Moments in the life

So Nick got me a fun pocket-sized camera for Christmas (I love my big fancy camera, but carrying something the size and weight of a big rock around in my purse on vacations was wearing thin). My favorite feature so far: video.

Hannah still loves the cell phone and now that she's talking, she likes to make pretend calls:

(Translation: "Hi. I want crackers. Hi. I want crackers. I want crackers. Hi. Crackers. Bye-bye.")

She got into a bin of clothes that my mom saved from my childhood, choosing some of the more eccentric pieces. Yes, those are plastic Japanese squeaker clogs, circa 1980:


You know, Nick and I have decided that this really is a fun age. For Hannah, the not-fun age was 14-18 months (lots of hitting, deliberate disobedience, making The World's Most Annoying Sound until her whims were accommodated). Nineteen months, on the other hand, is almost completely delightful. Maybe she's less frustrated now that she can talk so much, or maybe she realized that the timeouts were not going to end until the hitting stopped.

Whatever the case, we are very thankful for the change in personality. It's so much more fun to laugh with your child than wanting to cry because she keeps acting like a kid you wouldn't let your kid play with.

Complete thoughts

Hannah uttered her first full sentence last Sunday: "I go walk." Followed by "I see Daddy," and "I poopy."

Her hands-down favorite phrase, though: "Daddy toot." Even when Nick isn't in the house. This is what happens when you laugh at something the first time your child says it. We knew it was a bad idea and eventually it would come back to bite us in a public place...like last weekend at church, when I was sitting in a rocking chair in the nursery with her. It was old, wooden and squeaky and every time we rocked she said, "Mama toot! Ha ha ha ha! Mama toot!"

"Such a fun age! (???)"

Adoring stranger: Oh, she's so cute, how old is she?
Nick/Katie: Eighteen months.
Stranger: Oh, that is such a FUN age!

At this point, we answer with the same strained smile that we used to save for "Oh, don't you just love those 2 a.m. feedings? It's such a great bonding time."

I guess we should feel hopeful for the future, because everyone who has [grown] children seems to remember this age only as a time of fun and wonder. And to be fair, there is a lot of that. Hannah comes up with a new word almost daily (and sometimes we can also figure out what it means. "Zooma" apparently applies to anything with wheels, even a tractor, despite our repeated assurances that tractors do not go fast enough to qualify for "zooma" status.)


On the other hand, we deal with senseless, yet extreme, tantrums ALL THE TIME. The other day we had a Battle of Wills over a vitamin. Hannah loves her vitamin. Every morning she gets a chewable vitamin when I take my prenatal vitamins. She jumps up and down and does her happy dance when I say "Hannah, do you want your vitamin?"

And yet, on this particular morning, there was something mortally offensive about actually eating her vitamin. She carried it around, occasionally licking it, but would not take a bite. This was only really a problem because the pill in question was red. And when you lick something that is saturated with Red #12, it tends to rub off on EVERYTHING.

So I gave her two options: please chew your vitamin or we're going to put it in the garbage. (The parenting books say this works. You empower your child by letting them decide between A and B.) Her response: running away, vitamin tight in fist. (Stupid books.) So, because the parenting books say you have to follow through, I pried away the vitamin. Major screaming fit. (Stupid books.) And because I am weak, I gave it back to her when she indicated she would actually eat it. Followed by more running away. Third time: vitamin actually went down the hatch. No reason, everything fine.

Slow insanity by toddler. Sure, suuuuch a fun age.

My Little Martha

Project One

Hannah decided that she wanted to make some Christmas presents this year. She thought that she should share her favorite thing in the world (candy) with some of her favorite people, so we got out the cookie sheets and went to work. First things first: sample the ingredients.

"This one's still wrapped. How am I supposed to eat it if it's still wrapped?"

She actually did a great job of putting the kisses on the pretzels, as long as she had a piece in her mouth and a backup in one hand. (She tried biting the kisses before they went on the pretzels, but I promise none of the final product had Hannah cooties.)

The project was a great success; I was a little amazed that she was able to do it and not just throw a huge fit when she couldn't eat EVERY piece of candy (there are a lot of fits in our life these days). Unfortunately she did manage to eat more candy than her little system was used to, so a few hours later we had some pink, gooey throw-up to deal with. I think she'd say it was worth it.

Project Two

We had some friends with older kids over on Christmas Eve to decorate gingerbread houses. Again, I wasn't really sure that Hannah would be into it (other than sampling the candy). She napped through most of the actual decorating event, so my mom and I worked on the house for her (not that you could detect a difference in skill levels).

She made a beeline for the dish of candy as soon as she saw it, but when Grandma showed her what to do, she really got into it.

The gingerbread man turned out with a Picasso-ish feel, probably due to my challenges with the bag of frosting:

And, of course, the different varieties of candy all had to be sampled.

Hannah and her friend CC happened to have matching hand-me-down Santa dresses, so we tried to take an adorable Christmas picture in front of the tree. Clearly, they were not into it as much as we were. But they weren't beating on each other, either, so we'll call it a draw (or a Christmas miracle).

Girl Power

It's official: Nick is going to be VERY outnumbered on anything gender-related. We're having another little girl!!

We thought we knew before Thanksgiving, thanks to Nick's DIY ultrasound. But since we had some radiology friends who also took a "sneak peek" and spent 3 weeks telling everyone about their "little princess" before finding out they were really having a prince, we mostly kept the news to ourselves until the real ultrasound.

The tech took this shot "so everyone could see for themselves that it's a girl."
Um....right. I suppose if you have a degree in some form of radiologic imaging, this picture might tell you something. Because I know what I'm supposed to be looking at, I can tell those are butt cheeks and parts of the legs, but gender? Looks as much like one as the other, as far as I'm concerned. (Hmm- I just thought about what our child will think someday that I posted pictures of her girl bits on the blog.) Moving on..

Ok, this is clearly a baby. She's about 6 or 7 inches long from head to behind (or crown to rump if you want to be technical). And I've been feeling these bad boys a lot lately:
Isn't that a cute foot shot?? (Now that you know it's supposed to be a foot you can see it, right?)

At one point the tech commented, "Wow, she sure is active in there." Nick and I looked at each other with a slightly sinking sense of deja vu. Oh boy, here we go again!

On the bright side...

I just had one of those days with Hannah that made me question whether I will be able to handle two children without losing my sanity or locking one of them (or myself) in a closet for an undefined length of time. Nick was at work today and Hannah spent the whole day PUSHING IT. Many, many, many time outs that did almost nothing to correct her behavior. So, rather than focusing on all the ways she can drive me insane, here are some of her recent entertaining (although still not necessarily good behavior) moments:

-Belly-flopping from a chair onto a big round moose pillow. She climbed up, without warning or fanfare, flung herself off with complete spread-eagled abandon, then repeated 5 or 6 times. The chair seat is about 18" off the ground and this looked hideously dangerous, but it was also so hilarious that we had a hard time correcting her behavior because we were laughing so hard.

-First phrase. Not sure if it's "oh, man" or "no, mine." Hoping for former, most likely the latter.

-Deviousness. I could tell she was making a beeline to push her friend CC (who was standing on the ground but about to go up a step) over, so I told her that she could go up the steps, but she couldn't push CC. She climbed up the first step, put her behind in CC's face, and leaned backward until CC fell over. A similar incident apparently occured at CC's house: Hannah was told to stop hitting CC, so she lay down on the ground and started kicking. She's not quite 18 months- isn't that a little early to be so devious? What is she going to do to her sibling??

-Taking care of her "baby" (glowworm doll or stuffed elephant). She really likes to put either creature in her high chair, have me put the bib on, and then "feed" them crackers. Maybe she'll be able to transfer some of this love to the new baby. We hope.

-Loving her new snowsuit. She asks for it every time we walk past it and loves running around outside. She's surprisingly mobile in it, even though it's so big that she could gain 30 pounds and probably not fill it out. My mom says it looks like one of those fake sumo wrestling suits. Considering that the high today was around 12, we may need that extra space for all her layers.

SHOES!!

We may have a problem on our hands. Hannah is showing a disturbingly early enthusiasm for shoes. At first she just liked to put our shoes on and walk around. We figured it was because she got so much attention for being cute. Not a big deal.

Then yesterday we went to the mall to find dress shoes for her Christmas outfit. We walked into Payless and her eyes lit up- thank goodness she was strapped into the stroller. We picked out a pair of mary janes and she insisted on holding the box while we went to the counter and then held one of the shoes (I swear I heard her croon "my precious") the entire time we were at the mall.

As soon as we got home, the new shoes went on. She wore them for the rest of the day and got really angry after we put her jammies on because they wouldn't fit over the fleece footies. We put them on the changing table and I promised her she could put them back on in the morning.

Sure enough, the minute she woke up, "Shoes? Shoes? Shoes?" Again, frustration at the inability to combine jammies with shoes, which resulted in this:
I know, it looks like something from a disturbingly wrong burlesque show. But she was thrilled. The obsession is a little scary, but I feel like it's not such a bad thing to indulge right now. If she has feet like mine or Nick's, she isn't going to be able to find anything in her size when she grows up. It would be nice for shoes to bring her joy for a little while.