The unofficial start of summer

During the past few weeks the area around our home has been transformed, we had forgotten how lush and beautiful the area is. Flowers have been blooming and the trees are now full of leaves. This is how the back of our house looked when we moved here about 10 months ago now. We have been looking forward to our first full summer here in Michigan, and this weekend marked the first weekend, albeit unofficially. While it was a little weird to not be camping or at the cabin (the first time in I don't know how many years), we managed to make some of our own fun.

We went to a barbeque at a friends' house Saturday evening where we played outside and enjoyed some grilled food, cold drinks and time with friends. Alyssa had a particularly fun time, playing with the other kids, she didn't want to come home and the next morning she wanted to go back. Sunday, the weather didn't cooperate for many outdoor activities, but today the sun was shining. We knew it was to be a hot day, so we headed out for the first time on our bikes with the girls in the bike trailer. While we thought it worked pretty slick, Lauren didn't like it too much. We had to stop a few times to calm her down. The trailer pulls really nice although it does take a little more muscle to get you, your bike & the girls up hills. Aaron did most of the heavy lifting, although I did "carry" the girls for a while.



testing out the "buggy" the day before


the girls sharing a snack during the ride

Then this evening Lauren enjoyed crawling around in the grass and Alyssa had a blast digging and playing in her brand new sandbox (thanks to Aaron for that!). We all enjoyed dinner out on the deck until the mosquitoes started biting.







The mosquitoes have been quite fierce this past week, to the point we wouldn't allow the girls to go outside most of the week. Just walking out to get the mail and newspaper would result in several bites, so it was time to stay indoors. We invested in an Off clip-on though for Lauren and it works like a charm, so I think we made it through the day today bug bite free for the girls.

We hope you too had a fun Memorial Day weekend, and we look forward to seeing many of you over the course of the summer!

Molars and food

Last week was a rough week for Lauren. She was really fussy, had a low grade fever, her eyes were watering, and her nose was runny (although this last one has been kind of a permanent state since she was 4 months old!). It turns out that she was getting more teeth; the first of her molars finally poked through early last week. So she's up to 9 teeth now and I think a few more molars are on the way. At the rate she's going, she's going to be close to 12 teeth by the time she's 12 months old! Poor little thing. What's kind of funny though is that her molars are coming in before her eye teeth, so she's going to have a little "gap" for a while in her smile.

We've been trying to give Lauren more table food for a while, but she tends to reject it. The other night she got in trouble because she was just throwing her little bits of turkey burger and bun on the floor. She was crying as she really does not like to be told no, and her big sister Alyssa was very protective of her during this, kind of like why are you making my little sister cry.

It's been a little frustrating that she wont' eat more because she's totally got the teeth to do so, but she just likes to eat her food pureed or eat her starches (puffs, cheerios, etc.). But we've discovered lately if you give her big pieces/hunks of food, she'll happily take bites and chew it up. This has now happened with watermelon, cheese, and bananas. Aren't the pictures kind of funny of her eating these "big" things?







Now that the weather has been nicer, we've been going out for ice cream every once in a while. I wanted to go out on Mother's Day so we went to the ice cream shoppe in downtown Ada - Scoops. She really enjoyed the bites of my ice cream. Aaron took the girls for sundaes while I was out of town and then we stopped last night as well while we were out and about. Alyssa and I shared a strawberry & cherry sundae and Aaron got his own chocolate and caramel sundae. Since I was sharing with Alyssa, Aaron had Lauren on his lap. She was so insistent on eating the ice cream; she got very upset if Aaron took a bite or gave a bite to Alyssa. He tried to put her down to move around (she'd had plenty of ice cream) and she threw a fit - she wanted more ice cream I think we have another girl with a sweet tooth in the house! Lauren is quite fiesty at times, when she wants something, she doesn't want to be told no.

She's continuing to try to walk around more. With both her walker and when holding to your fingers with both hands, she's running around. And she's now walking holding on to only one hand too. It might not be too long, but we shall see. She looks so proud of herself when she's getting around on her feet. She's doing better climbing up stairs, she can do it but often doesn't push herself. I'm trying to decide if we're not pushing her as much to be independent (you know, the poor second child) or if this just part of her personality. Time will tell. In the meantime we're just going to enjoy all the smiles she sends our way.

Sing-a-long

Alyssa is now singing and we love it!

It started a few weeks ago when she spontaneously burst out into the "ABCs" all by herself and it has continued. Yesterday we hit a high point. On the way home from the store, I asked her if she wanted to sing a song and she said yes. So we started singing Old MacDonald, she made all the animal noises and would choose the animals we sang about. (She corrected me when I sang that chickens say "bok bok", she wanted to say "cock-a-doole-doo".) The we sang the wheels on the bus and she could keep it going by herself.

At bedtime, I started singing her good night songs, and she joined in. Aaron could hear her downstairs (although he wasn't able to make out what she was saying). She sang Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, Jesus Loves Me, and He's Got the Whole World in His Hands. It was awesome. Her tune isn't always the best, and she's not always on key, but she's singing!

Her favorite song by far is the "Rain, Rain Go Away" song, which we sadly have been having to sing more and more. We added our own little verse where we sing "Little Alyssa wants to go outside and play." We then have to sing it to Lauren (or Lolo) and all her friends at daycare (which she sometimes calls her peeps since that's how Gwen sometimes refers to them). She sang it this morning on the way to daycare all by herself - three times, once for herself, once for Lauren, and once for me too!



This picture is from last weekend while I was in Minneapolis for a conference. Aaron took the girls to Arts in Ada; I think they had a good time and enjoyed the nice weather outside. The girls had to go to a different day care center for three days last week, and Alyssa did really well there. She made new friends and got to do all sorts of different activities, including having a birthday party for one of the other kids. The providers said that she was a super star because they wouldn't have known that she hadn't been going there all along.

She loves to help do little things around the house - wash bottles, sweep the kitchen floor, set the table, buckle Lauren in her car seat, etc. This morning I told Lauren to not take her shoes off, and Alyssa came over and held the shoe on Lauren's foot so she couldn't take it off, and if Lauren's eating puffs or cheerios, Alyssa will remind her to eat "one at a time." She amazes be by the complexity of her thoughts sometimes. I asked her yesterday what they did at day care and she told me (in three separate phrases): "I not go outside and play today...it rain all day...so we had to play inside." What good thinking on her part! While I have enjoyed many of the different stages, Alyssa has passed through, I think is one of my favorites because she's just silly and she's so on top of things.

ABCs

A month or two ago we had some friends over; their little boy, Gavin, is just a year older than Alyssa. They were playing with the letter magnets on the fridge, and he knew all the letters while Alyssa didn't know any. Here's a sample of what their conversation was like:

Gavin: This is G.
Alyssa (holding a B): That G
Gavin: No that's B.
Alyssa (now holding an S): That B
Gavin: That's S.

Alyssa became somewhat frustrated rather quickly. She's been doing letter puzzles since her birthday and Christmas, so we started teaching her a few letters. We started with A (for Alyssa), then added L (for Lauren), M (for Momma), and D (for Daddy). From there we branched out to P, N, G, W, S for others and it seemed like within just a few weeks she had all the letters down. We didn't realize how well she was doing with them until one night we were sitting at the table, eating a pasta dish, and all of a sudden she's saying "P-A-R-M-E-S-A-N". It took us a minute to figure it out, but she was reading the letters on the Parmesan cheese container. She sees letters everywhere, she'll read the letters on your clothes or on boxes. And while reading books at night, she's looking at the letters. Sometimes she'll look at a page and be all upset: "There's no A for me on this page." Aaron and I are pretty sure we didn't teach her all the letters, but she knows them all somehow. And just in the past week she's started singing the alphabet song (I think they've been singing that at day care). I caught her on tape singing the song one night so I thought I'd share. It's not her best version of it but you can probably make it out.



And this video of her is from sometime about a month ago when she was still learning most of them.



In other news on the Alyssa front, she is potty trained. She's been wearing big girl undies for about a week now. She's been ready to get rid of the pull ups for a while now but she wouldn't wear undies until I bought her some princess ones and that's all it took. She's doing so great. She's only had one accident and that was this past Sunday after church. She was in the kitchen while the rest of us were upstairs changing our clothes. All of a sudden she was crying and we came down to see her standing in a puddle of pee in the middle of the bathroom. Apparently she couldn't get her tights off in time. She was pretty upset, but that's her first accident in a long while. She's still in diapers at nap time and over night as she almost always wakes up wet, but we're pretty excited by this new phase. She's gone potty in stores, church, and even the port-a-john at the Tulip Time festival last weekend. And when we traveled to PA a few weeks ago, she didn't even have an accident in the car. As she'll tell you, she's not a baby, she's a big girl!

Silly Lauren

It seems hard to believe that Lauren is 11 months old already; in another month we'll be celebrating her first birthday. While she's become quite a speedy crawler as of late, is cruising around anything she can hold onto and is trying out new foods nearly every day, she's still so baby-like in so many ways. I think there's a part of me that wants her to stay just as sweet and happy as she is now, but there's another part of me that's ready to hear her little voice talking and watch her take those first steps. We had thought she'd be walking by now because she's been pulling herself to standing and cruising for so long, but she is just perfectly content to crawl to where she needs to go. Every once in a while I'll catch her letting go of her "hold" but the minute she realizes she standing, she sits down.

She's been enjoying getting outside for walks and play time. She looks all over as we go for our evening walks in the stroller or wagon, often clapping, waving, and smiling as we go. She wasn't too sure about the grass at first, but she's getting used to it slowly but surely. She loves to swing in her new red swing that the Easter Bunny brought her and we've even let her go down the "baby slide" a few times. She's getting into chasing or rather being chased and still loves to clap her hands when you sing and laugh at her sister.






She's now got 8 teeth, and I wouldn't be surprised if another one pops through sometime in the near future. She just chews and chews and chews, on fingers or toys or anything else she can get her hands on. We've been encouraging her to try eating more table foods and self feed, but she's not quite the eater that Alyssa was/is. She loves to self-feed starches(pastas, breads, puffs, cereals, etc.) and some veggies (green beans, sweet potatoes, peas), but she is not a fan of bananas, broccoli (throws it on the floor), shredded cheese, or little chunks of meat. She'll eat all of this when it's pureed in baby food but not when she has to chew. She even went through a phase where she's spit all of the chunks out of her baby food and just swallow the puree. We're past that now (Thank goodness!) and are just trying to encourage her to chew and eat new things. I do have to say that her favorites as of late are black beans and ice cream.

We love to watch Lauren as she explores her body. When she discovers how she can move different parts, she becomes kind of spastic at times, to the point that you might get a little concerned, but then she'll grow out of that phase and won't do the motions any more. We've gone through what we thought was her losing head control as she'd throw it forward and back, shrugging her shoulders and more. I'm including two different videos of her being somewhat goofy while eating; in one she's showing her muscles or her mean face and in the other she's shaking her head. In the one, Alyssa is chattering non-stop in the background and we're not real sure what she's saying other than every once in a while she says "My butt hanging out!" So it's not just Lauren that's silly :)

Tulip Time

Last weekend we headed out to Holland for the Tulip Time festival. Holland is a town know for it's Dutch influence, so we thought we'd see a few tulips and maybe a few wooden shoes. But we had such a fun time with the girls and we wished we could have stayed longer to walk around and really take in all the tulips that were there.

Upon arriving in Holland we went directly to Kinderplaats. We had to wait in line to purchase our ticket, but the wait and Alyssa's entrance fee were well worth it. We immediately headed over toward the farm animals, where Alyssa got to see a camel, tortoises, bunnies, and goats. Alyssa tends to be quite afraid of animals, so we were shocked when she was willing to feed the goats carrots. Lauren even made a few friends with the goats.







From there we watched Farmer John's Farm Show in which we watched kids feed lambs bottles, a dog perform tricks, the farmer milk a cow, and a pig run around and squeal. That was a lot of fun, and I think Alyssa enjoyed it. After the show, we headed over toward one of the tents where Alyssa got her face painted and then we let her jump in an inflatable "bouncer". It took her a while to work up to going in there, but once she did, she enjoyed herself.You could see her smiling, hear her giggling, and even hear her say "I falled down" a few times. After this, we took a quick stroll past one of the tulip fields/gardens. There were so many different colors and sizes - it was beautiful. We didn't have the time to explore as we would have liked as we were all hungry and we were closing in on nap time. But we did try to take a few pictures of the girls with the tulips.





As we were leaving Lauren was saying "bye bye". Although you can't hear her necessarily, you can see her hand waving and her lips moving.




And here is Alyssa talking a little about the day at dinner that night.