she didn't choke.

Who needs TV with this kind of entertainment??

Speaking of TV, but totally unrelated, here's a video of Rachel hunting pine cones a couple weeks ago...

who am i?

We had company for dinner tonight, and Rachel became all smiles and cutes. The best thing, though, is that she got really snuggly and lovey on her mommy. She kept wanting hugs, and she squeezed her cheek to mine, grinning. She repeated, "Maaamaaaa" really sweetly, patting my arm and smiling. While I was eating, she sat next to me with her arm locked around mine, and she kept crawling in my lap, just to sit there. She did run around some and show off in other ways, but she seemed really proud of me tonight, for whatever reason. And that felt so good.

non-toy toy of the day

Jarrad was doing some yard work over the weekend, and Rachel and I decided to help after her nap. Rachel followed right behind her daddy, picking up sticks and pine cones from the yard. Once he was satisfied that the yard was cleared, Jarrad began trimming stragglies from a couple of the bushes. Just as I was thinking I should get Rachel some toy garden tools, she walks up to a bush with a stick and begins her own pruning. Why would I think I need to buy her little plastic toys? The stick she had was the perfect tool to "snip snip." She also found a "broom" (a pine twig with pine straw still on one end), and she swept up all the sidewalks.

she's making leaps

Rachel continually amazes me with her thought processes. On Monday, I babysat another baby girl, Kyler, who is just learning to walk. As she crawled around, I caught her almost crawling into our fireplace. I picked her up and showed her the rocks, and told her that's a no-no. She stared at me blankly and then fled the scene. Later, I got out Rachel's walk-behind toy, and Kyler strolled back and forth for a while. Rachel was eying that toy, and, as soon as Kyler let go of it, Rachel dashed to it, grabbed it, and rolled it over and onto the rocks. She then pointed back and forth from Kyler to the toy, as if to taunt her. It was hard for me to believe she was baiting Kyler, but it was SO deliberate, so I can't deny it either. She's a nut.

Earlier that day, Rachel was trying to climb onto our coffee table, something she knows is a no-no. I reminded her a time or two, and then told her she would get a time out the next time she did it. She nodded yes and went over to get a floor pillow, placed it in her time-out corner (she knows the procedure), and sat down, laughing. "Okay," I said, waving my finger in her face "you will sit in time out for one minute because you were climbing on the table." She sat there, solemn, while I moved away and pretended to ignore her for a minute. I came back and told her she was all finished. She went straight over to her Elmo, who she carried to the coffee table, where he proceeded to climb. She scolded him, "No, no--out!" She placed him on the time out pillow. "Minute," she said, waving her finger. She walked away briefly, and then returned, "All finished." Well, Elmo was quickly back to the table, climbing again. This time, though, as Rachel began to scold him, she had a thought. She dropped her Elmo, went to her toys, and pulled out the giant red foam finger Jarrad brought home from a game last year. She came back to Elmo, wearing the finger. She stuck it right in his face and waved it around saying, "no, no...no, no." HA! That must be what I look like to her when I'm waving my giant finger in her face. I got a great laugh out of that.

altogether, now

Photo by Sarah Arpin

A friend and her friend came over yesterday and took lots of pictures of Rachel because photography is their hobby. This is the only image I've seen so far. I can't wait to see more! And I have vowed to never take Rachel to the mall for pictures ever again.

cute moment

Rachel's imagination is getting more and more colorful. She started saying "hello" last week, and she carried her toy phone around and held it up to everything (yes, everything) and said, "hello?" The chair talked on the phone, her sippy cup, the blocks, her foot--everything.

Rachel also started fake crying yesterday. She puts her face in her hands and lets out this oh-so-dramatic wail. I say, equally as dramatically, "Oh, Rachel, are you sad?" She looks up, grins, and nods, then holds her arms out for a hug. She has given me some really sweet hugs the last day or two when she was "sad." She also asks me to pretend to be sad, and, this afternoon, everything in her room was sad and needed a hug. Her book was sad, her little chair, her piano, her bear, her doodle pad--you get the picture.