Another one, with flash...

That title is a line from one of our favorite Modern Family episodes:

It's particularly funny because Vivian went through a LOVE-the -FLASH on the camera phase. I'd pull out the camera and snap a quick picture while she's looking at me curiously, then after the first flash goes off, she'd pull out the big grin. Observe:

 

 

  

  

Northern Bi-Polar Express

It can be really hard to be two years old. It can be really hard to take Christmas pictures of a two year old. The process includes bribes, threats, whining, and partial nudity . Let's let the pictures illustrate:

 Thanks for finally smiling, but let's do a not so crazy smile.

 Ok, now that's being too silly. Fingers out.

 Creedo, I'm serious. Don't eat that! You won't get any treats after this if you keep doing that. 

 Are you ready to try a good smile?

  I'm sorry you're upset. Here's the candy, right here in my pocket. Give me a good smile and it's all yours.

There's my happy boy. Remember, lets keep our fingers out of our mouth though when we smile.

Whatev. Here's your candy.

34 Days & 33 Nights Away

Happy 2013.
I'm behind on two years' worth of S&M Awards. Hmm. I'm OK with that.
Since last blog post, we've all been through a lot.
The highlight reel:
- All sick during our stay-at-home Thanksgiving
- I was reminded that I'm always glad not to be in school during finals weeks
- We left for a 34 day holiday. Steve had five weeks off of school and we maximized it! Perks of being in school still :)
- Drove to San Antonio, visiting family in suburbs of Dallas and Austin along the way.
- Stayed at my parents' lovely new home they had only moved into two weeks before. First to arrive and last to leave- nice.
- Became better friends with new(er) family members, like in-laws and babies, and long-time friends
- Spent two weeks in SoCal. It went by faster than you'd think, especially when you've got the coolest new pajamas to hang out in and a collection of Steve's childhood toys to go through.
- Overnight get-away in the Gaslamp District.
- Did a session in the ever-beautiful San Antonio temple. Sometimes I really miss Utah's proximity to temples...
- Everybody got sick again on the return trip
- One ER visit in Dec for Creedo and two Urgent Care trips for Viv in Jan
- Viv turned one! We had a family celebration in CA and back in CoMo.
- I miss everyone

Besides it being the worst winter in our family's history for sickness, the trip was still a smashing success. When better to be sick then when you're with lots of loving help and few obligations?

Creedo's such a big boy. It's almost like terrible twos re-emerged upon our return, but I think being away so long was hardest on him, so an adjustment time is to be expected. He is really into the Aquabats SuperShow, saying "funny" words (read: poop), doing more things all by himself, and making me laugh with the stuff he parrots. Today we were playing a game with his new play kitchen where I had to sit on the sofa and be grumpy, demanding food, and he would fix it and bring it me (he came up with this). At one point I crossed my arms and huffed for more watermelon, and he rolled his eyes and laughed at me, saying "Oh mom. You certainly crack me up." It was really hard to stay in character after that.

Viv oh Viv. She developed a truly nasty ear infection upon return. She wasn't responding at all to treatment the first four days, but as soon as we got her on a different antibiotic she was much better. I have never had a baby as sick as she was those days. She looked awful and there's not much else that hurts more than seeing a normally active, super-smiley and happy little girl become too weak to even grin, let alone walk or play. Her birthday was pretty subdued because of her illness, but we'll do a re-do soon. She is doing great now, except she's been waking up absolutely furious during the night and early morning. It's bizarre and I have no idea what to do about it. I only hope that it is connected to the fact that she is getting in four new teeth. All you can see so far are the two on bottom and the two top side teeth coming through a la hillbilly people.

Pictures to come, as soon as I can find my camera cord...

Baby Steps away from Babyhood

As predicted, Viv has reached the milestone of biped ambulation.

Two weeks ago we tried to get her to walk a few steps between me and her dad. Her best was four steps, which is notable for a nine month old. The next day she took eight steps completely independent of me. She just decided to walk from a window to a chair, no cajoling or bribing at all. I was stunned, but I can see now that this might be her way. When she figured out the stairs, there was a period of her playing around/on the bottom one and then one day she went all the way up as if she'd done it a hundred times before. Same with the sizable drop -off of our back deck into the yard. She had played near it dozens of times before with little interest in trying to climb it, but then one afternoon she went to the edge, turned around, lowered one leg and then the other, and crawled away on the grass. Not only was she proficient at the physical level, she was even graceful in her movements.

Steve has gotten a couple of these "You won't believe what the baby just did..." calls and texts followed by "WHERE DID MY BABY GO?". I know all kids grow up and I'm really OK with that and look forward to watching them develop into little big people (they'll always be a little bit little to me, I think). But why do my kids grow up so fast? Even in the womb, my midwives tell me I felt my first kicks weeks before the average mom. I'm convinced they just don't want to be babies. We make adulthood look so fun they are dying to be old (I'm 25 now so I can say stuff about being old).

The next day she did it again. Independent of me and apparently just for fun, she walked across a room to her favorite dancing spot in front of the TV stand. She is really wobbly, holds both her hands up above her head as if grasping someone's fingers (C says she walks like a monkey), and tends to take big steps with her right foot and tiny catch-up steps with her left, resulting in a sideways trajectory, but she can most definitely be deemed a walker. Every day since, she goes farther and with more surety.

I'm curious what these pattern of development means for her personality. She is pretty fierce when you take away the toy she just took from her brother (who had already taken it from her while trying to trick her into swapping it with his inferior toy), and will often bite the offending hand. C, bless his heart, is still very sweet with her and usually plays gently and respectfully of her, her space, and her things. He growls and grumbles a lot, but he calls for me to "put her away" and doesn't shove her off his books. She is also very cuddly with me and likes to twirl hair- my hair. She also fake laughs and hams.it.up for the camera. One flash and she is all squinty-eyed-grins until the camera is put away.

Besides walking, her other latest developments are imitations of real life. She has loved playing with bags, purses, wallets, bank cards, etc for months, but it wasn't until yesterday at the grocery store when I saw her trying to swipe the card she was holding in the card-reader that I realized she knew what to do with them. She also has picked up on the pretend phone thing, where all things phone-size occasionally are held up to her ear. While folding laundry today, she kept picking up a pair of C's Yo Gabba Gabba underwear and putting it on her head as if she knew that clothing belongs on bodies. What?! I know. She is just too much sometimes and I just want to squeeze her and hold her and go Granny Wendy on her with squunches and "Stop growing up!" ultimatums.

Creedo is great, too. I'll feature him next time. Stay tuned for tales of the jungle, painting projects, declarations of rights, pint-sized shopping carts, trips to the Dark Side, and zombie get-aways.

Ghostbusters or Bust

For the ward Halloween party, Creedence was Tin Tin and Vivian was his trusty sidekick, Snowy. Steve was Captain Haddock for a three minute span during which I took pictures. I was everything else, as usual.

For the actual Halloween day, it somehow ended up with me in zombie make-up and Vivian in a skeleton onesie. I don't have control over what the rest of family wears, and they chose not to participate. In fact, I dragged the kids to do trick-or-treating at the grocery store and that was all I could get Creedo to do. He didn't want to go out door to door. He wanted to eat treats and watch Halloween movies at home, so Ghostbusters and Dum-dums it was.

I'm not sure what Creedo thinks Halloween is. Since the first time he saw a soda display that involved Frankenstein's monster printed on the cartons in a store in early October, he's been saying, "It's almost Halloween." We made a paper chain to help count down the days. We've watched hundreds of Halloween jib-jabs, we made pumpkin-everything-edibles, we listened to the Monster Mash on repeat for hours.  But sometimes he would say that it's Halloween in the back yard, or we just passed Halloween, or that he's going to hit the bad guys with Halloween. Not sure where I got off teaching him that one...

Is it really bad when you live next to a super busy day care and across the street from an elementary school, two clear signs of lots of local kids, and yet not a single trick-or-treater comes to the door? Everyone apparently goes to a ritzier neighborhood a few minutes away instead of staying around here. The point is that now we have so--- much candy. And so little time.

In other news, stay posted- Viv is going to start walking any day now. At least, Steve's trying really hard to make it happen.

 He played doctor the whole time. He did not want to touch the insides of the pumpkin. I pretended to get my hand stuck to see if he would reach in to pull it out for me, but he offered to go get Dad instead of do it himself, 

 Snowy and Capt. Haddock

Camera-shy TinTin. Today, he tried to re-create his Tintin hair with hand soap. It sort of worked... 

Yeah... 

 This is what Creedo wanted to do on Halloween, despite a month of preparation, casing houses practicing innocent faces to elicit extra treats

She's a natural

Our New Street: More Holes than Sponge-Bob at a Donut Shop

I'm not even kidding. The worst ones happen to be right in front of our house. Creedo, Viv and I have sat on our porch in the afternoons watching drivers freak out as they drive by because they think their rear bumpers just fell off.
It is just one of the interesting things about our new place. At first glance, I was thrilled. It is spacious and not terribly junky and it turned out that we have a deck in the back yard, which was a surprise. But as we started unloading the truck an hour later, it became more and more evident that the place had not been cleaned well after the previous tenants. An hour after that, we had become aware the place probably hadn't been cleaned at all after the previous tenants. By the end of the third day of just cleaning, it was obvious the place probably hadn't been cleaned well, ever.
The good news is that we had lots of help from Steve's parents those hardest first days (and on the drive out here, and on the Provo end of the cleaning/packing. They are fantastic people). The other upside was that every issue was more or less fix-able, even if that meant painting over popcorn ceiling in the living room and completely re-painting the downstairs bathroom (thanks Steve's mom!). I still haven't gotten all the white residue off the sink cabinet in the master bathroom stubbornly left over from where I had to peel off velveteen stickers depicting each of the Seven Dwarves (why...?), but I'll get to that. Our landlord is a whole 'nother story, but I'll save that for a different day.
My Mom and youngest sister came out the second week and helped organize all of my storage (labels and everything!), clear out the miscellaneous boxes in the garage (read: those incredibly taxing boxes of odds and just barely useful things you just don't really want to unpack ever), hang pictures, and enjoy some Columbia fun. We took Creedo fishing, saw an outdoor movie in a park, did Steve's back-to-school shopping, and enjoyed how fun Vivian's new squinty-snorty-smile quirk is. It was great.

But then everyone left, and school started.

That was rough. We've had Steve around all summer more or less and then to have him just go off and abandon us...  not. nice. but necessary (he says). Luckily, our ward has eight other toddler boys in the 2-3 yr old age range and we are having fun getting to know them. We trek through the jungle, Creedo's title for all the nature trails. Steve and I have also been re-watching all of Arrested Development. So, so good.

Columbia

Not the country. Not the city in South Carolina. Not Ohio either, you're thinking of Columbus. It's Columbia, MO and we are headed there in a week and a half. Steve has achieved his MFA in Creative Writing and now he is going for a PhD at University of Missouri in Creative Writing and Literature. It's a five year program. I still don't understand what could possibly take five years, but then again, if I made the rules, cookies wouldn't have to be a "sometime treat." 

The crazy thing about moving is that it all comes down to the end. We've packed a little but there are only so many boxes I can tolerate in the house while we are still trying to live here. I'm choosing to spend a lot of time with kids, Steve (who has been home and free this month and I love it), and the Utahns I'll miss the most. I feel like now is the calm before the the storm, before school starts up again and I'm busy with the adventure of exploring CoMo and setting up house. I'm one of those people who actually enjoy unpacking so I'm looking forward to that part of a fresh start.

Speaking of fresh starts, Vivian has just transformed over the past three weeks. She went from figuring out how to roll over both ways to a funny face-plant caterpillar forward movement in the course of about a week; then suddenly she started army-crawling. Fast. Until this point, I had been in denial about how mobile she was, telling myself she's just a rolly-polly, not really in control of her movements. Then she started making purposeful 90 degree rotations and avoiding obstacles and using turn signals and stuff. She's really good at focusing on whatever Creedo is playing with and trying to get that into her mouth. He is tolerant in a two-year-old sort of way and mostly just yells "Vivian!" a la Ricky Ricardo and moves over a couple feet to a new spot. She pursues, and I pretend they are playing together. 

She can also sit up unsupported for a little bit, although she looks supported by her tummy and thigh girth. She's ahead of the curve in her motor development, just like Creedo was, and appears to be nowhere close to interested in giving up night-time feedings no matter how much solid food she eats (also a Creedo behavior). I guess that's the trade-off for having super skills. She also picked up this funny quirk where she quickly pumps her arms when she's excited or growing agitated, and she likes to bob her head frequently to real and imagined music. 

Both of the kids love the water. Creedo is pretty fearless, so when we go to Seven Peaks I strap on Vivian in a mesh water wrap so I have both hands free for him. He wears this adorkable floatie that goes over his chest and straps under his legs with a tube floatie across the chest. Accessorize with bright blue water shoes, red Spider-Man shades to match his Spider-Man trunks, a high-neck rash guard and a floppy hat, and now you've got a combination for some of the most bizzare tan lines you've ever seen on a toddler. Steve's skin cancer appears genetic, so I try to keep Creedence protected. Vivian loves the wrap and will splash her legs and people-watch the whole time. The best part about the whole thing is how great they sleep afterwards!