August 23-30

Kaitlyn is in 6-9 month clothes.  It doesn't matter as much now that she wears dresses and skirts every day, but her sleepers were getting a bit snug.  They may have been snugger than I realized, because she doesn't even look like the 6-9 month clothes are too big.

I found an idea for a growth chart that is not a permanent part of the door frame.  I bought supplies at the beginning of the summer and then finally got around to making it a few days before Olivia's birthday so that I could measure her close to the four year mark.  It's a burlap strip with yarn woven through at (roughly) one foot intervals.  I use safety pins and colored cardstock to mark heights and indicate different children.  Picture below.

I mentioned this in a video, but I wanted to make a note of it in my blog, too: When Kaitlyn hears my voice in the morning, she starts flapping her arms and kicking her feet.  Often she'll also crane her head over her shoulder to see me coming into the room.  Olivia used to have the same wild limb flailing response when she heard the door to her room open.  Gretchen was never a limb flailer, preferring to crane her head or just roll over.

There are a lot of disagreements over who gets to be the mommy and who gets to be the mother during the day.  I've told the girls that they can BOTH be the mommy (or mother), but they don't tend to like that very much since it puts them on the same level.  I'm not sure at this point whether the mommy or the mother is a higher authority, but I do know that neither girl wants to spend much time as the daughter when they play together.

Gretchen is very interested in solo play right now.  She will spend hours happily playing in a corner if we let her.  In fact, Bryan has noticed her playing alone and tried to get some quality Gretchen time in, only to be kicked out of her game.  :)  Now if I could only convince Olivia to ignore Gretchen...

We've developed an interesting phrase in our house: my sorry.  I can see where it came from, because I'll tell the girls, "Say you're sorry."  Except they hear it as, "Say YOUR sorry," so they will tell me, "I said my sorry."  The actual apology is still rendered properly.

I got a basket full of apples from a friend's backyard apple tree, so I've been chipping away at that.  So far I've gotten three pies and seven quarts of applesauce.  Bryan thinks I've only gotten about a sixth of the way through the basket, so it would seem that we're in for a lot more pie and applesauce!  Olivia helped me with the pies, making two little ones while I made two big ones.  The only step she didn't help with was the actual cutting of apples.  Gretchen helped a little, but then saw that I had pinto beans that needed to be released from their pods, so she did that instead.  :)

Pictures and Video:

Bonus Post: Sound Bites 5

Gretchen: I want butter.
Bryan: You want butter?
Olivia: No, she said she wants WATER.
Gretchen: I want butter.
Olivia: She doesn't say "water" very well.

Olivia: Should we do that again yesterday?

Gretchen, pointing at Murry: That's not Mommy!
Me: No, that's not mommy.  Who is that?
Gretchen: I am saying that is Grandma!
Me: I am saying that is Grandma, too!
Gretchen: No, you are saying that is Murry.

Olivia: Mommy, why is daddy not coming up to give me a tootsie roll?  I was having quiet time.

Gretchen: My back hurts.
Me: Why does your back hurt?
Gretchen: Because I need a new one.

(The monitor in our room is right next to the clock on the dresser.)
Olivia: I hear Kaitlyn!
Me: You do?  How do you hear Kaitlyn?
Olivia: In the clock!

Gretchen: I Opa's Kiki.  I not Oma's Kiki, I Oma's Gretchen.  And I mommy's Gretchen.  And I Opa's Kiki.

Gretchen (holding a length of (clean) toilet paper): I have my king.
A few minutes later...
Gretchen (holding two squares, having ripped the toilet paper in half): I broke my king.  I am just a mother now.

Olivia: Can you say Spicable Me?
Gretchen: Hickalel You.
Olivia: Hey! Say Spicable Me.
Gretchen: Hickorly You.
Olivia: No! Say Spicory ME!
Gretchen: Hickory YOU!

Me: This little tuna brain was up at 1 and 4 and 7.
Bryan: But it's so cute!  It just wanted to remind you how cute it is.
Me: I can't appreciate the cuteness if my eyes are glued shut.
Bryan: Mooom, look how cute I am!  Mooom, you're missing it!

Bryan's sister, Keshia, and her husband, Tyler, have a baby daughter named Rudy.  They also have a dog, Kevin, who was Keshia's before they got married.
Gretchen: Rudy has her mommy and her daddy.  Keshia has her Kevin.

Bryan: They're counting the chickens in our driveway.  There's more than zero.
Olivia: 1, 2, 3, 4.
Gretchen: So many chickens we have!
(Note -- We do NOT have chickens, but the neighbors do and they escaped into our driveway.)

Me: Oh, you have bug bites on your arm.
Gretchen: I have bug eats on my hand, too.

August 16-23

The kids are winning the music war.  We got Olivia the Frozen soundtrack for her birthday, so that's been playing pretty much constantly in the car.  Whenever I'm driving alone, I try to make a conscious decision to listen to a not-kid CD.  Note the use of the word try.  Early this week, I made a solo trip to JoAnn.  On the way out of the store, I was humming "Let It Go" to myself since it's so ridiculously catchy.  If you know the song then you're probably humming it now, too.  I'm not sorry.  Anyway, I got to the car, and chose the Frozen soundtrack so that I could listen to the song.  I was immediately ashamed of my choice in music and (after the song finished, of course) switched the CD to... Sandra Boynton so that I could hear "Singing in the Shower."  By the time that song finished, I was home.  When I confessed my failures to Bryan, he told me that he does the same thing all the time.  Goodbye, grown-up music.  We'll miss you.

In our house, we have cookers.  Both of the older girls talk about how they are cookers, wearing cooker hats.  I've tried telling them that the word is "chef," but this is not allowed.  Neither do they accept "baker."  The word is cooker, and apparently always shall be.

Time to place your wagers: Which will appear first -- Kaitlyn's tooth, or her newest cousin?

And speaking of teeth, Gretchen has all of her baby teeth now.  Steph checked, since I haven't bothered to count since she got number eight.  I did notice that her fists had permanent residence in her mouth for a few months there, so I guess I subconsciously assumed that everything came in the way it was supposed to.

Bryan has been introducing Olivia to some of the video games he played as a kid.  Apparently she's now at least as good as me in several of them.  :/  I'm accepting of that, though, because Olivia is clearly better than Bryan at memory/matching games.

Last Saturday we went to the zoo.  We were in Fort Wayne for church and decided to make a day of it.  There was no service at our local parish because the priest went to Dormition monastery for the feast.  We thought we'd visit dad's parish, but he went to the monastery, too.  That left, Toledo, Dayton, or Fort Wayne.  I never consider Fort Wayne because it's so far away (you know, being in another state and all), but it turns out that it's closer than both of the Ohio options.  Related, we now have a membership to the Fort Wayne Zoo.  :)

Pictures and Videos:

August 9-16

I have trained Olivia well.  Whenever I get in the car, I automatically lock the doors.  Usually this isn't a problem as I am the last one in the car.  I have been known to accidentally lock Bryan out on occasion, though.  Although vaguely aware of this habit, I don't generally pay it much attention.  A few weeks ago, however, Olivia started shouting from the backseat: "Mom!  The doors!  You didn't do the thing on the doors!"  It took me a while to figure out what she meant.  Her panic escalated until I happened to notice that I hadn't locked the doors yet.  As soon as I pressed the button, all was well with the world.  She's done this a few more times since that first one, leading me to believe that it wasn't just a one-time coincidence.

Kaitlyn only naps in about 45 minute chunks.  This results in her taking about five naps a day, but I think I'd prefer 2-3 nice long naps to five short ones.  She often doesn't seem quite ready to be awake, so I'm wondering how much of her nap schedule is due to general noise in the house.  :/

Last weekend went well.  The wedding ceremony was Jewish, so the girls got to hear some Hebrew and watch the groom stomp on a cup.  We took them to Bubble Island in Ann Arbor afterwards so that they could experience the bubble smoothies from our college days.  We stayed in Michigan through Monday, hanging out with dad and Josef most of the time.  The girls enjoyed taking a couple of trips to a nearby park and Opa helped Olivia try out her new roller skates (purple ones that Aunt Jacque sent for her birthday!).

This week the girls had Vacation Bible School with some of the other kids from church.  Yes, Gretchen is only two, but if they excluded two-year-olds then the VBS population was cut in half.  :)  For two hours each on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, Presbytera and a volunteer mother corralled twelve 2-6 year olds while the other mothers took some time off.  It is my understanding that crafts, snacks, playground time, and Bible stories happened.  At the end of the final day, the girls each came home with a bag full of crafts they'd made.

Wednesday night we had the Hodges over to play games after kids went to bed and they mentioned a meteor shower that was happening, so we all went outside to stargaze on the front porch.  I was not dedicated enough to wake up at four in the morning for the peak of the show, but we did see several good sized blazes of light shoot across the sky, which was neat.

Pictures and Video:

August 2-9

Our friends the Sledges came to visit last Saturday and were able to stay until Tuesday morning.  Bryan got to play lots of old video games with someone more on his level and the four of us played Dominion every night.  We're trying to convince the Sledges that they want to buy a house near us, so we also spent time driving by likely domiciles.

One night last week I was putting the girls to bed and had a sudden urge to play a particular piece of music.  After everyone was quiet, I went to my workroom, located my practice mute, and played viola for over an hour.  I did not find the piece I wanted to play.  I did, however, rediscover all sorts of old music and when I finished I hung my viola up on the convenient viola holder that is mounted on the wall.  Since then, my viola has been so wonderfully accessible that I've played almost every day.  It's not much -- ten minutes here and there, just playing rather than practicing -- but any playing at all is a vast improvement.  The first time I played during the day, Olivia was in the room and, after recovering from her surprise, said, "Mommy, can we get a little violin for me so that I can play like that?"  Then she went and fetched Gretchen, "Gretchen, come and look at what Mommy is doing!"  Gretchen came running in, stopped short, and said, "Oh Mommy, that is beautiful."


Olivia recently asked when Kaitlyn would start wearing dresses, so I caught a fabulous sale at Meijer and picked up three dresses and two skirts in Kaitlyn sizes.  She can wear the dresses until she starts crawling, but then she's relegated to skirts until she walks because dresses and crawling just don't go together.  She looks incredibly cute, and Olivia is pleased that Kaitlyn is FINALLY getting dressed in the morning (it would seem that 3-year-olds don't accept sleepers as appropriate attire for the day, even for those under four months old).

I've decided that Kaitlyn sounds like a dial-up modem.  Maybe I'm mis-remembering what babies sound like, but she's the first one that has inspired this thought.  Her squeals and clicks are rather endearing, and she's recently added a low growly sound that fits right in with the rest of her electronic connection repertoire.  It's too bad that when she's old enough to read this post she won't have any idea what I'm talking about.  Google it, dear.

Gretchen has developed a recent disdain for forks.  Suddenly she eats everything with her hands, painting her face with the goop and crumbling the rest in tight little fists.  Since she does still eat everything and it takes less time than it used to, we haven't been fighting it too much.  Gretchen also has a new love for washing her hands, so she happily trots off to the bathroom after every meal to spend twenty minutes or so cleansing herself.  I'm not sure if these two new habits are products of each other or merely coincidental.

Olivia had a birthday on Monday.  She is now a proud four years old, unless she's counting bites of vegetables at dinner time, in which case she'd like to be three still, thank you very much.  She got dresses, princess dolls, and a "flute" (a recorder).  She also got $5 which she used to buy a Barbie.  She was very happy to be shopping with her own money, but I found it rather depressing since she doesn't understand the concept of money at all and everything she saw was about eight times what she could afford.  She was very accepting of "you can't afford that", though, and seems perfectly content with the Barbie that we discovered on clearance.

Thursday we drove to Michigan for a wedding (and to spend some time with my family).  Gretchen scandalized traumatized the whole household with her bare bottom and her little toddler potty that we set up in the corner of the living room.  She continues to do well with potty training, though, and we even made a dry trip (in underwear!) to the park for a couple of hours on Friday.

Pictures and Videos:

Bonus Post: Pictures

Pictures of the three girls, taken by Carrie on May 31, 2015 and June 14, 2015

July 26-August 2

We've given up our garbage service.  (My dad is shaking his head right now.)  We haven't stopped creating trash, but we definitely don't generate enough refuse to warrant paying for a weekly trash service, especially one that doesn't also do recycling.  So we talked to our friends, the Weys, and asked if we could periodically use their extra trash and recycling bins (they have two of each because their house used to be a duplex) in exchange for an occasional bottle of wine.

Kaitlyn doesn't cry so much as shout.  I'm not sure if this is a permanent thing or just a phase now that she's discovered her vocal cords.  She does cry occasionally, but generally she just yells in short little bursts.  I think I prefer the shouting, if only because it makes me laugh to hear her little voice hollering.

And speaking of Kaitlyn, she's started reaching for toys.  Sometimes she tries (mostly unsuccessfully) to grab them, sometimes she just punches them to knock them over.  She shows definite interest in brightly colored objects, though, so we've hauled out the box of rattles and littered them around the house in strategic locations.  She's also begun to interact more with the various parts of her flying saucer, which stirs up great excitement among her sisters.

Also in Kaitlyn news, she had a check up on Tuesday.  I'd feel worse about so many Kaitlyn updates, except for then I remember that this was essentially the Olivia blog for almost two years and Gretchen got her fair share of time when she was doing new stuff every week, too.  Anyway.  Kaitlyn is 14 pounds, 12 ounces, and 25.75 inches long  Olivia was longer and heavier, Gretchen was a tiny bit longer and a tiny bit lighter.  Everything looks fine, and Kaitlyn is so far ahead in the rolling game that they didn't even ask about it yet.

We have an identity problem around here.  Many (all?) of our babies and dolls and Barbies have names now, but they're names of people we know.  There are Kaitlyns and Rudys and Johannahs and, most confusing of all, Mommys.  I never know who's talking to me and who's just having an imaginary conversation with various inanimate playthings.  Add to that the fact that sometimes Olivia and Gretchen are Mommys, too, and I've just about stopped answering altogether.

I hesitate to say that Gretchen is potty trained, but she has definitely reached a point worthy of note.  We began potty training in earnest last Friday and she had one accident first thing Saturday morning and then... nothing.  As long as I keep her bottom bare, she does just fine.  I don't worry about her being on the carpet or the couch or my lap because she hasn't failed to make it to the potty yet.  I don't trust her (or the availability of bathrooms) when we're out, so she wears a diaper when we leave the house and also for naps and bed.  Those are always wet when we take them off, as if she appreciates the simplicity of not having to pay attention to her bodily functions.  In a similar vein, she doesn't do tremendously well in undies (she's about 50/50), mostly because she doesn't focus, I think.  However, she's does fantastically if her bottom is naked.  The method I used to train her is called potty training boot camp, and they say that you should keep them bottomless for three months after the first weekend, so I guess this is normal.  I'm hoping to get her in undies sooner than that, but we'll have to see how it goes.  At least one of the perks of dresses is that you don't have to look at the bare derriere your two year old is sporting.

Pictures and Videos: