Rebecca

She just started clapping, too. ANd she thinks she invented peek-a-boo.

Pants

My theory on kid clothes has always been to avoid redundancy. Don't buy too many clothes, because they grow out of them so fast. Katherine had four pairs of nice school pants at the beginning of the year, which I thought was plenty. By January, they were all holed, along with all her play pants and the jeans I bought to replace the school jeans. (On the day I picked her up to go pants shopping, she'd ripped the knee in yet another pair.)

New strategy: redundancy. We loaded up on pants at the consignment store and Value Village, and brought home five pairs. One already has a hole in it.

One down, four more to go.

Rebecca gets mobile II

She started standing up today, or maybe yesterday. I still haven't seen her pull herself up, but I have seen her wobbling on her own two feet, hanging onto the bathtub or her play saucer. She seems to like it, until she realizes she doesn't know how to stop. It's a long way down.

Tooth Fairy II

Awhile ago Katherine and I came up with some different tooth fairies:
--The nice tooth fairy, who brings things like money
--the boring tooth fairy, who brings things like Kleenex
--the interesting tooth fairy, who brings things like coal
--the good tooth fairy

This morning, after Katherine's tooth had sat under her pillow all night, we had to invent a new one: the forget fairy. We assured her that's why her tooth hadn't been collected. I tried to build on this scenario: the tooth fairy didn't realize she'd lost her tooth so fast, the tooth fairy couldn't come in the (meager) snow. But she had an answer for everything. The tooth fairies knew immediately she had lost her tooth, because they have a magic map. And snow shouldn't have stopped the tooth fairy, because the tooth fairy has wings. So we had to stick with the forget fairy and leave it at that.

Tonight Katherine told me I had to be the tooth fairy. I don't know if she figured us out, or if she's just impatient. I said I couldn't because I don't have wings, but she offered to loan me wings out of her dressups.

So tonight, if all goes well (i.e. the forget fairy doesn't strike again), I'll be sneaking into my daughter's room, clutching a quarter. And possibly wearing wings.

Getting popcorn off the ceiling

takes way longer to clean up than it does to scrape down

Organized

I may be living under a delusion: that I can get organized and stay organized. I was on a roll last week. All last week, while Laramie was in New York and my evenings were so empty, I cleaned. Organized the children's room, discarding two bags full of old scribbles and moving the furniture around (successfully fit everything back in the room!) Boxed up the Christmas decorations, reshelved the Christmas boxes, arranged my beautiful Lewis chessmen on my card-free mantle. Cleaned my bedroom--well, 1/3 of it, anyway.

Then, Saturday, we buy a bedroom furniture set. So we had to empty our bedroom and move all our stuff wherever it could fit. Our study is full of boxes, with a little island of empty space in the middle (as opposed to the little island of flotsam that's always been there before). Our downstairs book room has 4 layers of mattresses stacked on top of each other, as if we're sleeping a princess. And all my laborious organization? Completely undone.

Well, at least the kids' room will stay organized. Knowing children.

Kneeling

Alex yells, "Mommy, Rebecca got kneeling." I look over, and there she is kneeling up, playing with her toys.

Another new skill. I wish I could learn them at that rate!

Home again

We made it back home again Friday night late--or was that Saturday morning? Roads were clear and bare all the way back, and the kids slept all the way through Oregon. Our book on CD, "His Majesty's Dragon," made the time fly by. Our house is still a mess, especially because Lar set up the bunk bed in the kids' room and spread all their clutter all over the rest of the house in the process, but we are unpacked and ready to start our normal routine. We were even all on time to church today, thanks to Lar's hard work as well as the new 11:00 time slot. We so enjoyed seeing all our family in Utah, and I thought the 16 hour drives were a small price to pay compared to the pleasure we had in our visit. Good times working on the photo-mosiac puzzle with Cody; sleeping in the cabin with Sarah and Cody (who lay awake all night worrying that our kids would fall out of the loft); exploring the gold mining cabins with Katherine, who talked about them this whole evening; getting a personal snowmobile tour of the vanished town of Kimberly; experimenting on Kangan water and acids with Isaac; feeding Julie Brown's goats; and staying with Josh and Maria. We must be about the last guests in Maria's guest suite (which will soon be Noah's room) and the first guests in Josh's (sheet rock and bare cement floors; the kids loved sleeping in a tent in the next room). Thanks to all of you who helped us have such a great trip.

Rebecca gets mobile

Rebecca officially crawled yesterday evening, a few jerking forward motions. She can also scoot all the way down the hall. But, as mobile as she's gotten, she's not nearly mobile enough--at least in her opinion. She's been crying a lot, either because she feels mommy-deprived and wants to be carried, or because she's moving too slow and feels the need for speed.

Snowmobiling 102

They made me drive the snowmobile partway down the mountain, since our other driver, 14-year-old Ethan, wanted to do a little snowboarding. I drove at about walking speed and reached the others safely, without crashing, getting stuck, tipping over, or dying of a heart attack, though I probably almost fainted hyperventilating.

Lar says snowmobiling 103 is going around corners, and snowmobiling 201 will be driving in fresh snow, not in somebody else's tracks. Maybe next year. Or next decade.

Baby news

Rebecca learned to sit up yesterday--I looked over and there she was, sitting, grinning as proud as can be. I still haven't seen her do it, but she's getting pretty good. It makes bathtime a lot easier, since I didn't have to hold her up the whole time.

She also nearly crawled two days ago, and would have had a big breakthrough if she hadn't been wearing such baggy pajamas. As it was, her knees just slid back and forth. We may keep her in these pajamas until she's a teenager.

Tooth Fairy?

Katherine lost her first tooth the Saturday after Christmas. She left it in a container on her dresser. At midnight I thought "tooth fairy!" and jumped up like a good mommy to swap it for a quarter and shove it under her pillow.

The next day she came out wondering where her tooth was. "Why?" I asked.
"So I can put it under my pillow for the tooth fairy."
I told her I'd done it for her already.
"Are you the tooth fairy?" she asked.
"Did you get something from the tooth fairy?" I countered. "Go look." She didn't. Later she found her quarter on the floor.

Jury is still out on whether she thinks there's a tooth fairy or not.

A crash course in country living

(posted from Annabella, UT, after a New Year's bonfire and hot dog roast in the cow pasture)

Laramie made me drive a snowmobile AND shoot a gun all on the same day!