Playing house

Alex and Claire have started playing house lately. Like all the time. Which is fine. Claire is the mommy and she has a doll baby. Alex is the baby and he also has a doll baby. Which is weird. Not sure how that works. He likes to carry his baby around in a fisher price barn. It fits just right. Or the "trunk" of the scooty car.
The really distressing thing is that he listens to her as the mommy more than he listens to me. And when we are sitting at the dinner table, he will ask her for more milk, which she obligingly pours. But when he asks her for more milk, he calls her mama. I've tried to assert that I am mama and she is sissy or DeeDee. He doesn't really listen. But it is cute watching them play house together.

Elizabeth is 6 months old

Time sure has flown by. Our baby girl is getting so big. She turned 6 months told on Dec 23. In the last week or so, she has exploded in things she wants to do. She has started eating food. She won't eat baby food. She prefers chunks please. So that's been interesting. I have had to relearn how to prepare food with a baby in mind. She also has decided that a sippy cup is cool. I think we have overcome the "won't take a bottle" problem.
She has started rolling from her stomach to her back. She's been going back to tummy for a long time, but just barely figured out the other way. On Thursday, we were at the church and I looked over at her and she was sitting. And I had definitely seen her on her tummy just moments before. Yep, she can sit herself up now. And she is working on pulling up. As soon as she figured out the sit and the new roll, it was crawling time. She is still pretty slow, but if she is motivated enough, away she goes.
At her checkup, she weighed 18 pounds and was 27" long. That's the 90% for both. Doctor told me again that she will likely be taller than me. That's OK. Marrying a guy almost a foot taller than myself, I kind of expect to be the shorty.
We have also noticed lately that her hair and eyes are changing. When she was born, she had Claire's hair and Alex's eyes. Well her eyes are definitely brown now. And her hair gets lighter and lighter every day. She may end up blonde and brown eyed.
Overall, she is a very happy baby and we sure love her. She loves her siblings and is very curious and interested in life.

6 months

"I love some mashed potatoes!"

"Do I have something on my face? Why is it so hard to breathe?"

I just love this picture of her photobombing her sister.

And now she is 8 months old! (I ran into a snag with my sentence a day idea. I was using my tablet to write my posts, but instead of publishing them, it eats them. I can write and save in that format, but I need to use the computer to post. So this one got pushed aside.)She is finally crawling like a little monster. She zooms anywhere. And she is standing very well. She is taking some tentative steps, but mostly brother or sister push  her down. She loves to play chase. She crawls a few paces, turns and looks at you, then crawls again, laughing all the way. She thinks it is hilarious. She has started babbling some, with some mamas and dadas and nanas in there. I think she is starting to figure out mama and dada. She definitely loves her dada. She looks around for him whenever I get her up for a nap or if we go somewhere new in the house.  She is always on the look out for him. When she wants something at meal time, she looks straight at him and says "ah". Sometimes she looks at him, says "ah" to get his attention, and then "hides" from him. I love it.

Claire is 4

Amazing to think that she is 4 already. She has changed so much in the last year. She has grown and matured quite a bit. She is actually growing taller as we speak it seems. She has hit another growth spurt lately. I bought her shoes a few weeks ago, thinking I would save them for when she needed them. The very next day I was helping her put her old shoes on and was having a hard time and realized that her toes were very scrunched. I asked if the shoes hurt her feet and she said yes. I sent her upstairs to get her new ones. Up until this point, she never wanted to wear her tennis shoes to preschool. Now she will put the new ones on without a fuss. Silly girl. If it hurts, tell me! I was just thinking it was strange that she had worn the same size shoes for almost a year. Oh well, at least the old ones weren't too beaten up. She only wore them for a few months. Elizabeth can have them. And then, a few days after giving her the new shoes, I realized that none of her socks fit her. So I had to buy new socks. And her shirts were all short, so we had to change those out for her 4t shirts (Thanks Aunt Jenn!)  And now when she stands next to Alex, he seems like a midget and she is super tall. We just did her birthday measure- she is 3 inches taller than she was last year.

Otherwise, she is doing great. She still loves preschool. It is so much fun for her. We are working on getting her evaluated for speech therapy. She has an appointment in March. Her teachers mentioned that they can't understand her very well, and while it is getting better, there are consistent things that she does. Like she says "ay" instead of "s" at the end of words. She can say S at the beginning or middle, but not the end. And Alex is starting to pick it up. So we really need to get this fixed.

I put her big girl car seat in the car too. She is very excited about that. I'm glad that I can move Elizabeth to the Britax, because she doesn't really fit too well in the baby seat any more. Claire can unbuckle herself from her big girl seat, and she can unbuckle Alex now. It makes getting out of the car a lot easier. And so far, she hasn't abused the privilege. We have always been very strict about car safety. Alex and Claire will actually start crying if I forget to buckle them. They always tell me if I forget. (Come on, I have three. It's easy to forget one of them sometimes.) 

Her birthday was all about princesses this year. She got some Belle dolls and some dress up shoes and I made her a Belle dress. She wants to wear her Belle dress to church on Sunday. She asked for a chocolate butterfly cake, so that is what she got. It actually turned out pretty nice.

"Look it's the same"

Yep, that's my special girl. I love that this picture so accurately captures her personality.

Her butterfly cake. She wore that dress for days.

Everyone has to try on the pretty princess shoes. They are now spread out about the house.

Butterfly cake. 

If a tree falls in the forest....

So Sunday night it was REALLY windy. Like crazy windy. Insane. And instead of blowing towards the front of the house, which is the normal direction, it was blowing through the woods and against the back of the house. Alann and I went to bed kind of late and were just starting to fall asleep when suddenly there was this crescendo of noise. I can't even describe the exact noise. It just was building. I was actually starting to wonder if that was what a tornado sounded like, and if we were under a warning I didn't know about. Then there was a crunch/crack/thump. And then, silence. It was kind of weird. Alann said "I think a tree fell." I said "On the house?" And thus began an investigation. We couldn't see anything from our bedroom windows, so we went downstairs. As soon as we opened the sliding door to the back porch, a HUGE gust of wind came in at us. It almost knocked me backwards. We went out on the porch and sure enough, a tree had hit the back of the house. We didn't see any immediate damage, so we went to bed. Upon later inspection, I saw that the entire root ball had disintegrated  There is a huge hole where the bottom of the tree used to be. I thought the trunk had cracked. Nope.

Here's the amazing thing. As the noise was building, I said a prayer, as I usually do during storms, that we and our house would be safe during the storm. The tree that fell hit the back of the house right underneath our bedroom window. The second floor is smaller than the first, so there is an overhang underneath our window. You can see the smashed rain gutter from our bedroom. If the tree had been any taller, it would have come through our window. The tree was also pretty rotten on top. The various branches broke away as it hit the house, so instead of smashing through the house, it just ripped siding off. I have never had a prayer answered so swiftly and immediately and clearly. There was so much potential for this to be bad. But we were protected and kept safe. And I am grateful. I don't want to ever forget the immense gratitude that I felt and expressed as soon as we discovered how close the tree came. Not only the gratitude that I felt, but the confirming spirit that this had indeed been an answer to that prayer. I tend to think sometimes that "my prayers are never answered". You always hear those stories about how Johnny lost his ring and said a prayer and found it right away. That's never happened to me before. Now it has. And it's awesome. And thank goodness for home owner's insurance!

It's hard to capture the entire thing in one picture. It goes all the way to the house, other than where Alann has already cut it away to fix the dog fence.