I don't know how she managed this

This morning, Olivia kept taking off her pants. I hate it when she does that, so I put overalls on her.

A few minutes ago, I was on the phone and she kept tugging at her overalls like she wanted them off. She got frustrated when I said no, so she left the room. She came back and handed me a diaper. Which was recently on her rear. And her overalls were still on and fully snapped.

Yep, she was going commando. I don't know how she managed to pull off the adhesive tabs and work the diaper out from under her overalls, but she did.

She never ceases to amaze me.

Busy day. This is all you get.

Olivia sings Twinkle Twinkle Little Star as she climbs around/out of her high chair this morning.

Happy Easter!

In a moment of insanity yesterday, I decided that Olivia and I would go to the Easter Vigil Mass (Daddy had to go to all the Masses as Master of Ceremonies). We were on our way home from Grammy & Grampy's house, so we had about ten minutes to change and hop back into the car to get to Church in time. Olivia looked roughly like this, except for the cute Easter shoes. I forgot those in my haste. She had to wear the white tennis shoes that were in her diaper bag already. Good thing it was dark in Church when we came in.

This picture was staged today for posterity. In my haste I also I left my camera behind.

The decision to attend was made based on Olivia's late-afternoon nap and my suspicion that she'd be hard to put to sleep on time anyway. With blankie and pacifier in tow, we did pretty well. We had to pace the back of Church during the Eucharistic prayer, but she played happily in the pew for most of the rest of the long Mass. I actually heard and comprehended most of the readings and homily, so I guess the whole thing could be regarded as a success.

My favorite parts of last night's Mass:
When we were outside lighting the Easter candle from the new fire, and the fire started shooting out these tall flames...Olivia was watching intently, pointed and said, "Oh NO!" She was possibly worried about her Daddy, who was in charge of lighting the taper from that fire.

When Father was saying the closing blessing, and as soon as he uttered the final word, Olivia says in a loud voice, "A-MEN!" Perhaps she was happy that she could finally go home and sleep.

Mass last night left my morning free for preparing our Easter dinner (lunch). Grandma, Grandpa and Aunt Lori came over. Olivia was charmingly entertaining in her own sleep-deprived way. (Note to Olivia: Getting up at 6:00 a.m. is not a rule. You can sleep longer when you are tired. Mommy and Daddy have an alarm clock, so you don't have to worry about getting us up at a certain time. And you can nap for longer than 45 minutes at a time. Please? Love, Mommy.)

After three egg hunts, three Triduum services and three late nights, we are all in need of a good, long nap. The end.

Vocabulary

Olivia has never been slow to do anything...she runs everywhere she goes. Language acquisition is no exception. For many months, she has had a few words that she has used regularly, and it has been obvious that she understands more than she can say. She has been quickly expanding her vocabulary and is even stringing a few words together to make sentences. It's really fun to watch her little mind work as she communicates with us.

I've been trying to get a list together of the words she uses regularly, without prompting. I consider these to be the words she "knows". She can repeat just about anything, but if she can pull the word out of her brain without our assistance, then I know that she really KNOWS that word. I've counted about fifty words so far.

Here are some examples of an almost-15-month-old trying to communicate.

Daaeee go? (Where did Daddy Go?)
Daaee phone? (Is Daddy on the phone?)
Fishies, pease? (Goldfish Crackers, please?)
Cackers (Crackers)
COO-Key (Cookie...one of her favorite words)
Ca-Corn (Popcorn)
Muh (Milk)
Pay (Pray)
Jesus
Bye, Bye
Nigh-Nigh (Night-Night -- Used when she wants to go to nap or to bed)
Foo (Food)
For (Fork)
Side (Outside)

That is just a short list of her more frequently-used words. And as I look at them, it becomes obvious that she's obsessed with two things...Daddy and Food. She talks about one or the other about 80% of the time.

Heavy

Everything here is weighted down under inches of ice and snow. See the tree behind Olivia? It doesn't usually touch the ground like that.
It has been freezing rain and/or snowing for the past 24 hours, and it finally stopped. We woke up to the sound of crashing several times last night. We thought it was sheets of ice falling off the roof, but now we think it may have been the neighbor's trees snapping off, one at a time.
Our county is under a state of emergency because of all the downed power lines and trees lying in the road, so my husband is home from work. Our residential neighborhood has buried electric which makes it less likely that we will lose power, and that is a HUGE blessing.

I wrapped Olivia in a blanket this morning and took her onto the porch for a few minutes to look at the snow. As soon as we came in she started whining and pounding on the door saying, "Side? Side?" So we decided to bundle her up to take her outside to play in the snow.

She has no fear, which is why the first thing she did was to trudge out into thigh-deep (for her) snow until she lost her balance...and came up with a face-full of snow.

After that, she was a little more content to stay on the already-shoveled areas and watch as Daddy continued to shovel the drive. A half-hour of this cold recreation was about all we could take, and now she's napping. And Daddy's still shoveling.

Our toddler-proof home

Well, the computer-in-the-dining room thing was working out OK until Olivia decided that it was her sole purpose in life to climb up and stand on the computer desk.

So, to remedy that situation and others (like the garage opening habit), we moved the couch to block the dining room entrance and bought a gate to block off the hall leading to the kitchen and garage entrances.

Works like a charm! Olivia can run and play as much as she likes in the living room and her bedroom without me constantly chasing her to pull her off of the computer or out of the garage. Why didn't we think of this before?

Oh, the changes you are willing to make for your children...

As a jaybird

Last night, we put Olivia to bed at the regular time, but she sort of crawled around and played in her crib for awhile. No big deal. She does that sometimes. As long as she's not crying or in distress, we just let her play and eventually she falls asleep.

We always check on her before we go to bed to make sure she has blankets or her leg is not sticking through the bars or anything. So we went in to check on her.

She was wearing nothing but her diaper.

I don't know what her fascination is with taking off her sleeper, but it's obvious that we are going to have to dress her in something other than zipper sleepers for awhile. We didn't want to wake her up, so we just put a few blankets over her and tucked her in and stiffled our laughter until we were back in our own bedroom.

Then, at 4:30 a.m. or so, I hear Olivia awake and playing in her crib. Again, this happens on occasion and we just let her fall back asleep. But around 5:00, she started to cry. I went in to check on her and found her completely na*ked and curled up in a little ball with her discarded diaper sitting in the opposite corner.

I picked her up, diapered her, dressed her and put her back in her crib, and she went back to sleep until 8:00. She probably slept pretty well for those last few hours too, being DRESSED and all.

Sheesh.

Evidence

of the previously-mentioned obsession.

This was taken moments ago. She was too quiet, so I went looking for her and found her in her new favorite hangout...nestled in among the bowling bags.

Daddy is so proud

Olivia loves to bowl. Or, at least, she loves the IDEA of bowling. It's really weird.

She knows that Daddy goes to his bowling league once a week. When he's absent from the house on that evening, she makes sure to ask me 100 times over..."Daddy, Bowl?" Yes, Daddy is bowling. Yes, he's still bowling. OK, nothing has changed since you asked me two minutes ago. Bowling, yes, that is where Daddy is.

On New Year's Eve, we took Olivia bowling for the first time, and she seemed to like it well enough. I don't think you can call what she did "bowling". She pushed a bowling ball down a ramp that was facing in the direction of pins. But she was happy doing it.

Lately, she's been talking about bowling a lot. It's like she's obsessed. She wanders around saying "Bowl, Bowl?" When we acknowledge that we know what she's saying, she runs to the front closet, drags out Daddy's bowling bag (which contains more than 30 lbs of bowling equipment) and then proceeds to try to open the zipper and empty the contents. If she is unsuccessful, she gets desperate and starts crying, "Bowl! Bowl!" with a whiny tone to her voice that usually means, "Somebody get these balls out of this bag immediately or I'm going to have a major tantrum."

We usually concede and let her play with the heavy balls, which means pushing them around the carpet.

Yesterday we decided to take her bowling after Church. She had a blast. I honestly don't know what the fascination is all about. She likes rolling the ball down the ramp, but I think she enjoys watching other people bowl even more. Or maybe she's just determined to do something that Daddy likes to do because, people, she adores her Daddy.

Last night, Olivia was wheezy and today she's snotty, and it looks like we are starting our next round of winter crud. She is tired and grumpy and pretty miserable. And all she has wanted to do this morning is drag bowling balls out of the closet. Her whiny plea for bowling is more desperate than usual.

So here's my line of thinking...she's sick, she wants comfort, Daddy provides comfort, Daddy's at work, she wants to be closer to Daddy, she thinks of bowling, she's obsessed with the bowling equipment. Irrational, yes, but it's sweet to think that she loves her Daddy so much that she wants to do stuff that reminds her of him.

The cloudy day with silver linings attached.

Today was a long day. I had a meeting to attend, so I took the opportunity, while we were "in town", to cross a bunch of things off the homestudy checklist. Olivia and I went to the copy center to have our profile book copied, laminated and bound. We also stopped several places to get signatures for this and that. We are now finished with all paperwork that requires someone else's signature, and Olivia and I are both pretty exhausted. If we ever do this homestudy thing again, I'm definitely going to have to get a sitter while I go chasing down documents and signatures. My left arm is a bit sore from holding and restraining a squirmy 26 lb. toddler so that she wouldn't scatter colored paper all over the copy center floor.

Sheesh.

Also in the "I need a babysitter" category, Olivia came to my meeting with me. It was a meeting of a subcommittee for an organization whose board I sit on. There was cake for someone's birthday, so that kept Olivia occupied for about half the meeting, and then she proceeded to run around throwing pens on the floor and shouting at people around the table and trying to take stuff out of everyone's purse. It was probably pretty comical for everyone in the room who isn't her mother. Next month...getting a babysitter or skipping the meeting. The shouting is only cute for about two minutes. After that, it's just annoying.

Olivia only napped for spurts in the car, so she was pretty grumpy by the time we finally got home. I managed to get her to stop whining, but then she just started pulling things off the counter and throwing toys around. Early dinner and early bath were accomplished, and I planned for an early bedtime...maybe around 6:30.

At 6:05, Olivia looked at me and started saying, "Night-night" and walking toward her room, looking back at me after every few steps. It took me a minute to figure out what she was saying, but how sweet is it that I have a child who knows she's tired and tells me when she's ready for bed?

In other news, Olivia has a couple more days of antibiotics, and I think she will be sad to be finished. She apparently loves the chalky, bubble gum-flavored concoction because every time we say "medicine", she comes running to suck the pink stuff right out of the medicine syringe. No complaints at all...well, unless you count the times she's complained because she thinks she wants more. But I'll take that over having her spit medicine all over the place any day.

One, Two, Three

Olivia's new skill is counting. She can count to three. We start out by saying "One", and then she follows it by shouting, "TWO! FREE!". We've tried to get her to five, but she can't quite remember the four. She knows five, though, thanks to the Subway commercials. She can shout Five! and hold up her hand like she's giving a high five. I'm trying to get it all on video, but she wouldn't cooperate today.

I spent most of yesterday creating our profile book which will be shown to birthparents who are choosing families for their babies. It includes a "Dear Birthparent" letter and photos of us, our house, Olivia and our family. Considering the thousands of pics I've taken over the past year, I'm pretty proud of how I was able to limit the photos of the book to about twenty and still, I think, create a pretty clear picture of who we are. We saw some samples of profile books at the agency last Wednesday, and some of them were so full of pictures that it was overwhelming. I didn't want ours to be like that.

We have a few more places to run and signatures to get, but we should be pretty close to finished with our homestudy paperwork by the end of the week. We'll have to wait a couple more weeks for references and fingerprints to come back before we can schedule the home visit, but we are definitely making progress.

Busy season for all of us.

Well, it seems I've been neglecting my blog recently, but by the lack of comments, I can see that you've been neglecting my blog too. I understand...the week before Christmas is always very busy. You are forgiven. And to prove that there are no hard feelings, I'm going to give you some cute updates.

On Thursday night, Olivia went to the bowling alley for the very first time. Don't laugh...this is a big thing for us. For six or more years before Olivia came along, my husband and I were involved in league bowling together. We were pretty good. We have trophies and high scores to prove it. Once Olivia came along, though, I decided I was taking a break from regular bowling. My husband, however, REALLY loves to bowl (he has a 200 average) and found a men's league to join on Thursday nights. For one reason or another, we had never taken Olivia to a bowling alley, so we decided to go watch on Thursday night.

SHE LOVED IT! She stood on the counter behind the lanes for a solid half-hour watching and pointing and clapping for all of the bowlers on Daddy's lanes. I was amazed at how it held her attention for so long. She's definitely Daddy's girl.

We all came down with a cold by Friday, so there has been quite a bit of hacking and wheezing going on here. It seems that Olivia has learned that tissues are not the devil, and that it actually feels better to have your nose wiped than to let all that icky stuff run down your face. And...get this...she has learned to blow her nose. I know! The blowing is not really all that productive at this point, but the fact that she has made the observation that blowing through her nose helps the wiping process is progress indeed.

On Friday, we visited Grammy for awhile in the afternoon, and she and Olivia took a walk outside to see the neighbor's dogs, Ollie and Louie. Now, every time she hears a dog bark, she shouts "Ollie!"


Olivia has recently shown an affinity for popcorn. She likes to snuggle in next to Daddy on the couch and eat out of his bowl.


Enjoy your last minute shopping and office holiday parties this weekend!

Things I love about 13 months

Olivia is a wee bit over 13 months old now, and aside from the fact that she can now open any door in the house and enjoys climbing very high and giving her mother a heart attack, I am really enjoying 13 months.

First of all, Olivia is very good at sleeping. While it took us awhile to get to this point, I am truly enjoying my girl who enjoys her sleep.

It's not always easy to get Olivia to GO to sleep. She fusses. Sometimes she lays in bed and stares at the ceiling until she's sufficiently sleepy. Occasionally she'll pitch a fit.

But once she's asleep...wow. She typically goes to bed between 7 and 8 pm, and then she wakes up around 12 hours later. On weekends, if we aren't up and moving around early, she often sleeps a little late. Once she's up, she usually lays in bed and talks to herself until she gets impatient and then she yells to let us know she's up. Naps are the same. She is usually content to lay in bed for awhile until she decides that she's not falling back asleep. She's a lot like me in that way.

I love the way she runs around the house in the morning. Runs. Everywhere. In her footie pajamas. SO CUTE!

I love that she's taken a sudden interest in books. And not just the destruction of them. Instead of carrying them around and standing on them, she likes to pick one out and then sit down next to me on the floor or couch and "read" it to me. Sometimes she'll even let me read it to her.

She sings a lot now and dances anytime she hears music...on the radio, on the TV or from one of her toys. We have this annoying Rudolf clock that plays "Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer" every hour. Every time she hears it, she runs to the kitchen to watch. It's like the cuckoo clocks at both Grandma's houses. She likes to watch them or just point to them and say "cuh-cuh."

Although TV = Not The Most Productive Thing a Toddler Could Be Doing, it is on a lot, especially in the evenings. Olivia doesn't pay much attention to it except when it is showing either kids or music. She stops whatever she's doing to watch those Target commercials with the kids doing a school Christmas pageant all about how awesome Target is (I hate advertising). And she loves the Subway $5 footlong commercials. She watches them shoving their hands forward, making a "5" with them, and she turns to look at us and does THE EXACT SAME THING. She saw a picture of gloves in a book this morning, and that prompted a $5 footlong motion too.

She's a riot! Now if we could just figure out a way to keep her from destroying anything that is not set up REALLY HIGH, we'd be perfect.

Santa, etc.

I'm lacking any inspiration for a blog post, so you get pictures. Our town had Christmas parades and celebrations this weekend, so we had an opportunity to introduce Olivia to Santa. She decided he was one scary dude.
She wouldn't get close enough to sit on his lap, so we had to hold her. She's got the candy cane that he gave her in her hand, and yet tears were streaming down her face until we backed away from him. Then she took time to inspect (and crush) the piece of candy she had.

See Mom...this is what that scary man gave me.

We decided not to attempt to see Santa again this year. That made Olivia very happy.

I surrender

If our tree looks bare at the bottom, it's because I'm tired of fighting Olivia over not touching the ornaments. So everything we want to keep nice for next year has been moved to the top of the tree. The ornaments at the bottom are plastic ornaments of characters from the Rudolf movie, and they are there to keep Olivia occupied so she doesn't pull off strings of lights. Sheesh.

We're not sure she understands the meaning of the word "No". She says it a lot...usually when she's doing something she's not supposed to do. I think she may just be repeating the word because she hears it a lot and associates it with the activity she's doing when she hears it. So she pulls ornaments off the tree while saying "No", as if that's just what you say when you are doing that activity. Like how you say "yum" when you are eating a cookie.

I guess we have some work to do.

Videos

Today I spent most of Olivia's nap time ordering photo gifts online, so I didn't have time for a substantial post here. I did, however, post a few videos at our photo blog, so please stop by there to see some short clips of Olivia's activity. I wanted to get a clip of her running (which is really the way she gets from point A to point B, 90 percent of the time). I also posted a clip of her playing with her Santa doll and one of her climbing on the coffee table. If you watch the coffee table one closely, you can hear her saying "get down" a couple of times. That's what I say when she's up there.

The futility of shopping with a one-year-old

My husband has a two-night business trip, starting today, so I thought Olivia and I would entertain ourselves with a totally unnecessary trip "to town" to run a few errands. We'll be back on Friday for playdate and more errands, but I figured there was enough to do to warrant another leisurely trip to shop.

Leisurely, HA! As I was plotting my errands last night, the list kept getting longer and longer. And it turned out that there was no way I would have accomplished this all on Friday.

We did the necessary (oil change, pick up 1-year pictures, drop off dry cleaning) and the not-so-necessary (knock things off your Christmas list by stopping at ten million stores for exactly one item each, making yourself and the active toddler crazy).

I discovered that Olivia has entered the land of impossible when it comes to shopping. She refuses to sit in the cart seat. She will stand in the cargo area of the cart happily, but only for twenty minutes at a time, then she attempts to climb out. And she has developed a tantrum cry that is mind-numbingly grating. It sounds like she's seriously TRYING to damage her vocal cords. It's a cross between a growl and a cry. Ugh. I HATE it. She used it a lot today, interspersed by many moments of flashing her award-winning smile at total strangers and being totally sweet. It's like she can turn emotions on and off like a light switch.

Miraculously, we accomplished everything on my list. I have St. Nick Day gifts for stockings (Saturday, in case you were wondering), and almost everyone on my gift list is accounted for. Thank heavens, because I don't really do crowds and shopping and grumpy babies very well.

For your daily dose of happy, go visit Jen and congratulate her on the arrival of her baby girl, born just this morning.

Holy Climbing, Batman!

The holiday weekend was fun, but Olivia is teaching her 7-months-older cousins some bad habits. Like how to climb on chairs. Not just the little baby folding chairs (which she mastered easily), but also the big-people folding chairs. She was unstoppable. It was all she wanted to do. For awhile, she kept dragging the baby folding chair around, then she would climb up and stand on it and clap until someone told her to get down. My sister kept telling her sternly "Olivia, sit down", jabbing her pointer finger down. So, after awhile, Olivia would climb and stand up in the chair, then look her aunt in the eye and jab her pointer finger down saying "Sit dun!" It was too funny. Yes, Olivia, sit down. She thought it was a game.

Olivia has proven that she is freakishly tall. Here she is with her second cousin, who celebrated her birthday on Saturday. They are 17 days apart. And they were both born within two weeks of their due dates. So, developmentally, they are at the same stage. But obviously, their genetics destine them to be very different heights.

It's even more striking when Olivia hugs her. We are going to have one tall girl on our hands.

We all had a good weekend and ate way more than our fair share. Best of all, Olivia's cold is gone and my almost-cold disappeared before it developed into anything. I had a nasty sore throat for two days, but that is as bad as it got. And now we are having a leisurely day at home. Finally.

Where Tolkien got his inspiration for Elvish language.

This post brought to you by the busy woman whose family is in town and who is far too busy to post anything substantial today. Plus, I wrote this last week, so it's an easy post.

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My daughter speaks fluent elvish. I'm convinced that Tolkien spent a lot of time with babies to create this language for his books. Here is a conversation Olivia and I had the other day...

Mommy: Who's that pretty baby in the mirror?

Olivia: Ehr bahna nilthea. Ek-sia etha. (With emphasis, pointing to the mirror, then looking me in the eye and making a sweeping motion with her hand).

M: I have no idea what that means, but obviously you do.

O: Meeraba! O neksah badsa!

M: Uh, huh. OK then.

Things I have observed about my one-year-old

Thanks to everyone for your birthday wishes for Olivia. She had a really nice day, despite the rain and Daddy not being home. We had dinner with Grandparents, Godparents and her cousin, Trey, and the best part about the day was OTHER! PEOPLE! IN! THE! HOUSE! We're getting a little tired of just seeing each other. Luckily, we are busy with out-of-the-house things for a couple of days, so the time will pass quicker.

Olivia has been entertaining me these past couple of weeks by showing me just how fast she can pick up new things.

For instance, we've been singing some children's songs lately, and one of her favorites is "Six Little Ducklings". This was one of my favorites as a child, and it goes with hand motions. If you don't know it, here's the first verse, with hand motions:

Six little ducklings I once knew (hold up six fingers, then point to yourself)
Fat ones, skinny ones, fair ones too (hold hands wide, then close together, then in between...think "$5 footlong" style)
But the one little duck (hold up one finger) with the feather on his back (put wrist on tailbone and wiggle hand like a feather on your back)
He led the others with his quack, quack, quack (clap hands in duck-beak fashion)

Now, aside from the obvious clapping, which she caught onto quickly, she has also started doing the feather-on-the-back motion. Except that she got it a little bit wrong. Instead of wiggling her hand, she slaps her little hiney with her hand. It's so hilarious. Also, when she wants to request that we sing the song, she walks over to me and starts slapping her hand on her hiney.

She also loves "Itsy bitsy spider", but instead of putting her hands together to make the spider, she just waves both hands back and forth. She's getting there.

She loves to have her teeth brushed. I say "Want to go brush your teeth?" and she yells "Tee!" and runs to the bathroom in her little footie-pajama-ed feet. Sometimes it's the little things that are so precious.

This week, just to make life a little more challenging, Olivia has learned how to open the pantry doors, and she has also discovered that she's tall enough to reach door handles throughout the house. This pretty much makes the whole house available for her destruction. Luckily, she's content to stay in the room with me most of the time, but I have to watch her more closely.

We're off to the doctor today for her *gasp* one-year boosters and check-up. I'm REALLY dreading the shots, but I can't wait to get her new measurements. She's already taller than most of her one-year-old friends.