May 5-12

Gretchen Bernice
Baptized Saturday, May 4, 2013 (Easter Vigil service)
Sponsors: Keshia Barhorst and Josef Fenton
Patron Saint: St. Berenice of Syria (October 4)
http://oca.org/saints/all-lives/2013/10/04
http://www.catholiconline.com/saints/saint.php?saint_id=2957

Bryan's workplace is running a survey.  It's short and easy.  If you get a chance, go to this link and when it asks (in one of the last questions) who referred you, put Bryan Barhorst in the box.  Everyone who fills it out and lists him as the referrer gives him another entry in a drawing for $50.  If you fill out the survey, let me know in a comment and I'll give you 5 points.  Everyone wins!  https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/NXNHDDC 

Olivia's vocabulary has exploded recently.  Just this past week or two she's picked up book, eat, not, more, feet, fork, duck, chalk, bread, sit, food, and koala.  She has a word for "empty," but it doesn't sound like empty.  Maybe she's saying "nothing"?  Also, Bryan says she told him, "stay there, be right back" the other day.  Most of her new words are relatively indistinct still, so we rely on context clues, but they're definitely consistently there.  Her toddler dialect doesn't pronounce the letters f and s (weird, since she can say both those sounds), so it took me a while to figure out why she kept grabbing Gretchen's toes and saying, "deet."  We also have "cork" (fork), "dood" (food), and "dit" (sit).

Gretchen had her "somewhere between one and two weeks old" checkup on Monday.  The doctor said we were aiming to have her back at her birth weight of 8 lbs by that day.  The little fatty was 8 lbs, 8 oz.  No worries about weight gain here.  It also means that I don't need to be stressed about the fact that she occasionally spits up what appears to be an entire meal (or perhaps everything she's eaten for the past two days).  Obviously she's retaining enough.  :)

And speaking of spitting up meals...  I was so hopeful that Gretchen was learning to regulate her intake at the end of my last post.  In the two days after I wrote that post, she spit up large amounts three separate times, managing to get (1) Bryan, me, Josef's bed (2) Jacob, my Grandma and (3) her carseat.  She's since been better, but I hesitate to be too openly optimistic, lest I set her off again.

Olivia got her first haircut while we were visiting my parents.  My mom trimmed the back of Olivia's hair while Olivia put her head on my shoulder and sobbed.  I'm relatively certain the sobbing had less to do with the loss of hair and more to do with the fact that we made her sit mostly naked on a stool while said hair was removed.  She also got her bangs trimmed, although that was harder because my mom didn't want to accidentally poke out Olivia's eye.  The resultant look works better with the shorter-than-normal-because-she-pulled-them-out sides and is pretty cute, if I do say so myself.  :)

Pictures:

A couple of leftover pictures from last week:

Gretchen sleeps like a muscle man, too, only her hands aren't as tight, so it looks more like she's surrendering: