Happy Birthday, Anna!

Anna is 2! (And, boy, does she act like it sometimes!)

We had a fun birthday celebration for Anna on Saturday, starting with a "find the 2's" game. Matt and I hid a bunch of number 2's around the house on Friday night for Anna to find in the morning. She didn't want to stop for breakfast, but insisted on continuing to look for the 2's. She must have played with them for about an hour throughout the morning ... easy entertainment :)


Our friends Gretchen, Tim, and their son, Josh, came for the day; Anna was SO excited for Josh to come. I'd told her on Friday that Josh would be spending the day with us on Saturday because it was her birthday. When Matt and I came into her room singing Happy Birthday in the morning, she immediately said "Josh coming?" over and over. Those two kids are so fun together. They play so well together and remember each other even though we only see one another every few months.


In the afternoon/evening, our neighbors and Anna's godmother, Melissa, came over for a cookout, cupcakes, and general play time. I'm not sure that Anna quite understood that the whole shindig was set up for her, but she seemed to enjoy the entire experience.


A few experiences lately have reminded me how much our little girl is growing up. For example, last week Anna and I had been watering flowers and picking some produce in the garden during Kate's first nap. On Friday morning I asked Anna if she was ready to go outside with me. Usually she jumps at any suggestion to go outside, but this time she said "No. Mommy go outside, I stay inside. Read books." So I made sure Kate was unreachable to Anna and told Anna to come to the door and ask to go outside when she was ready. Grabbing the monitor and crossing my fingers I headed outside. Sure enough, I could hear Anna "reading" to herself (which is another story in itself) for 10-15 minutes before she came to the door and asked to go outside. Then today Anna stayed at Sadie's house for a few hours while I took Kate with me to the eye doctor. She had a blast and didn't seem phased at all by having Kate and I gone. Certainly different from just a few months ago.

Life

Now that Kate is six weeks old, I feel like we're past the initial adjustment phase and are supposed to be really getting into "normal" life again. It seems that we've been pretty busy lately and probably will be now for awhile. For example, we had some kind of visitor(s) at our house each day last week from Wednesday through Sunday. Nothing big (except for Anna's birthday party), but enough to make life busy. Plus, the garden is gearing up now and I need to come to terms with the fact that we're just not going to be able to harvest and preserve everything ... there are simply not enough hours in the day. Oh, well!


We have saved some produce, however. This monstrous broccoli head is only one of the dozen or so that we've been able to prep and freeze. We're also working on the peas little by little. Maybe things will settle down a bit after Anna's birthday celebrations and Kate's baptism and we'll be able to find more time. We'll just have to wait and see!


Kate seems to do pretty well most days, although we have our challenging ones as well (today was one of those days). She's not as laid back as Anna was as an infant, but seems to be more able to entertain herself these days. All the cuddling and snuggling is fun, too :)

Kate's smiling more and more, but we still don't have a good picture of one. This will have to do for now.

Water and firetrucks

What an eventful day yesterday! We've got some really nasty hot weather moving through the state this week and so our play group decided to meet at a local splash park instead of at church on Tuesday. We all arrived about 9:30 a.m. (along with about 2 dozen other families who had the same idea) only to learn that the water wasn't turned on until 10 ... yikes! After calling around a bit to get in touch with the parks and rec. department, things started up a little early (9:50, instead of 10 ... but 10 minutes makes a big difference for toddlers!) Anyway, Anna loved the entire experience and Kate managed to cooperate so Anna could have a bit of fun. We may have to get out the sprinkler here again this afternoon ...

The other big event of the day involved a couple of firetrucks that came to our street. A neighbor a few doors down was cutting down a tree, hit the power lines (big oops!), and knocked out power on our side of the road (on the hottest day of the year so far, of course). We got to watch two firetrucks with lights flashing and sirens blaring drive right past our house. Then we were able to meet a real, live firefighter in full gear in our neighbor's backyard. But the real highlight was when Anna, Kate, and I (Matt was out running errands, so he missed this part) walked down to see the trucks up close and were invited to sit IN the firetruck. A very friendly firefighter held Kate while I climbed up with Anna and sat inside the truck for a bit. Anna will definitely be talking about this experience for awhile!

The good and the bad

This week has been filled with a lot of good and some bad.

One of the bad parts has been Kate's fussiness. This week was a relatively crabby one for her during which she wasn't really happy unless she was being held or sleeping. However, a good part is that she's started smiling! I got a few real ones on Monday, but then not many more throughout the week because of her crankiness. Matt finally got to see several today (on Father's Day of all days)!

Another bad part was that I got a pretty bad migraine on Monday night and Tuesday. The good about this, though, was that I got to renew my prescription for Imitrex, which I'm not allowed to take while pregnant. Imitrex does wonders! Another good aspect was that Matt was able to take the day off as a sick day and have some special time with Anna :)

Unfortunately, summer had hit with a vengance these past few days with major thunderstorms and highs predicted in the 90s (after a relatively cool and calm spring). The good part about all the hot weather, though, is that Anna gets to play in the water again. She LOVES running through the sprinkler. She was even invited over to neighbor Carly's house yesterday afternoon to play in Carly's sprinkler. What fun they had!

Bad again ... I had a dentist appointment on Thursday morning. Nobody likes the dentist :( The good part was that Matt took the morning off to watch Anna (I didn't feel like trying to handle a newborn and an almost 2-year-old while at the dentist).

We decided to go strawberry picking before my appointment and had a great time. Anna ate her fair share of strawberries and we froze about 4 1/2 gallons of yummy strawberries. Here's Anna showing off her strawberry filled stomach, her red face and hands, and the strawberry trail down her shirt :)

Another bad ... Anna's been a bit "kid deprived" since Kate was born, simply because it's summer and we're not doing nearly as much out of the house. However, we've been able to see a lot of neighbor Carly and her family. Not only did Anna get to play in the sprinkler with her, but we also met up with them at a local farm breakfast on Saturday. Here's Anna, Carly, and Carly's mom, Jenny.

All in all, a good week.

Pictures from the weekend

Just wanted to share a few fun pictures from our weekend. Saturday morning started out a bit overcast so we set up the play-hut tent we'd picked up at a garage sale for only $3.00 (!) in the basement; Anna and Matt played in it for close to an hour before we realized the weather was clearing up. Then we proceeded to spend most of Saturday afternoon and evening and just about all day Sunday outside, including meals. By Sunday evening we were all ready to just crash in the living room for a bit instead of running around in the yard anymore.



Everyone was ready for church a bit early on Sunday so Matt and Anna took an extended tour of the yard before getting in the van. Here's Anna in one of her new dresses (also from garage sales).


Anna loves all the flowers in the yard and knows the names of many of them, including peonies, alysum, pansies, daisies, yarrow, begonia, asparagus ferns, and irises. Most she'll even say on her own and with relatively decent pronunciation ;) She's also well versed in the vegetable plants and fruit trees around the yard.



Kate's working pretty hard on smiling these days. I think we've gotten a few real ones, but never long enough to capture with the camera. I'm sure it will happen one day. In the meantime, here's some of her silly newborn faces.





I chose not to put the extreme close-up crying ones online :) Instead, here's a pretty goofy look she was giving on Sunday night. And yes, I think there really are three chins in the picture. I weighed Kate on Friday with the kitchen scale and I'm pretty sure she's pushing 10 1/2 pounds, probably more by now.



Last night I asked Anna if she'd like to hold Kate and Anna sounded pretty excited about it. We sat together for about 10 minutes with Anna talking constantly about Kate. I think this picture is of her tickling Kate's toes, but I can't remember all that Anna was saying at the time.


We've taken to putting Kate in Anna's crib with her sometimes when Anna wakes up in the morning so that the girls can say good morning to each other. Anna absolutely loves the experience and will often ask for it when she wakes up. Kate also seems to enjoy this special time with her sister and will calm down almost immediately if she's been fussy if she's right there with Anna. This morning Anna was especially sweet and lay down with Kate and talked to her for about 10 minutes before I convinced her that she needed to get up and get dressed.

Making it work ...

We had another successful week as a family of four, despite Matt having to work some extra hours on Monday through Thursday. We've pretty much got our morning routine down and evenings seem to be settling into a routine as well. I'm actually feeling confident enough in how things are going to encourage Matt to bike to work next week a couple of days. (That means that I'll probably have to get both girls up on my own and get them ready for dinner on my own, too ... yikes!)

One thing that has made our days work well is that we figured out how to get Kate to sleep a bit better during the day. I know Kate looks a little odd in the picture, but it really works!


First she gets swaddled to pin down those crazy flailing arms, then she gets a pacifier, and finally we put a blanket over her eyes to help her shut out the world. Now it only takes 10-15 minutes instead of 30-45 minutes for her to fall asleep during the day! Plus, once she's set up like this she'll sleep just about anywhere (bouncy seat, cradle, inside, outside ... except her car seat, it seems).

One difference we've noticed between our two girls is that Anna has been pretty sensitive to sounds from the very beginning of her life whereas Kate seems to be sensitive to sights, thus the face blanket :)

I get the feeling that Anna and I are going to be spending a lot of quality time together this summer, especially without some of the normal weekly activities that we used to have (music class, story time, Bible Study, etc.) We're working on getting play dates set up, and still have play group at church, but there's definitely more "at home" time than we'd had this winter. It's a good thing that Anna loves to do random things (like play among pillows, "pay yegos"-play legos, run circles around the house, etc.) as well as help in whatever way she can.


She loves helping get diapers for Kate, burping Kate, picking out some of Kate's clothes when Kate "makes a mess", and just about anything having to do with the garden (weeding, washing and tearing lettuce, thinning apple trees, etc.)

Speaking of our garden, thanks to Matt and my parents, everything I'd hoped to plant got planted and is up and growing. Things are even fairly well weeded right now(again thanks to Matt and my mom). The next challenge will be to pick and preserve produce as it starts to ripen and it looks like the peas will be the first big crop to come in ... maybe in the next few weeks!

Our first week together

Anna, Kate, and I survived our first week together fairly well. We even managed to go to Walmart on Monday morning and play group on Tuesday. Unfortunately, Anna picked up a bit of a cold on Tuesday at play group, but so far seems to be conquering it well and no one else has shown symptoms. Wednesday and Thursday were beautiful days here so we all spent quite a bit of time outside; then my mom was driving through Madison on Thursday night/Friday morning and helped me hit the McFarland garage sales (that's where we get a good supply of the girls' clothes/toys for the coming year!).

So all in all things seemed to work pretty well. My mom gave me the best advice by saying that somebody was going to melt down and cry every day and some days all three of us might be crying at the same time. So far everyone seems to be taking turns with the melt downs, but I'm sure we'll have our challenges, too :)

Anna's still doing great with Kate. She likes to tickle Kate's toes, "pat her curly hair", shake her hand, and "help get the burps out". This last one is pretty funny because Anna will come over to help when I'm burping Kate, pat her on the back, then look Kate in the face and say "oh, good burp Kate!" I wonder where she got that phrase :) I've even caught Anna singing songs to Kate or offering Kate her blanket when I'm in the other room. She's such a sweet kid.

Anna's also developed a tendancy to add syllables to different words. For a long time, her friend Henry has been "Henery", but now she's added a nice, Southern sounding drawl to words like bear, stair, hair, etc. Hair has become "hey-ah", stair is "stay-ah", and so on. It's silly, but cute.

Kate's continuing to do well. We're still all working on adjustments and trying to figure out what works for Kate. Her most challenging characteristic right now is that she takes a really long time to fall asleep during the day. I know we'll get it worked out, but it can be frustrating at times.


Matt's parents came down on Saturday for a visit and an introduction to Kate. Anna was thrilled to see them and to pet "Bey-ah" several times. He tended to give her "slippery kisses", though.



Kate was happy to get lots of cuddling time with Grandma and Grandpa, too, but her reaction to seeing her grandparents is understandably a bit different from Anna's :)