Almost 2 and a rambling blog post...

It's a gray, rainy day here, the leaves on the Aspen trees outside are window are yellow and I'm sitting by the fire.  The girls are napping after a lunch of chicken noodle soup and toast.  The house is stocked after an epic shopping trip yesterday where I went to seven stores in four hours while Josh watched the girls at home. I'm feeling ready for winter, but wishing summer could last a few more months.  

This time last year I was writing this time last year posts reminiscing about being pregnant, having the girls, dealing with the NICU and all that.  This year, I am just thinking about when I'm going to find time to practice making fondant for the fancy jungle themed cake I want to make for the girls' birthday party, doing homework for a creative writing class I'm taking, and trying to figure out what we are going to do for the next six months of yucky weather.  In short, life moves on and thank god for that!  

The girls are turning the big T-W-O on Wednesday though we are not going to celebrate until November 6th when they are having a big party with their friends and family.  I'm wondering what I was thinking having a big party since Kate hates crowds.  I know Maya will have fun, but I have a feeling that Kate will spend her birthday party in the car watching videos.

Here's a cute picture of Kate eating an orange.  She continues to be the messiest eater on the planet.  I keep waiting for her to grow out of the messy eating stage, but then think of my brother who was a pretty messy eater until about 35.

Oh, and mom and dad, hope you're having fun in Vietnam.  Kate keeps saying "Nana on a big plane!".  I've been trying to get her to say "Nana and Grandpa are in Vietnam", but she's hung up on the plane thing.  (When Josh was in Texas for business last week, Maya kept saying "Daddy's in Texas!".  Of course, she must have no idea what Texas is, but she likes saying it.)

End of An Era

I finally decided that it was time to permanently pack up Kate and Maya's bottles and make the leap to just drinking milk with meals and for snacks out of cups.  They've only been having two bottles a day for the past six months or so and for quite a while Maya really didn't care one way or the other if she had a bottle. Kate was getting to that point, too.  It was actually very easy - they were excited to drink their evening milk from an open cup "like Petra" (their six year old friend), and didn't even seem to miss their bottles.  It's kind of strange and nice for me to have the whole bottle thing behind us.  Bottle feeding was such a royal pain in the neck when they were little and I'm happy we've moved on to bigger and better things.

Like baking...

Being the big, bottle-free girls that they are, I let them "help" me make a cake this afternoon.  Kate took her cake making responsibilities very seriously and actually listened to what I told her to do.  She spooned the pumpkin into the bowl and stirred it as if her life depended on it.  Maya, on the other hand, was more interested in making designs in the spilled flour and trying to lick the spoon, although she did do a good job turning the mixer on and off.  

Morning at the Pumpkin Patch

Nana and Grandpa are heading to Vietnam and Cambodia for three weeks tomorrow, so they came out today to spend a last day with us before their trip.  Since it's October, we decided to head to Reno to visit a pumpkin patch.  Now, when I was a kid,  pumpkin patches were pretty much just that - a field with some pumpkins.  You'd pick out the pumpkin you wanted, pay for it and that was that.  The pumpkin patch we visited today was much more than just pumpkins - they had a bounce house, hay wagon rides, farm animals, corn maze, etc.  Kate and Maya, of course, instantly headed to the bounce house and, had we let them, would have spent all day jumping around like crazed monkeys until they passed out from exhaustion.  However, we forced them out of the house at a certain point and made them do other things like look at pumpkins, sit on an antique tractor and take a hay ride.  We all had a lot of fun, though Kate, of course, got totally overwhelmed towards the end and needed to once again be extracted from the pumpkin patch to sit in a quiet car and watch Wiggles videos.

Anyways, here are some pictures.  Josh isn't in any pictures because he was home working on plumbing and lying on the couch groaning in pain.  Poor guy has had on and off severe abdominal pain for over 2.5 years and it's very much "on" at the moment.  The doctors are still working on a diagnosis, so in the meantime we've been spending a lot of time googling his symptoms, which, in case you're wondering, is not the best idea in the world.  So far Dr.Google has informed us he either has colon cancer, stomach cancer, stomach ulcers, pancreatitis, diverticulitis,  Crohn's disease or about 10 other things.  At this point, Josh is hoping the cure doesn't involve giving up beer or coffee.

 

We're still here

OK, so two people besides my mom have asked if I'm ever going to post again.  I honestly was thinking I was done blogging, but since "my public" is clamoring for more, here you go...

I can't possibly recap all the cuteness that has been going on in our house since my last post.  Suffice it to say that we had a really awesome summer hanging out at the beach, the pool, the park and various and sundry places in between.

The girls are both talking a lot - using full sentences, multi-syllable words, etc.  I still consider myself a Kate&Maya-ese  => English translator because, though they are both enunciating pretty well, I frequently am the only one who knows them well enough to get what they are trying to communicate.  For example, Kate's  recently been telling everyone "Gon-do-la not running".  Most people would just think she was babbling incoherently, but I happen to know that she's talking about the time last week that we tried to take a gondola ride at a local ski resort and it was closed.  Apparently, this made a big impression on Kate.

Today we went to a birthday party  for a friend's daughter's 3rd birthday party.  It was kind of a crazy at the venue with tons of kids, parents and lots of chaos.  Kate was just completely overwhelmed by it and was obviously distressed.  She seems to absorb and internalize other peoples' energy and it then comes rushing out of her in frantic, ADD-like action.  After about an hour of Kate bouncing off the walls,  I was beginning to  contemplate  future Ritalin prescriptions.  Josh wisely decided to remove her from the party and let her watch videos in the car.  The videos in the car were clearly the highlight of the party for her.  Maya, on the other hand is much more Zen about everything and quite enjoyed the party despite the chaos.  It made my heart melt a little to watch her sitting with about 10 other little kids at a kid-sized table quietly eating her cookies and cupcakes.   She seemed like a real kid  - not at all baby-like anymore.

Speaking of cupcakes, the end result of going to two kid birthday parties (we had one on Saturday, too) in two days, is that the girls are now thoroughly obsessed with these super sweet, completely nutritionally void confections.  At dinner today they were asking for cupcakes instead of my healthy, homemade split pea soup and they've been pretending that their Lego blocks are cupcakes.  Sigh - they are definitely my kids.  I'm not big on cupcakes, but I'll eat pretty much any other sweet you put in front of me.

Oh, while I'm at it, there's one other little thing I should probably write down for posterity since it was so hilarious to me.  I hate taking the girls grocery shopping these days because it inevitably ends in someone screaming and crying at the checkout stand.  However, you have to do what you have to do, so last week I found myself in Safeway with Maya in the cart and Kate in the backpack.  It was the end of the day and Maya was hungry and cranky, so by the time we reached the produce section, she very ornery and whiny.  Normally, the whining is really irritating, but this time it cracked me up because she was whining for all the vegetables as we passed them ("PLLEEEEZ BROCCOLLIIII!  CAAARRROOTTTS! LEEETTTUCCCE, PLEEEZ!")  Even though it was cracking me up, I thought she was probably disturbing the other shoppers, so I finally gave in and let her have a head of raw broccoli.  This made her happy and she spent the rest of the shopping trip nibbling on her broccoli (this definitely garnered a few double takes from other shoppers).  Ah, two year olds.

Finally, here's a picture of Josh and the girls last month on a sunny, beautiful late summer day at the lake.

Backyard Fun

Can we go to the pool now?

Ah, Summer

It's mid-summer and I'm still appreciating the warm weather, trips to the pool, the beach, walks in the woods, the park, the Farmer's Market and all those other great summer activities.  On August 1st, I feel like the summer both just got started and is also almost over.  The winter for us was very trying as it was so long, cold and dark and we all seemed to be sick for most of it, so I'm trying to enjoy every moment of our warm, sunny and illness free days.  I think we live in the absolutely best place in the entire country to spend the summer - the weather is warm and sunny (but not generally too hot and never humid) during the day, cold at night and lots of great activities and beaches nearby.  I can't think of anyplace I'd rather be right now. We had a fun Sunday today.  We took the girls over to a local ski resort and rode a shuttle bus around a bit just for fun.  I know it sounds strange, but it  was probably the highlight of Kate's week - she sang the "Wheels on the Bus" the whole trip.  Maya loves buses, too, but was a little scared of actually riding in one.  We also walked around the resort which has some great features for toddlers including multiple sand boxes, a toy store with a drawing table, hammocks and other things like that. In the afternoon we went to the pool for the third day in a row.  The girls love the pool and never seem to get bored of it.  Kate loves to put goggles on and hang around in her rubber ducky.  Maya is the ultimate water baby and has been very busy teaching herself to swim.  She is very good at holding her breath under water and is working on floating and kicking .  I'm feeling very lucky to live a block from a great pool (even if it doesn't have pool side drink service) and am dreading the day that it closes in the fall!  It's such a low key, easy activity to do with toddlers and we always seem to meet people we know there - which makes it more entertaining for me. On the way to the pool - Kate's all set with her rubber ducky (she walked around with it for a half an hour before we left for the pool). Maya's laughing at her Dad being silly.

Kate goofing around at the pool.

Kate playing with my sunglasses.

Enjoying a nectarine on the front deck before bedtime