December 2011

December has come and gone in a wink of an eye and a twinkle of a nose.

We’ve been so incredibly busy with Kid Development that it’s hard to summarize all that has been happening.

Morgan hasn’t stopped growing and continues to eat as if she were a 13 year old boy.  She is skinny as a reed, but man, is she TALL (38+ inches for a 2.5 year old).  She is mostly day-time potty trained and seems to get a real pride from her skills =)  Beth made her cloth diapers with velcro snaps for her dolls and she is continually putting on their diapers, then declaring “wet bum”, taking off the diapers and then taking the dolls to the potty.

Her vocabulary has just exploded with development.  Although we’ve been eagerly awaiting this advancement, it has still taken us by surprise with how fast she is progressing.  The number of words she can say, the number of words she can combine into sentences, and the clarity of her speech is increasing daily.

Morgan has also stopped using much of her sign language.  We still have an interesting blend of spoken words and hand communication, but it is definitely leaning more towards speech every day.  She continues to teach her sister MSL (Morgan Sign Language).

Charlotte – oh boy, where to begin.  She has been crawling since mid-November, but now she is just flying down the halls.  She has mastered going up stairs and has some pretty good success on going down them.  She has also just zoomed through crawling to start cruising (9 months) and is just doing amazing.  She can reach just about anything she puts her mind to… and if she can’t reach, she gets her sister to fetch it for her.

When she is concentrating on something she can free-stand for about 10 seconds.

Charlotte is still having a lot of difficulty with her teething… which is affecting her sleep… which is affecting her mom’s sleep… which is pretty disrupting to the household.

When she gets her sleep, she is so happy and ready with smiles and the house is completely transformed… but this doesn’t happen too often =|

She has also taught her sister that if she makes this screeching noise she gets attention.  So Morgan has started screeching.  When they both get going – yikes!

We bought them a trampoline for Christmas – we have visions of sticking them out there first thing in the morning, leaving some food and water out for them, and then letting them back in the hosue sometime around bed time.  Right now Charlotte loves it but Morgan is a little reluctant to go on by herself… which is odd since she loves her cousins’ trampolines.

As the temperature increases, this should be a fun activity for them.  They now have a fenced front yard, a trampoline, and a wonderful new bubble machine from Grandma and Grandpa Lehmann.  Should be a kids dream yard!

For Christmas, we headed to Auntie Tracey’s for a wonderful get together.  Both Beth and I were pretty out of it as Charlotte hadn’t stopped screaming in about 10 months, including every second of the car ride to her house.  We were going to give her to someone to hold so that Beth could get some hands free time, but that wasn’t to be.  She just wants her mommy.  Wonderful child, but I cannot wait for these teeth to settle down.  (She has her two front bottom teeth, and about 3 on the way).  Morgan had a great time with her cousins.  They are so good with her.

And of course, the children were spoiled this year.  They got some of the nicest clothes you could imagine… and wonderful toys that they just love to share back and forth.  Charlotte is MUCH more into toys than Morgan ever was.

And the house is a mess =)   Our TV cycles through our photo library when it isn’t in use (think screensaver) and every once in a while a picture will come up that shows our house pre-children.  And Beth and I just stand there mesmerized by how clean and orderly things are.  We just sigh and stand there transfixed =)

New Years was fairly uneventful for us (bed at 10, iPod alerted me at midnight, Beth is in crash mode getting ready for her 4 am wake-up call).  Morgan had a strange melt-down but we fixed that up with a wonderful new invention: warm milk with a half spoon of hot chocolate mix…

 

Happy New Year to All!

Running

Noisy Toys

Riding

Video-Rama III

So here are several videos of Morgan over the last several months. As you can see she has changed alot.

Hope you enjoy!

Catching Up

Well, I know it’s been a long time since either of us have posted.  Things have been crazy in the Lehmann household.

As I’m sure most of you know by now we are expecting baby #2 in early April.  This time around the pregnancy is much harder on me than it was with Morgan.  The first few months were very rough with me losing ~10 lbs.  Things started to get better around Thanksgiving, and then rough again a couple of weeks before Christmas.  Thankfully, things seem to be getting a little better again this past week.  I am very happy that we only have ~3 months left to go.

Well with me not feeling well, Matthew being super busy, and Morgan being far more mobile it has become much harder to get good pictures taken (we aren’t entirely convinced that the camera doesn’t have something to do with that either, but that’s another story).  Morgan has gone from stumbling around at the end of the summer to full fledged running everywhere now.  Not only does she not stop, she loves the camera and will go for it any time she sees it.

Let me see, what is there to fill everyone in on.  Since we are having another baby we decided to turn what was the guest room into a nice new room for Morgan.  In September, we (and by that I mean mostly Matthew) cleared out the guest room (which had housed all our videos, books, and all my craft stuff) and moved on to painting it.  As you will can see from the pictures we decided to go with a bright green to make it lots of fun.  Morgan also got a bunk-bed and a beautiful new hope chest.  We haven’t moved Morgan into her new room yet, but we are going to try getting her in there for a nap sometime this week, wish us luck!

After Morgan’s room came Thanksgiving.  We hosted Thanksgiving dinner at our house for Matthew’s family this year.  Everything went very smoothly, if you ignore the fact that the washing machine died 3 days before dinner.  Not only did the washing machine die, but I also took it apart to see if I could do anything to fix it and apparently I didn’t get the hose connected all the way.  Luckily Matthew found the leak the next day and he managed to get it cleaned up.  Of course the carpet in Morgan’s room was soaking wet for our dinner.  Morgan really enjoyed having her cousins over for the evening, even with all the different outfits they made her try on.  My favorite part was the pumpkin pie made from the pumpkin that we grew in our garden.

We had grand ideas for Morgan for Halloween, unfortunately, she came down with strep throat and scarlet fever.  It certainly made for an interesting week.  I have to say that I am very glad that it was the first time that she was sick because she was horrible.  She decided that she doesn’t like to take medicine, so getting the penicillin into her 3 times a day was a HUGE fight, with most of it going everywhere but in her mouth.

November was just a big blur.  We had our second ultrasound and everything looks great.  Other than that it was mostly just chasing Morgan around, trying to keep the house semi-clean, and working on the business every other waking moment.  Needless to say we were really looking forward to taking 2 weeks off for Christmas.

December brought a few more interesting developments.  We had pictures with Santa (Morgan was great!), Ashaya’s birthday party, a house visit from a very friendly duck, getting ready for Christmas, destruction behind our house (it used to be a large treed lot, but now they have leveled it to get ready to put in 9 houses), a visit with Great Grandma Mary, and of course Christmas.

Morgan loved having her Daddy home for 2 weeks.  We did a lot of taking it easy and ignoring phones and email.  Now of course it’s back to the grind.  Things are still as hectic as they were before Christmas.  Of course we have to be sure to get everything finished up before baby time, and as we found with Morgan, that could be earlier than expected.

This week we are thinking about starting with potty training.  Morgan hates to have her diaper changed and at 27 lbs (and 33.5″ tall) she is getting to be much harder to control.  We have got some reusable training pants so we’ll see how things go.

Hope everyone had a happy and healthy holiday.  I should be posting a few videos next week.

Seventh Month

Wow, what a month it has been!

Matthew managed to take a couple of weeks off for Christmas so we all had some great family time.

It’s hard to believe that 7 months have gone by.  Morgan is now 17 1/2 Lbs, and still 27″ long.

A few Firsts:

★ Christmas

★ Time getting on her hands and knees

★ Time sitting all on her own

★ Picture with Santa

★ Time eating turkey

★ Time brushing her non-existent teeth

★ Trip to the swimming pool

★ Time watching Christmas Story with Daddy (likely to be many more of this one)

★ Time babbling non-stop

Morgan’s First Christmas II

What a magical day!

We had a great time with family last night at grandma and grandpa Lehmann’s (photos submitted).

Morgan got completely exhausted ripping up paper so we headed home, put the baby to bed, and watched a couple of thrillers (not the most Christmasy theme, but fun nonetheless).

Morgan did NOT deliver on her Christmas promise of giving us sleep (still up every hour).  Instead, papa was given the joy of unwrapping a Level III Disaster Diaper (photo not submitted).

We had a beautiful white Christmas (frost, not snow, thankfully) complete with deer in the front yard.

Grandpa dropped off a wonderfully, hand built toy chest that we got some great photos of Morgan playing in.

Beth is busy cooking a turkey for us tonight (Morgan will get her first taste!).

Photo’s Online Here: picasaweb