Recovered from Bad Day

Thanks for your sympathies over my bad day. The ended up being better overall, which included:

1.) Finished piecing the top of Krystal's quilt, planned the backing, and got as far as I can on it before having to spend more money on materials. Yay!

2.) Kept to my new workout routine. It's nothing as intensive as Biggest Loser, but it's something that I can maintain. Though I'm still a little bewildered that I didn't lose like 30 lbs in the first week. Whaa? I have to workout continuously for the rest of my life in order to be healthy?? I can't eat 5 brownies a day anymore?? Agh!

3.) Tom Turkey visited us this week. He liked our yard, as he hung out in the garage and yard for 2 hours before I let Lucy out to chase him off. I had laundry to hang. And I didn't trust him not to peck Olivia's eyes out. And you can bet that Olivia would have tried to pet him. When she saw him out the window she cried, "Ducko, ducko!" over and over again (she now knows it's a turkey). She loves animals. Last week at my parents she kept trying to pet the band of wild calico cats that my Dad keeps. They'd come up on the porch and she'd yell, "Kitty!!!" and try to go out to pet them. She didn't understand why they kept running away. To be honest, I think even a tame cat would run away from such exuberant yelling. Poor Olivia. I guess we'll have to take her to a petting zoo some day.

4.) O got her teaset for her unbirthday (though there was a theftery fiasco involved in that, but this will be a positive blog post). Every morning when she gets up she remembers her new toy and cries, "TEApot! TEApot!!"

5.) A regular activity with O is to make tall towers that she can knock down. Today we built the tallest one yet, with our imposing and impressive Teapot topper. It lasted about 1 minute.

Bird Update III

Tonight I was trying to give Olivia dinner while making my own, and the casserole I was making needed a little more attention than I had bargained for. As a result, I kept giving Olivia more and more food in order to keep her at bay while I cooked. I was also curious just how much she would eat as I am always wondering if I feed her enough.

When I put her in the bathtub I realized that she indeed got enough to eat. I really wanted to get a photo of it, but I couldn't convince Lucy to spot Olivia in the tub while I ran downstairs to fetch my camera. Laying in the tub, she looked just like the Saggy Baggy Elephant did when he floated in the water. My baby had a big belly!


Today the Bird is 10 months old and is changing right before my eyes.

She is way more curious, and has discovered the treasures lying behind cupboard doors and in boxes, bins, etc. While her curiosity is strong, it is not intense enough to warrant crawling to such things. She will occasionally do the "wounded soldier" crawl, but mostly just does her precision rolling.

Her first word is "dog." She says Mama and Dada, but not to us. She will point at a dog though and say, "dah!" She jabbers more, especially while "reading" her books. Watching her read her books is one of my favorite things. She points her chubby fingers at a picture on a page and talks to it.


Lucy and Olivia can play together more now. Favorite games: lick the baby on the face and watch the baby laugh; tug-of war; laying near baby to get pets; and one of their favorites: before the Mom yells at the baby, eating baby snacks that baby offers to dog.




The Bird has also gone swimming! The first time was with Daddy, and she wasn't very excited about it. Annie and I took her in the Hunts' pool again on Monday, and she liked it much better. I let her slowly dip into the water, and to get used to it before letting her go down farther. We also let her sit on a floating board and play with some bath toys. She was happy in there for an hour! She even floated on her belly and her back. Here is a shot of her first dip:


Olivia has also started to have baby nightmares. I had nightmares when I was little too, and so did some of JB's family. Last night JB heard her cry out and he went to her. She was still frantic as he held her, but eventually he rocked her back to sleep. Maybe she was having dreams about having to wear this shirt again:


Sorry, guys, I just had to go there! You all should know that I'm not really anti-Michigan, but as a Spartan, I feel it is my duty to put this photo into cyberspace. :)

We're Baa-aack!

I couldn't resist. I just started to look through the 631 photos I took on vacation in the U.P. last week (yes, I may have a problem) and one of the first shots was this stellar catch of dogs at play. Yes, Lexi is completely in air, like Lucy. JB and I have talked about doing a vacation top 10, so I will post more photos as we post our list, but I just had to share one...

(the girl in the photo is JB's second cousin, Clara. Or first cousin once removed. Something like that. A nice girl.)




Oh my gosh. I just found more "dogs having fun." Agh. Will have to do "dogs having fun" post.

Oh, yeah, and we humans had fun, too. :)