August 18-25

Gretchen news:
-She's in 6-9 month clothes.  I don't remember when that happened with Olivia, but I think it was a little later.  I swapped out all the smaller sizes this week and Gretchen doesn't even look like she's swimming in the bigger stuff.
-She officially has two teeth now.  More potential for biting her thumb when she manages to catch it, but that hasn't bothered her yet.
-Baths are terrible.  It's like James has come again.  Sometimes I can trick her into being accepting of the water, but then she'll move her limbs and instantly be upset again.  The only thing worse than baths is bedtime.
-Bedtime is terrible (you knew that was coming).  She takes a final nap beginning between 4 and 5 and then is determined to be awake forever!  ...Or at least for several hours.  Preferably no less than 4.  I can't even convince her to take another nap sometime in there, so by the time she goes to bed for the night, Gretchen is one tired baby.
-She's a leech.  Olivia held on about as well as a sack of rice when she was being carried.  Gretchen is much more interested in preserving her own skin, so she'll cling like a baby koala to whatever she can grab.  Usually that's my shirt, but every now and again she'll get the back of my arm instead.  :(  Oh, and one Sunday she grabbed on to the communion cloth when it was put under her chin.  That was a fun 30 seconds or so while we all tried to disentangle her clenched fingers.  :)

Olivia news:
-She sings.  This should surprise no one.  The other night, Olivia made up a wonderful head-banging rock song about Oma and Opa.  It went something like this: O-MA!  O-PA!  O-MA!  O-PA!  James!  Omao-PA!  O-MA!  O-PA!  We've also heard songs about the mommy and daddy octopus.
-She's about to lose a fingernail.  She shut her finger in a door a couple of weeks ago and it didn't look so bad at first, but now the nail it probably 98% detached.  Bryan insists that we try to keep it from coming off completely, so we go through copious amounts of band-aids and masking tape in an attempt to keep it covered.
-She doesn't like listening to crying.  Whenever Gretchen is sad, Olivia says, "Don't cry, baby."  This usually starts out gently, but quickly escalates until Gretchen is crying and Olivia is yelling, "Stop!  Don't cry!  No!  Stop cry!  Don't!  Stop, don't cry!"  We also heard a "quiet, baby!" come from Olivia's room one trying night.
-She's good at filling in familiar words and phrases.  If I pause at the right point, Olivia can help read most of her books.  She also does parts of the Lord's Prayer and the Creed.
-She knows some colors.  Olivia will identify things as being yellow, blue, black, and green.  She gets yellow right almost all of the time, but the other three are hit or miss.  She can also say purple, orange, red, and pink, but has to be reminded that those colors exist first.
-She's in full potty-training mode.  Bryan built a little set of steps so that Olivia can get up to the potty and sink by herself.  Since she already knows how to unsnap her own diaper, convincing her to put herself on the potty was pretty easy.  Of course, that means she can also get off by herself, which would be fine if she could put her diaper back ON by herself.  As it is, I generally catch her running around naked (because I have to leave the room when she goes to the bathroom -- there are worse things) and have to recapture her to put a diaper back on.  Next week we're buying some training undies and seeing how that goes.

Johannah:
-I'm auditioning for two orchestras in the next month.  Lima has openings for subs and Springfield has section positions.  We'll see how those go.  Regardless of the results, my Monday orchestra starts back up tomorrow and I'm pretty excited to be playing regularly again.
-I got a food processor.  Let the peanut butter making commence.  Well, let me buy the peanuts, first, and then it will commence.  For those of you who don't know about the peanut butter project, I'll tell the story next week.  Short version: there are 73 pounds of peanuts in my future.  If you want to buy some for about $1.30 a pound, I will not object.  I have only one rule: I'm not going to ship them, so I'll have to be seeing you in person in order to deliver them.

Bryan:
-Working late has decreased so that he only has to stay late twice a week.  It's been nice to have him home at the normal time again.
-He declared August "get stuff done" month.  We have an ever-growing list taped to the bedroom door that we've been steadily chipping away at.  Bryan's biggest accomplishment was the steps for Olivia, but he's gotten lots of little stuff done, too.

Pictures:
We have a book that was given to us called Safe Baby Handling Tips.  It's a board book full of useful illustrations showing you the proper way to deal with various baby issues.  Olivia likes to read this book, but she apparently didn't pay attention to the teething page:

Gretchen eating her hands (not sure where that falls on the teething recommendation scale):

Olivia thought this box was a great toy:

Five points to the first person who tells me what Olivia is eating in this picture:

Gretchen in the flying saucer.  The purple thing used to be Olivia's favorite part, too:

Olivia likes to help Gretchen play:

And gets jealous when I only take pictures of her sister, so I took some of her, too:

Gretchen loves tummy time:

On a walk.  We went to Kroger to get cereal that was on sale.  Olivia brought her cell phone and sunglasses, because she's cool like that:

Ignore the surveillance camera feel of these pictures.  I used an auto-correct feature to lighten them up since my phone captured pretty much a black box.  The question here is, has Gretchen rolled over?  Her stomach is flat on the bed and her legs are knees down, but both her arms are on the same side of her body.  It is worth noting that she slept in this position for about 7 hours (and didn't just flop back onto her back):

The Girls