Fall

Animal Farm

Posted on by Amy
Fall will be here soon. It’s my favorite season. In the fall I get all excited about going to new outdoor places and soaking up every possible moment of the beautiful weather, before Winter hits us like a slap in the face…

Yesterday we checked out a local animal farm, where they have all sorts of cool animals to look at and feed. When I paid our admission, we were given three bags of bread and told we could feed any of the animals we wanted, but just to “watch our fingers.” Miss got right to feeding some goats.


We had seen two beautiful peacocks walking around free right after we drove onto the property. As we went further, we saw there were lots of animals roaming around out in the open. I noticed one of the peacocks near where we were standing and tried to get a great photo of it. I was not successful. See that goat behind the peacock?
Shortly after I took this photo, that guy and one of his pals accosted us, trying to steal my bread and completely freaking Lass and Miss out. Lass was in her stroller, doing a great job, and Miss had been feeding the smaller caged goats. These two insane goats practically stood on top of the stroller, trying to get at the stack of bread I had pulled out of the bag and the pieces that had fallen on the ground. There was a cat trying to climb into Lass’s lap too. Needless to say, I forgot all about the peacock as I was frantically trying to strap on my Ergo while Miss was working on climbing up my leg saying, “Hold me Mommy! Hold me Mommy!” and Lass was screaming bloody murder. One of the women working there came over and started trying to pull the goats away just as I was getting Lass into the Ergo, her favorite spot.

I ended up pushing an empty stroller for the rest of our visit. It was a good spot to hold the bread I guess.

Fortunately, Miss quickly forgot about the goat attack and was right back into feeding them.



This guy kind of made her nervous though.

I thought he was really fun to feed. His tongue was super long and funny.

Miss kept getting freaked out though and dropping her bread each time he’d stick his tongue out to grab it. By the way, if you can’t tell from the photos, this guy is a buffalo. I think. They had Bison there too, but they were separate, and I’m pretty sure this guy was a buffalo. There were water buffalo too, which Miss thought was pretty fun, since we recently got the book, “Panda Bear, Panda Bear, What Do You See?” in which there is a water buffalo.

This is the guy who freaked me out a little bit. Just for a second. With each of the animals we fed, I gave them a piece of bread before letting Miss do it, just to make sure it wasn’t going to take her little arm off or anything. When I held out a piece of bread to this ostrich, he stretched his neck out and grabbed at it so quickly, he startled me so much I jumped back, let out a screech, and dropped my bread.

After a second try though, he really was pretty friendly. Miss had no trouble feeding him.
She love seeing the ostrich eggs and kept asking if she could go get one and were they going to hatch. I thought it odd that they were just lying all around on the ground like that.
There were a few other odd things about the place. Like the fact that a stretch of our tour led us through this area that was full of trash,


and these. There were a bunch of them just in a pile in the trash area. Notice several of them still have fur on them? One was even a bit more fresh, but I didn’t take a photo of that one. Weird.
And many of the animals clearly needed a bit of grooming.

But, Miss didn’t even notice all that stuff. I just looked past it, after taking some photos of course, and we really did have a lot of fun.
There were so many different types of animals to see and being able to feed them was great.
Camels.

Horses. Miss loved the horses. And I loved seeing her run right up near them and then stop and stare, up, up, up at these big guys.

Lass enjoyed the horses too.
I was trying to get a photo showing how she was interested in them. What I got instead was a horse nipping my shoulder. I snapped this photo right as the big black and white one was taking a nibble. It didn’t hurt, but scared the heck out of me for a second.
I thought this pig was so funny, but was bummed that he didn’t want anything to do with us. We had to just drop our piece of bread for him, and he didn’t even sniff at it until we had walked on by.
Miss did get to feed some other pigs later though.
I loved this fawn. It ate out of our hands, and made this funny little squeaking sound asking for more.
The bison.
Eyeore.
This guy was a miniature dwarf pony. He was one of my favorites.

Birds.

Turtles.
I think these were porcupines.
There were a lot more animals too. When I asked Miss what her favorite was though, she said, “The cats.”
She loved this little bunny too.
And so did Lass.

It was a fun day. I’m glad we have something like this place nearby. I still have to take the girls to the bigger zoo soon though. Miss keeps asking to see giraffes, hippos, and rhinoceroses. So we’ll make that trip soon.

Cheech and Chong

Posted on by Amy
Today, when we were getting ready for the day, I swore, for a brief moment of “where the heck did she get that?” that Miss was saying, “Cheech and Chong” over and over. I started to crack up about it, but realized all too quickly that she was actually saying, “teeth and tongue.” She was playing with a doll and I suspect she was brushing its teeth. Damn. “Cheech and Chong” would have been funny. But even without that, my kid is pretty amusing. I love those moments when she says something that cracks me up. She does it more and more often these days.
An example of this occurred in the grocery store checkout the other day. We were waiting for the bagger to get the last of our stuff in the cart. Miss said she was hungry and I told her that we were going to go home in a few minutes to have lunch. I then asked her what she might like to eat. Without skipping a beat she replied, “A lemon.” She was so serious about this I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. And she continued to ask for a lemon to eat, all the way home, during lunch, and the next day. I kept telling her that I needed to use the lemon we had purchased that day for a recipe, but she kept asking. Today when it was time for her snack I suggested apple yogurt. She said, “No, I fink my want a lemon.” I had realized, when cooking my recipe that required a lemon last night, that I actually had another, extra lemon in the fridge, so this time I said, “Sure. Hop up to the table and you can have a lemon for your snack.” I was chuckling to myself about this, but she surprised me. She took several bites and kept asking for more.


She didn’t shudder. Didn’t make a sour face. She seemed to love it.


She got to her third wedge of lemon before finally giving a little shudder.

Then a big shudder and sour face.
She then held her lemon wedge out to me and said, “Apple yogurt please!”
Today the weather was perfect. A beautiful late summer, early fall day with sun and a breeze and a temp of about 75. I decided it was a park day. Lass loves hats, and was so excited when I pulled out her bonnet for the park trip.
As we were getting loaded up to go to the park I happened to think, “It’s Thursday, I’ll bet I could find a few rummage sales on the way.” So I took a slightly circuitous route to the park to look for some sales along the way. I found two. They were crap. Seriously, the first one had deodorant for sale for 75 cents. Deodorant! 75 cents! So wrong. I didn’t look any further because I wanted the girls to have plenty of time at the park before lunch. We went to a new park today and Miss had a blast checking out all the new stuff there.



Of course there was a lot of swinging.


This park has a splash pad, which I assumed was turned off. One little boy apparently touched the magic spot to turn it on, and Miss immediately asked to go play in the water.



The little spouts of water shot up in a sporadic manner, so Miss got doused by a couple of them.
She didn’t seem to care. And Lass had fun putting her hands in the water from the Ergo.
This place is my new favorite park.
We came home to get dry clothes, eat lunch and take naps, and then went back to the beautiful day outside. We took a walk, which was very short because Miss requested to walk by herself instead of riding in the stroller. As she was walking she went onto a neighbor’s lawn and started to take her shoes off. I told her she needed to keep them on while we were walking and she informed me that she wanted to feel the grass under her feet. All right. She agreed to keep her shoes on until we were in our own yard, and then we all promptly took off our shoes to feel the tickle of the grass under our feet. Lass got a big kick out of this. Miss and I danced and shuffled our feet. This resulted in some heckling from my hubby who was inside changing clothes after work. The heckling resulted in a dazzling display of the Running Man by yours truly. The evening was topped off by grilled homemade brats, football on the telly, and very soon, ice cream. I love days like today. My spoon is calling me.

21-Month “Miss”-cellany

Posted on by Amy
21 months is fun. I *heart* 21 months. My elder girl is so stinking funny at 21 months. She is getting into all sorts of new things, some good, some bad. She likes to climb anything she can. She’ll climb onto the counter from her Learning Tower. She tries to climb the cabinets. She climbs me. She climbs her dad. It’s not uncommon for me to turn my back for a second and turn back to find her balancing on something she just climbed up on. It’s a minor miracle she hasn’t climbed out of her crib yet (knock on wood).
She likes to carry and pack things. She had a blast carrying all her importants in a backpack at the farm last week.

She is still our outdoor girl. The girl loves to be outside and explore. She picks things up or gathers them together. She’s not afraid to get dirty.
She can say just about anything at this point and in full sentences, if not fully grammatically correct sentences. She says the funniest things sometimes, and almost always in the correct context. If I came to get her to take a nap when she was playing with her Baba (my husband’s mom) at the farm last week she would say, “Bye-bye Mommy. See you next time!” Today she was talking on her pretend phone and she said something like, “Hi Grandma. All done talking. Bye-bye, see you next time” (I think “see you next time” comes from the way her favorite show “Yo Gabba Gabba” always ends).
The other day she was doing something that was driving me nuts and I snapped at her a little, “Stop it!” Well, of course today I heard her saying “stop it!” with a little frown on her face. Made me feel like a big heel. I am very careful what I say around her so she doesn’t start copying even less savory words or phrases (which I admit I have been known to say on occasion 🙂 and wouldn’t you know the one time I did swear in front of her, I heard her mimicking “Dammit!” just a few seconds later. Fortunately I didn’t react and she only said it once.
She also has other funny little things she does and says like “I go cazy!!” when she’s dancing or “I yuuuv it!!” when she really likes something. She can sing her ABCs, count to 14 and knows all her colors and most of her shapes. She knows almost all of her letters by sight and can identify the sound each letter makes. It seems all of this stuff happened overnight too. One day she was my baby, and the next she was this funny little girl with some serious personality.
She has a little bit of sass in her too. In general she’s a very good girl and usually listens when I tell her to do something. Admittedly it sometimes takes me two or three repeats of an instruction, occasionally with a bit of hands on encouragement, before she listens, but most of the time she does what I ask fairly readily. Recently however she has started letting me know when she doesn’t like it by letting out a shrill scream while complying with my requests. It’s like she’s saying, “I’ll do it, but I’m not gonna like it!!” We have had a few tantrums and their frequency has increased a bit, but so far these are usually short lived. I must admit there are moments when I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing in terms of disciplining my toddler, but we seem to be doing okay so far. And I am learning all the time and figuring it out as I go, so I’m okay with that.
Miss loves to sit on the counter while I’m getting ready and play with my makeup or hair brush. I love watching her imitate me with my makeup brushes. She also loves to have her hair done. If I ask her if she’d like to get pigtails she gets very excited, and she loves to pick out the barrette she wears and her socks. One day we were in her closet as I was selecting what she would wear that day and I held up a shirt and asked her if she liked it. Her eyes got big and she said, “oooh, booful! (beautiful)” Of course that’s the shirt she wore that day. I can’t get enough of the pigtails. . .
She loves to push her baby dolls around in their stroller, but even more than that of course she loves for me to push her baby dolls around. “Mommy push?” she says. So I do. She also loves to chase and be chased, so we do this often with the stroller as well. The vacuum works too.
Miss loves to play with her sister and hold her. She asked to hold her the other day so I had her sit and placed Lass sitting up between her legs. Miss grinned ear to ear and held her and hugged and kissed her for a minute. Then she kind of pushed Lass away from herself and said, “Play toys?” So I thought she was done with her sister and wanted to go play with her toys. Well she walked over to Lass’s playmat and picked up some of Lass’s toys, looking back at me expectantly so I would put Lass down and Miss could play with her. She loves showing her sister things.
She is also starting to get interested in manipulating things and learning how things work. She pays very close attention when I show her how to get toys on and off the play mat hooks.
She is also getting into dressing herself. And undressing herself. She loves snaps and zippers and is very eager to do up the zipper of her jammies every night. Fortunately she hasn’t quite figured out how to undo the zipper. We had to abandon the few pairs of jammies she has with snaps, because I went in to check on her one night before I went to bed to find her jammies in a heap in her crib and her lying in bed with nothing but a onesie on. After she got up the next morning and I put her jammies back on her, I went to the laundry room for a minute and came back to find this.
Her near nakedness apparently inspired the urge to dance and go “cazy.”


And of course the jammies were a great tool for playing a sort of hide-and-seek/wander-around-without-looking game.
She is noticing the camera more and will look at it and say “picture!”
Sometimes now I can get her to stand still for a second and maybe actually pose for the camera. Here she even said, “cheese” for her Daddy.
Bottom line? I love this age. I have loved every stage, every age so far. But I. Love. This. Age. And man I love that girl.
Speaking of love, here’s a little sneak peak at a very-soon-to-be-three-month-old. I could just eat her up.

Tick-a-Teek!!

Posted on by Amy
Miss had a wonderful time for her first trick-or-treating experience. She didn’t really know what it was all about, but she did have fun saying “Tick-a-teek!” around the house as we were getting ready to go and she was very excited to put her costume on. She was a garden gnome. Here she is getting ready.




Heading out. I couldn’t believe she kept the hat and beard on!
Once we actually started Trick-or-treating, she seemed a bit puzzled by the whole thing. At the first two houses we went to, she just stared at the person who answered the door and put random colorful things into the cat bag she was carrying. She stared when we encouraged her to say “Trick-or-treat!” She stared when we prodded her to say “Thank you.” Then at the third house she brightened up with the receipt of a cool orange toothbrush. This was by far her favorite item to go into the treat bag. And when we prompted her, “Say ‘Thank you'” she said, “More??” Well.

We only went to the six nearest neighbors houses. We had fun and I think she did too. Here she is ready to head home with her Daddy.
When we got in the door she sat down right away and started counting her booty. She counted several of the pieces and had fun identifying the colors of the candy wrappers. She didn’t seem to have any concept that there was anything inside the wrappers, so the Crunch bar was just “Blue!!” and the Kit Kat “Orange!” And she seemed to derive plenty of pleasure just from that. Until we let her have some after dinner. Yeah, my girl is a chocolate lover. We had lots of “Mmmmm!” and “Num num!” and maybe even a “Deyiscious!”
Lass was getting tired about the time we were going to head out to trick-or-treat, so we didn’t put her in her costume. I just put her in her wrap so I could carry her and she could sleep. But I did put her “Wiggle Worm” costume on her before her bath for some photos.

Overall our Halloween was a great time. We didn’t have as many trick-or-treaters as I thought we would, so we have waaaayyy too much candy left over that I am trying very hard not to eat in huge handfuls all day long. The kids here are so polite. Even when I said “take as many as you want” they still only took about 3 pieces of candy. And later when I began to realize just how much candy we were going to be left with I was saying, “Please, take a lot, we have way too much” and they still didn’t take more than about 3 or 4. But polite is good, and we had fun visiting with our neighbors and meeting some new people in the neighborhood.
Happy Halloween!

Pumpkins and Tiggers and Boots, Oh My!

Posted on by Amy
We went to a brunch and pumpkin carving on Sunday. Miss was sort of interested in watching her daddy carve the pumpkin.

She was more interested in this large chunk of pumpkin “mouth”
Got it!!
She did enjoy the finished project and likes to look out the front door at the jack-o-lantern on the porch. The Daddy did a great job, I think.
She loves music and dancing and is always asking me to play her favorite songs on my computer (which she calls a “pooter”), pointing to it and saying, “Dance! Dance! Mooz! (music)” She also has her own mini laptop computer. The other day she was playing mooz on her pooter when she scooped up Tigger and started this great dance, sort of waltz, with him.

By the way, the song was “B-I-N-G-O and Bingo was his Name-O”
And did I mention I have a thing for shoes? I just love these boots.

Enjoying Autumn

Posted on by Amy
Fall is here and it’s gorgeous.

We have to enjoy every minute of it here, before winter arrives with a vengeance. So today the girls and I went to an apple orchard and pumpkin patch farm called The Little Farmer. It was a beautiful place with lots for Miss to see and do.


We got all ready to go this morning, which took the better part of three hours to do. Miss had pigtails again to start the day. They fell out on the way to the farm, but I had to include some photos of them anyway.

When we got to the farm we found wagons to use for toting pumpkins and apples. And little girls of course. Miss quite enjoyed her first wagon ride.
She saw goats and chickens and kept saying she wanted to touch them, but then chickened out when I tried to help her do so.

She picked out pumpkins.

They didn’t have a big selection of food, so we had pumpkin and apple muffins for lunch and Miss tried apple cider for the first time. She loved it.
Then we went into a huge playground area where she got to run through a big hay bale maze. I guess you’d say she has “straw-colored” hair!!
She wasn’t big enough to climb up the big hay bale fort, but she loved running around it.
Swinging!
Lass just hung out in my Babyette wrap, hence no good photos of her at the farm. But a nice stranger agreed to take this photo of all of us.
Speaking of nice strangers, after we got all our pumpkins in our wagon and a “peck” of apples, there was no more room for Miss in there. So I was heading back to the truck with Lass in her wrap, carrying Miss on my hip and pulling a very heavy wagon of pumpkins and apples when an older woman stopped and asked if she could help me. I thanked her and said I was just heading to my car, thinking she wouldn’t want to walk all the way back to the parking lot, but she promptly took the handle of the wagon and told her family she’d meet them on the playground. Then she walked all the way to my car with me and helped me load the apples and pumpkins in the car!! I kept thanking her profusely, and the last time I said, “Thank you so much, I really appreciate this,” she looked me right in the eye and smiled and said, “I know you do. I’ve been there.” And then she walked away, dragging my wagon behind her to return it to where I had gotten it. Such a random act of kindness, and it really was a great ending to a wonderful outing with my girls.

Fun on the Farm

Posted on by Amy
We had a nice week at the farm. The girls were fantastic during the road trip, both ways. It’s a seven-hour trip without having to stop for feedings and diaper changes. With those it took us about 9 hours each way. We had a few moments of unhappiness, but overall the travel was great. My girls are road warriors.
We tried to be as prepared as possible, with as many of the comforts of home as we could bring in our huge vehicle (but not quite so huge when you remember we had two dogs in the back). Lass absolutely loves her swing, and it is a lifesaver for getting her to sleep at night. But it would have been very tricky to try to bring it along. Though my husband swore he would fit it in so we could have it, I managed to find a small travel swing at the last minute at our local Babies’R’Us. Literally, I was there last Saturday afternoon picking it up just hours before we hit the road. It wasn’t quite as good as the big swing, but she seemed to enjoy it pretty well.

So Lass spent the week swinging, and growing, and being adorable. She is such a good baby, she made it easy on me.

Miss had fun going outside with her Daddy and Baba. Here she is all ready to head out.

Over the weekend she got to see all of her cousins. Miss has nine boy cousins and two girl cousins in my husband’s family, so the play amongst the boys can sometimes get a bit loud and rowdy. They like to have my hubby be the “monster” and chase them around. This game comes complete with the scary monster noises from my hubby and screams of terror from the kids as they flee from him, so Miss was a bit overwhelmed and freaked out by it at first. She got really upset when the boys all ganged up on the monster and started jumping on and kicking my hubby. I kept telling her “It’s okay,” and she got to the point where she would run away from them while saying over and over “it’s okay, it’s okay” as she high-tailed it towards me to grab my legs and beg to be picked up. But she got over her fear and ended up having a great time.
They went on a few “treasure hunts” where the kids pile on the Ranger and ride around the farm searching for interesting things in nature. I have been on many of these and thoroughly enjoyed them myself, and I was kind of bummed that I didn’t get to go with Miss for her first one. But I know she had a great time. Here is what she found on her first treasure hunt.
I have never seen something like that before. Anyone know what the heck it is???
After she warmed up to them, Miss had lots of fun playing with her cousins of all ages. She had her 11- and 13-year-old boy cousins playing with her baby dolls and dancing with her and spinning her around so she could get dizzy and fall down. She played hide-and-go-seek with them too. She also learned some wrestling moves from one of her younger cousins a bit closer to her size.

She had to be reminded a few times about sharing.
The last night we were there, three of the small boys were taking a bath in one of the bathrooms and she wandered in there to see what was up. My sister-in-law who was bathing them asked her if she wanted to take a bath. Miss loves the bath, so she enthusiastically nodded her head. My sister-in-law started stripping her clothes off to put her in the bath and about the time she got to her diaper, Miss seemed to realize that my SIL intended to put her in the bathtub with the three boys. She quickly turned to me with a panicked look on her face and begged me to pick her up, saying and signing “All done! All done!!” I took her to the other bathroom for a solo bath 🙂
We had a good time, but as always, it’s so good to be home. Time for bed.

What we’ve been up to

Posted on by Amy
We are at the Farm this week. My hubby has been hunting in the mornings and evenings. Miss has been having a big time with her “Baba” and “Papa,” (my husband’s parents) and is now playing with her cousins. More cousins and aunts and uncles will be arriving through the weekend, so I know she’ll have a blast. Her favorite thing this week so far has been riding around the farm on the Ranger. She has gone exploring with her Baba and Daddy around the farm, picked flowers, watched Papa on the tractor, and taken a nap on it, as loud and jostling as it is. She just went on a “treasure hunt” this morning. Lass and I have joined the ride a few times and she just falls right to sleep wrapped up snugly against my chest while the Ranger rocks and bumps around. She’s just been working on growing. I love watching all the sweet expressions she makes (haven’t yet caught a smile on camera).





Other things we’ve been doing since my last post include taking a trip to story time at the library last week. Well, sort of. We got all ready with every intention of going to story time, but couldn’t quite make it out the door in time. We went to the library anyway.
Miss really enjoys the show “Yo Gabba Gabba” and asks to watch it more than I would like. She calls it “Mo Ga.” I found a “Yo Gabba Gabba” book at the library and was so excited. I figured having a book from her favorite show would be great, so she wouldn’t ask to watch the show so much. Now all she wants to do is read the book and watch the show. “Mo Ga, book??” she says. It’s adorable to hear her recite the first page of the book though, “Oh nooooo! Where’s the sun?” Over and over and over as she flips through the pages.
She also got her first “haircut.” This really just means that I trimmed about five stray hairs that were too long and kept falling in her face so they are now the same length as the rest of her bangs.

Adorable. I’ll try to blog more in October. Can you believe it’s October already?? Fall, crisp weather, good football, Halloween (I already have the girls’ costumes). . . so much to look forward to!