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

November Update

The last month has been one heck of a month of development.

Charlotte has just sprouted all sorts of new abilities.  It started after Thanksgiving dinner when she decided she’d like to give crawling a try.  It took her about 2 weeks to start getting the hang of it and made really excellent progress… going from an army crawl to learning to mix in a bit of getting up on her knees, to full hands-and-knees power crawling.

But she didn’t think that was enough.  No, she decided she had best tackle the stairs.

I was checking in while on the road and at 11:30 am Beth reported she had started eying up the stairs.  At 1:30 pm she had taken a crack at them and had tons of encouragement from her big sister.  By 3:30 pm she was going up the stairs flawlessly.

Two days later she started going down them.  Now she is fully mobile in the house and just loving it!

But why stop there?… let’s explore this whole world of going vertical.  This last week she has decided to try pulling herself up.  And now Beth is greeted by a standing [crying] child at 1 in the morning (sometimes the crying is preceded by a loud thumb as she loses her balance).

She is now crawling to her destination, pulling herself up, and reaching for whatever catches her eye.

So in a month she learned to crawl, pull herself up, and is starting to cruise.  Wow!

Oh yeah, and she is now into eating solids – the more the better =)

And the difference in her personality has been stunning.  She is SOOOO much more happy now that she has mobility.  Way more smiles and giggles (and this hilarious snorting that she does when she is especially happy).  And Morgan loves showing her little sister how to do things (read: get into things she shouldn’t be getting in to).

Morgan has turned into a little kid right before our eyes.  Morgan has grown 2 inches in the last 5 months and is now in the 95th percentile for height (yikes!).  She got her first haircut and the transformation to kidhood has been amazing.  Her vocabulary is starting to really expand (and oddly, her sign language continues to increase as well) and she is so interested in everything her mom does.  She’s a little girl that loves clothes, and dress-up, and baking, and eating the baking, and playing, and running (constantly).

As we start to teach Charlotte sign language, Morgan joins in and shows her little sister her own take on how the signs are done… so we’ve started doing MSL (Morgan Sign Language).

This year we were able to enjoy Halloween (as you may recall, last year we spent it in emergency with Scarlett Fever and Strep Throat).  Morgan went as a puppy and Charlotte as a Kitty.  They were both wonderfully behaved and Morgan signed Thank You to everyone that gave her a treat.  Very sweet kids.

Cruizin’

T

his has been a busy week for baby (and mom and dad).

Morgan is now starting to cruise. She’s not content with just standing anymore, now she wants to get places while in the vertical. Pretty awesome (and pretty scary at the same time).

She got to spend some time with dad at Strong Start yesterday and wow’d him by climbing in and out of the round padded barrier in the play room. This is the same padded barrier that she only just started pulling herself up on 2 weeks ago (!).