Man is this long overdue! So much, too much, has been going on in our house so sitting down to do a post is hard to do. I barely get to do e-mail some days! I have waited so long I know this is going to be long, I am really almost dreading it, but I know so many family and friends are looking forward to it. So here goes the novel…….
Sophia is progressing well (but not fast enough in my opinion!) with potty training. She is telling us more often when she needs to go and is more willing. We have even had 3 Sundays during sacrament meeting where she has told us she needs to go and then she has gone in the women’s restroom! We were so proud of her. The only problem is that when she does have to go she always tells us “poopoo potty”. Not once has she gone number 2 in the potty so I don’t know why this is her choice of words to tell us, but at least she is communicating!
On a day I worked for my mom I let Sophia play in the sand box. I thought I had shaken out all the sand from her and her clothes until that night after her bath. BJ noticed a pile of something on the bottom of the tub when he was getting her out, and very concerned it was poop, promptly and nervously asked her what that was. Of course, following up with “Is it poop? Did you poop?” (we have had problems in the past of Sophia pooping in her bath after dinner) She looked at it and proudly announced “I pooped that!” BJ calls for me to come in and says “What the heck is that stuff? Sophia said she pooped it!” I saw what it was and through much laughter I explained it was sand from earlier. Thankfully much easier to clean from the tub than poop!
Sophia comes to me with a pair of training pants on her hand like a paper bag hand puppet would look and talks for it by telling me “Hello!”
Aunt Catey (BJ’s 16 year old sister) typically wears white tank tops with brightly colored v-neck or round neck shirts over them. I came out of the room one morning with a white tank top on with a bright pink shirt with flowers on it. Sophia points and says “That’s Catey’s shirt!” I told her no, and that mommy can wear stuff like too. At least not as well as Catey considering I am about 40 pounds heavier than her! It also goes to show Sophia is paying attention and getting used to Catey and what she wears!
Sophia is showing more aggression toward Phoebe. I feel like I can’t ever leave the 2 of them alone for 1 minute before she is biting, pushing, swiping, hitting, or sitting on Phoebe. It is exhausting and frustrating. We give time outs or pop her on the hand and manage to get her to say sorry and kiss Phoebe on the head, but 10 minutes later she will get at Phoebe over a toy if she can. I must say, though, Sophia is getting really good at tattling on herself. We have gotten to the point where if I am not around to see what happened and Phoebe is crying all I have to do is ask Sophia what she did or what happened. She is prompt and honest, “I pushed Phoebe.” or “I hit Phoebe.” etc……
Phoebe has started an icky habit of sticking her finger up her nose. It could be anytime, anywhere and she will just stick her pointer finger up her nose.
Phoebe has also discovered the power of her mouth. She can click her tongue, make a fish mouth, make tooting sounds, and blow. She will also anytime, anywhere make these noises and goes on and on.
We have begun the process of breaking Phoebe of the bottle at nap time and bed time. She seems to be doing fine at nap time without it but bedtime has been hit and miss. Once we are successful with this our next battle will be to break Sophia of her sippy cup at bedtime. This will help us with the potty training too so she isn’t loading up on fluid right before going to bed. We have had several mornings of wet sheets from leaking out of her diaper even!
Speaking of breaking old habits, we have been able to break Sophia of sleeping with her light on. She still has the flower night light, which we are fine with, but I hated that she had her light on too. It only took a few nights of sticking to our guns and she is fine!
Sophia’s bangs are finally coming in! They no longer look too short and have a very nice length as of now. Hopefully I can manage her hair while we are trying to grow it all out. Phoebe’s hair is getting so long too. Mostly unruly. Since it is coming in curly it sticks out in all sorts of directions, but it just makes her all the more cuter! It isn’t tight curls, mostly loose curls like mine but time will tell as more hair comes in.
Sophia and I have been practicing colors. She can accurately identify, most of the time, purple, pink, red, blue, black, brown, white, yellow, orange, gray, and green.
Phoebe has taken to crossing her arms like during a prayer, then she will take the outer most arm and hand and clap it against her other arm. Random, very random…..
Phoebe has also started a new thing of walking backward. She is very funny to watch when she does it, but she loves doing it. Eventually she will bump into something or simply fall on her butt, then she gets right back up and is at it again!
I bought a small pumpkin (pie pumpkin is what it was called I think) for Sophia. She has seen pumpkins around due to it being Fall and I thought I would indulge her. She was so excited when I brought it home and it had to go everywhere with her. She bounced with it outside, slept with it next to her bed, went potty with it, read books, etc. We drew a face on it and managed to keep it for a few weeks before it started to get too soft.
Sophia has grown short lived attachments to various stuffed animals. I work for my mom 2 days a week and literally every day it is something different that we take with us. It used to be that as long as I had her blankies and a sippy cup we were good. One day it will be Nemo, the next Pablo, then her beanie Ostrich, Lightening McQueen…..one morning we left with Pablo, a baby duck, a Siamese cat doll from Granny’s house and a ‘jingle bell’ bear that ended up coming home with us previously. She just HAD to have them all. This is on top of her blankies and cup. Needless to say getting in and out of the car ends up being a process of getting my kids AND all their crap out of my back seat!
There is a lovely duck pond and walking path within a short driving distance from our home. I have never been there early in the morning but with the weather being so nice I couldn’t resist. We were at the pond by about 9am. We took only a small amount of bread with us. The first group of ducks we came to (about 10) immeadiately came up to us on the grass when they saw they were going to get fed. They surrounded Sophia and I and came right up to our feet. Sophia was so overwhelmed nd was tripping on the ducks because they wouldn’t get out of her way and she couldn’t walk. She almost fell over on top of one. THAT would have been quite an incident. They were eating out of my hand and I even got nipped twice. Needless to say we ran out of bread very quickly and continued on our walk. The ducks were clearly NOT satisfied enough. They slowly followed us in the water along the path. There were other ducks along the path and they too thought they were going to get fed and started to come up to us, but we had to move quickly since we didn’t have anything. We ended up going back home and I grabbed whatever bread I could find, mostly old hot dog buns and flour tortillas, and rushed back. It was just like the first time. I have never seen ducks so aggressive and so willing to get so close. It was a little scary for Sophia and I (Phoebe had been safe in the stroller). I think being the first ones to feed these guys in a day is more than we bargained for.
A friend had her baby and he was in the NICU very sick for awhile. One morning I was very sad about his condition and was crying. BJ said he was sad too. Sophia was seeing and hearing all this so she asked about daddy being sad. BJ simply explained to her that mommy’s friend had a baby, he was very sick, and we didn’t know what to do. Sophia had a sweet answer for us. She said “Give baby ice pack.” We always give her an ice pack when she gets hurt so her reply made perfect sense!
We had a family friend come to town with his 2 children for 7 days while his wife stayed back at home working hellish overtime for end of the year stuff. Sophia was so excited to have a little friend over and was quite a shadow that first day. I could see, however, with each passing day that they were both wearing thin of each other and the crying, whining, and fighting were increasing. His daughter, who is 3 1/2 years old, came up with a very cute and funny nickname for Phoebe. She started calling her Phe-bob. Don’t know where it came from or if it was influenced by something she heard BJ and I call Phoebe, but it ended up rubbing off on us and we started to call her that too while they were here. We did take a trip to the Wiggly Play Center (just our family) where Phoebe thoroughly enjoyed the bounce house slide and Sophia loved the cars, as always. We all took a trip to the aquarium. Phoebe and Max (our friend’s son who is only 4 weeks younger than Phoebe) did not get much from the visit since they were trapped in strollers. It was nice taking Sophia back since she had not been since she was about Phoebe’s age. BJ got a great opportunity to set up one of his backdrops (first time too!) and take some fun portraits. He did as well as he could with a 3 1/2 and 1 year old! We got a few good shots and that is all it takes to print one to frame and love! The practice was good for BJ too.
Towards the end of our friend’s visit BJ’s grandfather got sick and was in the hospital. We no sooner had the company leave when other family came into town to rally around Grandpa. One of these being BJ’s sister Bekah. A bunch of family spent an evening visiting with Grandpa and each other at the hospital. I’m happy to say Grandpa improved and got to come home after only 2-3 days in the hospital. We got to also enjoy an evening alone with Bekah and have dinner. It is something I don’t think we have ever had and we had such a nice time. She brought ‘bribery’ gifts for the girls and they have thoroughly enjoyed playing with them. To this day she is still asking about Bekah and where she is and what she is doing. She has even begun to mistake her nursery leader for Bekah (who also has lots of freckles) and has been calling her that.
I proceeded to get sick with bronchitis during the remainder of the week. I had mild laryngitis for a couple days and after that just sounded like a quiet frog. Plus I had an annoying cough to get all the gunk out of my lungs. The coughing and rough voice carried into the weekend of the wedding unfortunately.
Since (cousin) Cindy’s wedding was right around the corner, Bekah stayed in town and drove with other family to Tulsa, Oklahoma. BJ and I left on a Friday morning. The car ride was about 4 hours and very strange without children. Within 10 minutes of being in the car I was shocked at how quiet it was. I was not constantly turning around to break up a fight, pick up dropped blankies and cups, offer snacks, etc. It was very relaxing and I ended up sleeping most of the time.
So much family came out for the wedding and it was so wonderful seeing them and even meeting some for the first time. BJ and I had a good time taking photos, but will readily admit it was also very hard. There were a lot of ’shots’ we wanted to get and so little time! We have discovered why wedding photographers, and good ones, charge $2,000 or more. We have now spent the following week going through what I had initially thought was about 1,500 photos but was really almost 2,000!!
Anyway, Granny watched the girls while we were gone and they did a great job. They weren’t upset, they didn’t even miss us, and they acted for her like they would for us! Which actually probably isn’t a good thing……Granny was more than ready for us to come home and was exhausted. Only trouble is, they all did so well, despite the half dead Granny we came home to, that it has given BJ and I hope that we can now have a vacation (within the next year or so) all to ourselves!
Tags: Heather,Phoebe,Sophia,weeekly family update
Categories: Heather, Phoebe, Sophia, Weekly Family Update
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