Fun stuff

A few fun things about each of my girls:

Audrey found her "room service" button last night.  Her mobile over her crib turns on with the touch of a button, and she managed to hit it with her foot.  She's done it before, one time in the middle of the night which was interesting, but this time it was 6:30 AM and she was just waiting for her breakfast to arrive.  I guess she figured out how to make it come faster!  Her mattress has been lowered now, so she'll have to get creative again. 

She also got her fifth tooth today, which was a total surprise since it was a top tooth!  I was expecting the next arrival to be on the bottom, and to maybe have more trouble with it, but there's been no fussiness or drooling, and also no counterpart on the other side!  Doesn't she know how nuts her mother is when it comes to symmetry??

Audrey has also exhitibed quite a bit of stranger anxiety lately, and it's actually worse when I'm around but inaccessable.  Dan and Kerri were here the other night, and she was really upset when she was close by but not in my arms, and when they took her and Emily downstairs to play, she was happy as a clam.  Weirdo.  She gets SO excited when she sees me, or Travis, which feels great! :)  She'll squeal and bury her head in my shoulder, then scrinch up her legs and flap her arms so much that it's hard to hold onto her sometimes!  And, she babbles "MomMomMomMom..."  Love it!

Emily is alternately hilarious and exasperating.  Audrey still does her high-pitched squeals from time to time, mostly at dinner, and they are SO painful on ones ears, but Emily thinks it's funny and repeats it.  It's really hard to come down hard on her because she knows better but have nothing to say to Audrey cuz she's just a baby and can't know better.  So, the other night, I told her if she needed to make that awful noise she should go outside, and I put her on the porch and shut the door behind her.  I went back to (finally) finish my dinner, and saw her standing on the deck, screeching as loudly as she could for the neighborhood to enjoy, and after about 5 minutes she came back in, happy as a clam.  "I all done making that noise, Mom."  Can't argue with those results!

She can draw letters now!  It's amazing!  At Amanda's, they've been studying one letter each day this summer, and the other day she came home with "P"s that she had drawn!!  Tonight at the park we were drawing with sidewalk chalk, and she copied the E that I drew for her on the ground.  It had a few more than 3 horizontal lines, but it was pretty awesome nonetheless.  I am so impressed!!

She talks ALL the time, and her speech has so few imperfections that they really stand out as adorable.  When asked if she was being a butterfly, because she was wearing her antennae headband, she said, "No, I just bein' booiful."  It's the lack of verb helpers and continual preference for the preposition "to" that crack me up the most, I think.  They would be easy enough things for me to correct in her language if I took the time to point them out to her, but she's growing up way too fast as it is!  So I just keep yammering, and so does she.

And, such a helper she is!  Amanda comments on it often, although there are still plenty of days where she doesn't care to help clean up with everyone (she's two!  i'm not worried!).  When we were in Rockford, she went downstairs and brought up a package of meat from the freezer for dinner.  Nevermind that dinner was already in the oven, and we didn't need the bratwurst that she'd brought up, but it was good to know where that package had come from!  We couldn't figure it out until she decided to go again and took Travis with her that time.  She was able to lift the lid of the deep freeze, reach in with those long arms of hers, and find a package to bring up.  I don't know how or why she thought to do that, but she was determined to bring up hambugger for supper -- twice.  What a sweetie!  She'll often run to the freezer in our kitchen at home to get a teething toy for Audrey if she hears her fussing, but most of the time the reason Audrey is upset in the first place is because either Emily knocked her over or was hugging her too aggressively or had just ripped a toy out of her hands.  "Stop that!  oh wait, how sweet..."  What on earth am I supposed to teach at that moment?

Travis has been finishing up the last few things that we need to get to round out the insurance claim from when our house was burgled in July '08.  There's a two-year window to remember everything and get it replaced, so he's figuring the last few things out.  It's weird to think that it's been that long, and I'm still paranoid of being here when someone broke in.  I guess there are scary things in life, like jars of violently reacting acid, that you just assume you're done with once it's over.  How's that for a philosophical point to end on?