Bonus Post: Sound Bites 19

Me: I'll say it and then you say it.  'You did descend from on high, oh merciful one.'

Olivia: You did descend from Ohio, oh merciful one.

Kaitlyn: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 13, 13, 13, 13, 13, 13, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 13, 13...

Gretchen, in a goofy voice: Mmm, this is so good!  I will not absolutely kill you when I'm done.

Olivia: We are five, but when the two babies come out of mommy's belly then we will be seven.
Me: There's only one baby in mommy's belly.
Olivia: Well, I just think there are two.

Olivia: Gretchen and I decided we are going to start a club when we are older.

Gretchen: I did not do it.  Myself made me do it!

(Kaitlyn knows several state names because of a song we listen to during breakfast every morning.)
Kaitlyn: Excuse me, mommy.
Me: What, baby?
Kaitlyn: Please Michigan and a movie?
Me: You want Michigan in a movie?
Kaitlyn: Yes! I want it!
Me: I don't have Michigan.
Kaitlyn: Oh no! Michigan all gone!

Olivia: How can we follow Jesus?  We don't even know where he is!

Gretchen: Sometimes the food that I eat goes into my forehead and my dinner tonight went to my forehead and now my forehead hurts.

Olivia: Everywhere I go on my unicorn, I pretend there are rainbows all over me to help me.
Bryan: That is the most little girl thing I have ever heard you say.

Gretchen: This is how we get spankings: 5, 2 --
Olivia: No!  5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0
Gretchen: BOOM!

Olivia: Hey!  Hey girls!
Gretchen: My name is Cordelia.
Olivia: Cordearlia!  That's a wonderful name.
Gretchen: Cordelia has pink hair.
Olivia: Hey, girl with purple hair, what's your name?
Gretchen: Carrots!
Olivia: Girl with the green hair, what's your name?
Gretchen: Peaches.
Olivia: Good name!

April 2-9

A story from Wednesday:
Kaitlyn was dressed in her own dress for a little while this morning.  She took it off and put on my skirt.  Took that off and put on a pair of Bryan's boxers.  Panicked when they got tangled, started hollering.  Finally removed those and put on one of Olivia's socks.  Rolled around on the floor yelling "no sock!" but refused to let me take it off.  I got it anyway, and was scolded for my efforts.  She went after the sock, saw her dress on the floor, and put that back on.  Got mad at the sleeves when thy didn't cooperate.  Spent two minutes crying about how her sleeves weren't right (they were).  Calmed down when Jacque called and I put the phone on speakerphone.  Is now playing nicely on the floor like she didn't just endure the biggest crisis of her life so far.  After breakfast update: Kaitlyn is naked again, but at least seems happy about it this time.

Kaitlyn is front facing in the car now.  She was getting to the point where she pushed her feet obnoxiously against the seat back while I was trying to buckle her, making it difficult to pull her straps tight.  Once we overcame that obstacle each trip, she seemed content to be facing backwards still.  She has also been trying to climb into her own seat lately, and that is easier when the seat is forwards, so I flipped her around shortly after her birthday.  The first forward facing car ride was one of wonderment as she noticed every detail through the front window.

Gretchen is getting quite independent.  Suddenly she can get her own drinks and find her own clothes in a basket of laundry.  If I can ensure that she's listening, she follows directions relatively well.  She takes care of Kaitlyn, watching to make sure she's not wandering away.  She stands up to Olivia's bossiness and isn't afraid to walk away if the game they're playing isn't worth it anymore.  She has ideas and stories and opinions of her own, and she will voice them.  Loudly.

Olivia can do double digit math.  It started as a game, one in which she tried to come up with a math problem that was hard for me to solve.  I was making her write all the problems down on a white board as she asked them, to help her practice writing double digit numbers.  After giving me a few problems, she asked Bryan one, and he promptly walked her through the steps of solving it herself.  She's to the point now where she can independently solve a simple double (or triple) digit addition problem as long as someone (or some graph) helps her line up the numbers vertically.  She can carry with assistance, but doesn't always get that part right if she's on her own.

Olivia is quite annoyed at the fact that she cannot see Hokya (Gretchen's imaginary friend).  She is constantly trying to pressure and/or trick Gretchen into admitting that Hokya is pretend.  Gretchen firmly stands her ground, stubbornly repeating that Hokya is NOT pretend, even though no one, including Gretchen, has ever seen her.

Ten is a magic age in our house.  All the best skills will magically be obtained at ten.  Shoes will be tied, bikes will be ridden without training wheels, games will be instantly playable.  Ten also comes with responsibilities.  It is that magic age when the girls will no longer forget to make their beds, when they will be able to listen to Mommy and Daddy the first time, when they will clean up without being asked.  I can hardly wait for ten to get here.

Kaitlyn pronunciations I want to remember:
Olivia: Olulah
Excuse me: Cue mes

Pictures:

March 19-April 2

We are very concerned with seeing underwear over here.  Seen underwear is both embarrassing (when it's your own) and hilarious (when it's someone else's), and slight measures are taken to ensure that one does not have underwear showing while changing.  "Slight" entails hiding behind a pillow and chastising others when they look, but does not ever extend to going into a less public room, preferably one with a door.  No measures are taken to ensure that underwear is not seen while sitting in decidedly un-ladylike ways.  Does this count as modesty?

Kaitlyn is capable of opening doors, but our house has unusually high doorknobs and she cannot reach them.  This has been great for keeping her out of (some) places she doesn't belong.  However.  This past week we left a chair too close to a door and she realized that she could push the chair against the door and then open the door.  I'm actually surprised that it took her this long; she's been pushing chairs around the kitchen to get up on the counters for months.  Regardless, it took until this week for her to realize she had this power, but now no door is safe.  Luckily for the rest of the family, chairs are generally inconveniently far away from doors and she doesn't feel like putting forth the effort to get them most of the time.

Gretchen has an imaginary friend named Hokya.  It took us a few weeks to realize this because Hokya first appeared immediately after the girls met Jacob's girlfriend, Katya.  We figured that Olivia and Gretchen were just incorporating a slightly mangled version of Katya's name into their play.  My pronunciation has been corrected several times, though, and Gretchen refers to Hokya as a separate (pretend) being rather than as whichever Barbie she is playing with at the time.  When asked to describe Hokya, Gretchen says that she is just pretend.  Upon further questioning, I have learned that Gretchen pretends that Hokya looks like Gretchen.

Olivia has grown a lot this winter.  All her winter dresses are several inches short in the sleeves, and her size 6 leggings that I thought would made it to summer are suddenly hovering above her ankles.  I finally went out and bought some size 7 leggings for her and the smallest dresses got passed down to Gretchen.

Bryan's work has a recognition system that allows managers to award points for good work.  The points can then be spent on various items.  From what I understand, it's pretty arbitrary.  It's also being discontinued, so Bryan's manager has been handing out his allotted points freely in order to use them all up before the program ends.  As a result, Bryan was recently awarded more points than he's ever had before and was able to spend them on a Barbie Jeep for the girls.  They somehow failed to notice the giant box in our TV room, so they were surprised and delighted when they came out from playing to discover a fully assembled miniature car taking up most of the floor.  ("They" in this case refers to Olivia and Gretchen; Kaitlyn "helped" Bryan and me put the jeep together.)  We let them play together in it indoors for a few days before installing the battery and moving it outside.

Kaitlyn had a birthday!  She's two now, which means very little in terms of, well, anything, but we celebrated anyway.  Olivia in particular was disappointed by Kaitlyn's unchanged appearance on the morning of her birthday.  Apparently she was expecting a dramatic change.  :)  Kaitlyn has no idea that she's two, despite our attempts to coach her.

Pictures: