A House for Hermit Crab

I have been doing daycare for eight years and I've never seen anybody do this. Sometimes they scoot forward and crawl away with the chair on their back, but nobody has ever been able to stand up and WALK AWAY. Tinkerbell has some mad skillz.

Milestones and Summer Lovin'

Look! We're getting Big!!

Hercules can sit!

Roo can commando crawl!

Tinkerbell and Esmeralda can walk (ish)! :) They're sort of in the drunken sailor stage but they're on their feet a good portion of the time at least. They immediately plop down when I go for the camera though so I don't really have a good picture of either one standing.


Aurora and Bianca are working on table etiquette. I love the stage where they hold the spoon in one hand and shovel the food in with the other hand.


Or, you know, just forgo the utensils altogether, in favor of efficiency.


They are also finally having fun playing together at the same activity, instead of each doing their own thing near each other. I love to back off and watch them to see what they do. Currently they love to steal all my kitchen towels and use them as blankets to wrap the dollies in. They dump all the dolls out and both sit in the bucket and then rock them. :)

The summer's been pretty quiet so far, lots of people on rotating vacations. Numbers are down. We've got a couple spaces to fill. But we should be getting notification that our newest tiny squishy is born soon!! Hopefully this week. Can't wait to meet her- she's starting in October, I think. Depends on when she's actually born.

We're working on letters and numbers pretty hard this summer- lots of alphabet and counting activities. It's been fun and the kids are really starting to show progress. That's always fun. Bianca's counting now and Aurora and Silvermist are singing the alphabet. It's been way too hot and buggy to go outside much, so we've just been hanging out in the house. It's nice.

Playing

Yesterday was low key and fun. Esme and Tink are both all over the place now- scooting, crawling, trying to pull up on things... they don't like to be in the living room anymore since I have to keep moving them away from the tv, so they spent at least an hour together in the playroom while the others were napping. They did really well- only knocked each other over a few times. Esme did pull a chair over on herself at one point, which didn't hurt her at all, and actually made me really proud since I didn't realize she was to that stage. They grow so fast.

O'Malley and Lilo are cracking me up on a daily basis with their imaginative play. I really like to sit at the table in the dining room or do the dishes and just eavesdrop on them in the playroom. They were playing in the kitchen area earlier and I caught this:

L: O'Malley!! Where you going? You need to come back here and help me cook dinner!
O: I don't want to.
L: Yes you do. Chop this... what is this?
O: It's tomato.
L: Oh. Yes. Chop this tomato. We are having lotsa vegetables for dinner! I making a big salad!

Then there is noise, and I peek in to see O'Malley looking defeated and halfheartedly whacking at the plastic tomato with the plastic knife.

O: I'm all done. I need to go find Catwoman.
L: No. First help me with dinner! Then we will go kill her.

Vegetables and Catwoman, that's how you balance some good gender-specific play. :) O'Malley got Batman Lego on the Wii for his birthday, and so he is currently obsessed with Catwoman. I love the Lego video games. When you kill the bad guys, they fall apart into a little pile of Lego bricks. It's adorable.

Friday Focus- Tinkerbell

Tinkerbell is a pretty hardcore sleeper. Sometimes it takes her a few minutes to get settled, but once she does, she kind of looks like she's sleeping off some sort of binge. I LOVE when she falls asleep with things near her. It's hilarious. A bottle in your eye? No worries. Sleeping too hard to even notice.


She and Esmeralda do the tandem nap sometimes, if they both end up drifting off while they're eating. Otherwise one of them rolls over into the other's kicking range and cries while her friend beats her up. Either that or they get on their tummies and stare suspiciously at each other.


She was very upset with me because Kanga was working on getting her breakfast, way too slowly, evidently... she was trying very hard to pull a Dorothy the dinosaur and eat all my red roses. Caught her with a petal in her hand that she'd yanked off and took it away right before she could get it in her mouth. How dare I deprive her of nature?



Oh, Tinkerbell. Your rolls are so delicious. Even YOU like to eat them.


This headband would not stay where it belonged. It took a pretty long time for it to make her mad though- mostly she just looked perplexed as it slid lower. She's a good sport about stuff like that.


She's started waving hello and goodbye recently, and I got my first hug when she came in last Monday morning. So fun! A real hug with little squishy arms tight around my neck. Love that.

She hates to be alone and loves the bustle of kids swirling around her. She always takes her first nap of the morning on the living room floor while we're watching tv and getting breakfast and hollering. Things are loud and crazy and she totally digs it. It's usually her best sleep of the day. If she's awake, she's gotta be where the action is. She protests very loudly if we try to go do art or read a book or anything in the other room where she can't see us. As of this week, she's up on all fours rocking back and forth, so I think it won't be long at ALL before she's wicked fast, crawling all over and keeping up with the big kids. A woman on a mission. :)

Christmas Slideshow

Every year for Christmas I do slideshows for the parents. Usually it's got one show with all the pictures of their child, and then a sort of "best-of" with a couple pictures of each child so they can see playmates and more of what goes on during the day. There was just a new update to iLife, so I can finally turn them into movies and put them on the blog!

Here's the favorites collection- maybe not all necessarily the BEST pictures, but lots of the ones that make me smile.

Practicing With a String Bean

Ever read Bread and Jam for Frances? One of our favorites. There's a line where baby Gloria is eating green beans and Mother tells her to eat them up, because it's always good to practice on a string bean.

Here we have three stages of bean eating:

1. Tinkerbell: This is my first bean at daycare! I am so happy to be sitting up here with those big kids and I have NO IDEA that I am supposed to be putting this stuff in my mouth!


2. Chip: Really? Beans? Is that the only choice? I think maybe I will throw it on the floor. (Which he did, right after I put the camera down. Must ham it up for the camera.)


3. Stitch: Holy cow these beans are good they are the best thing I ever ate please give me more after I shovel these in my mouth kthanks....

Belated Introductions

We have Tinkerbell!! We have had her since, oh, October. I've been woefully neglectful of the blogging lately. And actually that is why I haven't blogged about other stuff as much, because I keep thinking I shouldn't talk about other things before I introduce Tink.

Tink has fabulous dimples and awesome chubby cheeks. And not so much hair. :) Her mama laments this fact and wants to borrow some of Sully's, on account of he has tons to spare. Funny story about that~ Boo, Sully's big sister, is really good with all the little babies. She was talking to Tinkerbell and looked at me with this sort of perplexed, it's-on-the-tip-of-my-tongue face and said... "What is... wrong?... with her?" I could tell it was the same kind of look that I get on my face when I can't place what's different about somebody- did they get glasses? a haircut? what's the deal?

So I explained that she looks very different from your brother, huh? Sully has lots of hair and Tinkerbell doesn't have very much, and so that is why her face looks different.

Boo is smart. She totally got it, and then got worried. "She is still VERY cute." :) She's so adorable to realize that she needed to tell us she wasn't trying to be offensive. Practically impossible, by the way. Boo is never rude.

But back to Tink, since I've derailed yet again.

She has been here awhile and is not even the youngest baby anymore, so I have LOTS of catching up to do! Three months worth of pictures, which I can't even begin to do justice to in one post. But here are a few of my favorites:

O'Malley loves her. "Mommy! She yike me a YOT! I hep FEED her!"

Wish I had gotten a bit closer to catch more dimple, but isn't the smile awesome?

Sweet little pumpkin!!