trick or treat, round two

Rachel woke up this morning talking about it being trick or treating day.  She kept asking, "Is it 6 o'clock yet, Mommy?"

We all went together this year. 

Rebecca looked around in her car seat for the first 30 minutes or so, but then she started fussing.  It was past her bedtime and it was cold and windy (she was warm, but I was cold!).  We had already turned around and started heading for home because Rachel was tired, too, but I left and headed back home as fast as I could push the stroller into the wind in order to get a tired, cranky Rebecca into bed.  Rachel and Daddy finished trick or treating on the way home.

Rachel was so fun to watch.  She'd run up to each house, get her candy, and run back to us saying, "Did you see what I got, Mom?  I got CHOCOLATE!"  like it was a complete surprise and thrill.  And each house was just as exciting as the last. 

Now her care bear costume has entered her dress up bin, so I'm sure I'll be seeing a lot of Funshine Bear around the house for the next couple of weeks.

five months

She's five months old today....I can't believe it.

At five months, Rebecca is still obsessed with putting her hands in her mouth.  And I mean OBSESSED!

I remember Rachel going through a phase like that, but Rebecca's hand chewing phase seems to be lasting MUCH longer!  She seems to be heading toward a thumb or finger sucker--she can't seem to decide what she likes better--her thumb or a couple of fingers at a time.

She smiles a lot and is a pretty happy girl most of the time (except the last hour or so of the day).

She can't roll over yet, but seems to be getting close in the last few days.  She is pushing up on her hands a very little bit, too, finally, and will stay propped up on her elbows longer, though it's not her favorite.  She is close to sitting by herself, but is a GREAT supported sitter.  It seems to be her favorite position.  She can hold onto things for quite awhile now, and she's often happiest under her play gym, squealing at herself in the mirror and holding on to the toys that hang down from it.

She goes to bed around 6 pm, gets up around 6:30 am, and is sleeping all night, as long as we get her up to feed her at 9:30 pm.  Her naps are sporadic....I wish I could tell you we're on a good daily schedule, but I'm STILL working on that with her.  She loves oatmeal, and I'm sure she'd devour any kind of food we'd try to give her right now, but we're sticking to oatmeal for one more month.

She likes to be tickled under her chin and likes it when I sing to her.  She kicks her feet vigorously when she's excited or about to get upset, and she's easily startled by loud noises.  She "talks" to me a lot on the changing table, but otherwise she's pretty quiet, quite the opposite of her sister when she was a baby (and still is today!).  I wonder if that means Rebecca will be our quiet one, more like Mommy?  Only time will tell, I guess.

Most of this I wrote so I can fill it in in her baby book eventually, but hopefully some of you will still enjoy reading about my sweet girl!  She's growing so fast!

musings

*Rachel's discovered Super Heroes.  Oh brother.  She latches on to new characters like you wouldn't believe.  So while it was first (and still) princesses, then Thomas, then Cars, then Care Bears, now it's The Incredibles.  She puts on her "Super Boots," (pink cowboy boots), "Super Cape," (the felt Wonder Pets cape my mom and I made her when she was two), "Super Gloves," (white princess gloves, two sizes too big), and paper Spiderman mask from a birthday party she went to, and suddenly she's Mr. Incredible.  Then she slowly takes her mask off to show me that she's really just Rachel.  Thank goodness she reminds me, because I frequently forget, you know.

*Rachel's fascinated with the human body and asks me over and over to read her this Dr. Seuss book we have called, "Inside Your Outside," which talks (in rhyme, no less!) about the body.  So I'm currently sick with a cold or some sort of sinus thing and today she came up to me (as I was laying on the couch, not feeling well) with her pretend princess camera and tried (unsuccessfully) to lift up my shirt to "take a picture of the germs inside you."  I asked her why and she said, "Because I want to see those white things (white blood cells) eating the germs!"  (That's what the book says....that your white blood cells eat the germs when you get sick to help you get better.)

*Rebecca had her Help Me Grow evaluation earlier this week to see if she qualified for physical therapy.  She didn't qualify.  So on the one hand, it's good because they've determined that she's more normal than abnormal.  But on the other hand, it's not so good, because she's still not rolling over or pushing up, and they won't provide the physical therapy so she can learn how!  So I'm hoping that we can maybe do a few physical therapy sessions where we went before, learn what we need to know, and then I can do the exercises at home with her myself. 

*Until last night, Rebecca had been sleeping through the night for about two weeks straight.  I didn't write about it here because I didn't know if it would last.  I'm hoping last night was just a fluke (she was wet all the way through her clothes--which is all the impetus I need to move her up a size in diapers--I've been putting it off to try and get the most bang for my buck--there are more size 2 diapers in a package than size 3 diapers--but I'll gladly pay for the extra diapers if it means she'll keep sleeping all night!) and that from now on she'll stay dry and keep sleeping.  We'll see.

*That's about all I can come up with on a Saturday afternoon when I'm not feeling well.  Thursday night is trick or treat night around here, so I'm sure I'll have lots of pictures of my Care Bears again after that occurs.

a getaway

My husband and I were able to get away for the weekend last weekend without the girls.  My parents kept Rachel and Rebecca and we took a mini-road trip.  I won't tell you where we went, but for those of you who know where I live, it was about 2 hours south of us at a city on the river. 

We had a wonderful time.  I'd never left Rebecca, so I was really scared that I was going to spend the whole weekend missing her and worried about her, but I didn't.  Yes, I missed her, and I skyped with my parents a few times so I could see her (and Rachel, too!), but otherwise, I did fine with leaving her.  And the girls did great and were well behaved for Grandma and Grandpa.

Here's a picture taken at a park down by the river.

We didn't have anyone to take our picture, so this was a do it yourself photo with the river behind us.  I kept closing my eyes when I pressed the button so I had to put my sunglasses on so you couldn't tell!

We went to a conservatory in that park and saw some beautiful plants and flowers.

This is at the same park.  It's crooked, and not really a beautiful background, but there was a wall that we could set the camera on (we didn't have a tripod with us) so we tried it.

On the way back home we stopped at a state park.  The next pictures are from there.

We also went out to dinner two nights, saw a movie, went shopping, and basically just had a weekend-long date night!  It was lots of fun and a very, VERY nice break.  The weather was gorgeous, too!  Thank you, Mom and Dad, for taking such good care of my little girls!   

trick or treat, round one

Last night we went to our town's Halloween Festival.  It's the first year we've gone, and Rachel had a great time.  She's had her halloween costume for a couple of months, and it's been put away in the closet because she was so obsessed with it.  So the chance to wear it was absolutely thrilling for her.  

Speaking of thrilling, they were playing Michael Jackson's "Thriller" on the speakers at one point, and Rachel stopped in her tracks and started doing a very thriller-like dance.  My husband and I were cracking up, and I soooooo wish we had taken the video camera with us!  It was priceless.  How she learned to dance like that, I'll never know!

We couldn't believe how crowded it was.  We've heard a little bit about this event, but never too much, so we thought it wasn't that big of a deal. We were wrong.  We could barely park the car or maneuver our stroller around the crowd.

Rebecca was good while we were there, though she screamed in the car on the way there and the way home.  It was past her bedtime and she was exhausted, and here we were making her dress up and go out for the evening!  Poor little girl. 

Anyway, here are our little Care Bears.

See how crowded it was??

My eyes are closed in this picture, but I'm showing it so you can see Rachel's "belly badge."  She's "Funshine Bear."  At one point in the evening I called her to catch up to me and she said, "You can just call me Funshine Bear, Mommy.  Not Rachel."

And here's just a picture of a happy Rebecca from today, because I don't seem to get many of those pictures.

And here's an unrelated side note.  I was at church for MOPS today and when I went to pick up Rachel from child care the woman in charge told me, "You'd better watch out with this one.  All of the boys were picking her to be the goose during our Duck Duck Goose game!"  When I told my husband about it he said it was probably only because they knew she couldn't catch them!  When I asked her she said no, that she didn't catch any of them.  So I guess my daughter isn't going to be a track star.  But she makes a good goose, apparently!

fun in the fall

We took a day trip today to a state park and to an ice cream factory on the way home.  It was a gorgeous day to be outside!

Rachel sitting on the wall, waiting for me to finish feeding Rebecca

Daddy and Rachel climbed a fire tower while Mommy and Rebecca stayed down (see us?)

Here's the fire tower they climbed--Rachel was thrilled to be up so high

Rachel's stage--she was singing us a song and dancing

Another stage...a covered bridge

The ice cream factory

Daddy and his girls

Daddy and ALL of his girls!

Mommy and her girls

The trees were just starting to change--not as much as we had hoped, but still pretty

picture day

Today was school picture day for Rachel.  Knowing her tendency toward having difficulty looking at the camera, I decided to take a few at home just in case the ones at school didn't turn out so well.

I had to get her to tell me a "joke" (her version of a joke is a really bizarre story that makes no sense at all, and then she laughs at herself) in order to get her to smile and look at me, but it worked!

things Rachel says...

::The other day she asked me, "Mommy, will you get my shoes, please?"  I told her that she could get them and she replied, "But if I say please you have to do it!"

::She asked me, "Mommy, where's heaven?"  I told her I didn't know and that we wouldn't know until we died.  That answer didn't satisfy her, so she asked, "What kind of country is it?"

::Along the same lines, she asked me, "Mommy, what's inside God?"  I told her I didn't know (why does she always ask me these hard questions I don't know the answers to?) and that she'd have to ask God when she sees Him in heaven.  "But I don't want to die," she told me.  I said, "I mean when you're old.  Everyone gets old and eventually they have to die."  She said, "But I don't want to get old.  I want to stay your little girl forever.  But I just keep growing!"

::My husband was leaving to go to a meeting.  He gave me a kiss goodbye.  Rachel saw this exchange and said, "Mommy, you're falling in love!"

::She was playing with her stuffed animals and told one of them, "Your prince is going to come and sweep you off your feet!"

::This one requires some backstory....  When I was pregnant, Daddy and Rachel went on lots of outings to give me a break.  One thing they did quite a bit was walk at the park and then play on the playground.  During their walks Rachel would ask Daddy to read her the little plaques along the way.  Many of them describe the type of tree nearby, and one of them was "Shagbark Hickory."  Rachel came home several times and told me, "Mommy, we saw Bagshark Hickory trees!"  We kept correcting her and she finally got it right.

So a couple of weeks ago we were at our church's fall picnic.  We took a hayride into the woods and Rachel calls out for all to hear, "Look!  That's a Shagbark Hickory tree!"  And she was right--it was!  She then proceeded to tell our wagon everytime we passed a Shagbark Hickory tree.  I'm sure they were thrilled with the nature lesson.  What other 4 year old knows what Shagbark Hickory looks like?

firsts

First time in the exersaucer--she liked it!

First time eating anything besides a bottle--baby cereal

She loved it and cried when I stopped feeding her!  That's my little eater!  Rachel didn't like it for the first several weeks at all and I just stopped giving it to her for awhile.  Little did I know that it would be foreshadowing of her feelings toward food today....

the kitchen nightmare

Last year for Christmas, one of my gifts was a kitchen sink.  My husband told me he was going to install a new countertop, sink, and faucet for me in our kitchen.  I was excited, but because I was pregnant and hormonal and couldn't handle one single decision or frustration during those nine months, I wouldn't let him put it in yet.  He kept wanting to, but I kept saying no, that it was too much stress and I didn't want to have to pick out anything at that point.  I couldn't handle the pressure and couldn't handle the frustration of not having a kitchen for a time.  I know it probably sounds silly, but I've suffered from perinatal depression during both of my pregnancies, and both times chose not to take anything for it until after the baby was born because of its effect on the baby, so every little thing completely overwhelmed me (but that's all a topic for another day).   

Fast forward to August, when my husband was in Peru.  One night I put the dishes in the dishwasher, turned it on, and it didn't work.  It's an old dishwasher that came with the house, and it hasn't worked quite right since we moved here, but it's always done the job okay. My mom and I tried to figure out what was wrong, but couldn't.  At 10:00 at night we were using the shop-vac to suck water out of the dishwasher so it wouldn't leak anymore all over the floor.  We washed dishes by hand the rest of the week, waiting for my husband to come home to decide what to do about it.  Since it was so old, it wasn't worth bringing a repairman to the house and paying $100 just to get it looked at.  After several weeks of washing dishes by hand, I finally got my husband to try to fix it a week or so ago, but after looking at it he said there wasn't anything he could do, so we needed to buy a new dishwasher.

He went to the store to look at them, and when he came home he said that if we were going to tear up the kitchen we should do it all at once, and he'd get started on the countertop/sink/faucet project as well.  So we bought a dishwasher, finally picked out the countertop, and chose a faucet (I already had the sink).  I wasn't looking forward to the process, since it meant no water and a huge mess for who knows how long, but at this point I was ready to put up with it for awhile in order to have my sink. (I didn't care so much about a new countertop.  I just wanted a new sink and faucet to replace my leaky one.  He thought we needed the new countertop before putting in a new sink.) 

My husband's a great woodworker.  He has made countless pieces of furniture for Rachel that are just beautiful.  So he has the tools and the ability to do a lot of things with wood.  He thought he could build the countertop himself inexpensively and save some money.  He bought the supplies and set to work on Friday night, removing our old sink and countertop and getting the wood cut for the new countertop.  Things were ahead of schedule after that night.  He thought he could get it done by Sunday.  No problem, I thought.  I could wash dishes in the basement laundry tub for a couple of days and eat microwaved meals for the weekend until my kitchen was back in working order.  My parents came down so my dad could help him on Saturday.  But on Saturday they kept running into one problem after another.  First the formica wouldn't stick properly to the wood.  Then his router kept making marks on the sides of the countertop as he cut it, ruining it beyond repair.  The tops looked great, but the sides were a mess, no matter what he tried.  And the wall behind our sink is not flat, and he was running into problems with getting it to lay right in that spot as well.

On Sunday he decided he was throwing in the towel.  We went to Home Depot to price having someone else come put in a new countertop.  It actually was less than we thought it would be, but still lots more than we wanted to pay (since we had already spent all of the money on the other supplies!).  Plus I would have to wait three weeks before it was done and I would have running water in my kitchen.  We were going to go to Lowe's to get another quote, but decided to stop at home first to measure the sink, which we had forgotten to do before.  While we were at home someone (I don't know if it was Brian, me, or one of my parents) came up with the idea of putting wood trim on the sides of the countertop to cover up the mistakes.  Wood trim isn't quite as "in style" as it used to be, but it could solve our problem and save us some money.  We went to Lowes and priced wood trim.  It was going to be much, MUCH cheaper than having a new countertop made and installed and we could have it done much sooner.  So we bought the wood for the trim and came home so he could start installing the sink (the countertops were done, except for the trim, which he could install later).

He and my dad measured and cut the hole for the sink.  They dropped it in and the started working on the plumbing. Then it was time for my parents to leave.  My husband tried to connect the garbage disposal and ran into problems.  At that point I had to leave to take the girls to a birthday party, so he was on his own. 

When I came home a few hours later, I was hoping to arrive home to running water in the new sink.  No such luck.  Instead I came home to an even messier kitchen and a disgruntled husband who had been working the whole time and had only come up against more problems.  The old dishwasher was somehow leaking all over the floor, the brand new faucet was leaking, and there was no hot water or garbage disposal.

He gave up for the night.   So we started the week with no water and a kitchen that looked like a hurricane went through.  More microwaved meals.  More washing dishes in the laundry tub (so lots of using paper plates!).  Monday night he worked from the moment he got home from work until he went to bed, and still continued to run into problems.  No success.

Tuesday the new dishwasher was installed.  The installer ran into problems because our plumbing wasn't working. (In order to test the dishwasher to make sure it worked he had to put a bucket under the drain to catch the water coming out.  A couple of times he forgot and water came pouring out under the sink!) But he installed it.  I asked him how much he would charge for fixing the plumbing for us, but he said he wasn't allowed, because we wouldn't be going through Lowe's, where we bought the dishwasher, and he could lose his job.  He said it didn't look too difficult, though.

Tuesday night my husband set to work again, with the plans that if it didn't work, he was going to call a plumber.  This time, after several attempts, he was able to get it to work.  Hooray!  Now I have a working sink, faucet, and dishwasher!

The countertops still need their trim, so we can't put the things back in the cabinets (the living room is full of boxes with the contents of my drawers and bottom cupboards), but at least now I can use the stove and oven and wash dishes (and bottles!) again.  Because of the constant need for bottles, I was washing them a lot, and bending over the basement laundry tub was killing my back.  I'm so thankful to have a sink again.

And the sink....oh, the sink!  I LOVE it!  My old sink was a standard contractor's grade stainless steel sink that comes in apartments and so forth.  It was small and curved on the bottom so that you couldn't stand a glass up in it without it falling over.  This sink is deep and has a flat bottom.  It's wonderful!  And the dishwasher is super duper quiet. (our last dishwasher was about thirty years old, according to the installer, and sounded like a freight train when it was on, so that you had to turn the TV way up when washing dishes!  You can barely hear this one!)

So I'm still a little ways from having my kitchen done, but I'm a LONG way from where I was a few days ago.  The nightmare is pretty much over.  When it's all done I'll put some pictures on.

4 month stats

Hooray!  She's no longer on a "diet!"

Weight: 15 pounds, 8 ounces (75th %)
Height: 24 3/4 inches (75th %)
Head Circumference: 16 1/2 inches (75th %)

So she's big, but not huge, and definitely proportional, so the doctor told me I can feed her what she wants.  I'm so relieved.  I was so stressed about giving her too much, not enough, etc.  Now I can relax about it.

The doctor wants to have her evaluated by "Help Me Grow," the early intervention organization in our state that helps hook you up with therapies and so forth for babies through school aged kids.  Rebecca doesn't push herself up when she's on her tummy, she doesn't roll over (or show any inclination to do so), doesn't put weight on her feet, and her feet still turn in.  She didn't seem overly concerned, but wants to have her evaluated to see if she's eligible for any therapy to get her up to speed.  She said she's not concerned about the rolling over, but would like to see her pushing up more.  So I called, and we'll see what I find out.

In other news, we've been having a kitchen nightmare at our house....and one of these days I'll do a post on it, but I think I'll wait until it's all resolved.  Ugh....

UPDATE:  The biggest part of the problem is resolved....HOORAY!  I now have a functioning kitchen again.  I'll try to write the whole story in the next couple of days.

four months

Rebecca's four months old today.  I can't believe how fast the time is flying.  I'm trying to enjoy each minute of her infancy (the only moments I'm not enjoying are the middle of the night ones!  But even those are sweet sometimes.)

She doesn't have any new tricks to tell you about.  She still chews on her hands non stop, likes to look at herself in the mirror, smiles when she has a full tummy, and rubs her eyes when she's tired.  She goes to the doctor tomorrow, so I'll know more about her weight and eating and all of that--my biggest concern.

Here she is--still a deer in a headlights when the camera comes out and all smiles before and after. 

Chewing on her hands....

The smiling ones are always blurry...

Love that baby girl!

apple picking

Yesterday was Rachel's school field trip to the apple farm.  Daddy took the day off to go with her so I could stay home with Rebecca.  She and Daddy had a good time and there is an apple pie in our future....

Daddy said she got shy as soon as she got there and didn't talk to her friends who all told her hi.  Sometimes I just don't understand that girl--so talkative and social, yet so different a lot of times around other kids.  That's the whole reason we're sending her to preschool, so she'll hopefully overcome some of that.

picnicking

Yesterday was our church's fall picnic.  It's a huge affair with tons of people and things to do.  Tons of food, too, but we didn't get over to eat until almost all of it was gone or really picked over.  :( 

Hayride

Pumpkin decorating

Cotton Candy

Face painting

Pony ride!