There's Gotta Be A Better Word For This....

...than "cute."  Because it's beyond cute.  So cute it's almost painful.  Like when GW walks in the door from work, and El holds up a hand to him and shouts, "Eye!" (Hi).  Like when she burps, and if I say, "burp!" she'll laugh (how does she know that's funny?).  Like when she plays peek-a-boo with herself in a mirror.

She now says "Mama, up," when she wants me to pick her up.  She's practicing her walking all the time.  She's recently refined her kissing technique - instead of opening her mouth and diving for your face, she opens and closes her lips against your cheek.  She still likes the game where she tries to bite your nose and you try not to let her and you squeal in a really high voice.  She's a ham, like her sister.  She calls Av "Ah-ee."  Neat.

Let's see...finished unloading the shoe bench, what's next?

Grinning at Dad

Big Sis helps her walk

Hiey!

She clawed her way into the fridge and helped herself to a bloody corpse...I mean plum.

Her favorite ride.

The Barbuna Triangle

We're on a secret mission to find Captain Hook.  We need to find the secret way to Captain Hook at his Barbuna Triangle home.  We used our invisibility suits and our cloak of silence to sneak past his guards.  Av stole his pixie dust and cleverly stored it in a lantern, leaving it hidden in plain sight while the guards unknowingly ran past us.  "Us" is secret agent Av, baby secret agent El, and secret agent Mom.  Secret agent Dad will be joining us for one leg of the mission, before repairing to his paid job to look for more clues.  Secret Agent Av is the best of the agents, many times decorated for valor. 

By Secret Agent Av:  all of the agents have secret powers.  what do you think the secret powers are?

Let's go to the secret agent hide-out.  

Blowing French Kisses

El recently learned to blow kisses, but instead of kissing her hand and then holding her hand out, she sticks three fingers in her mouth, pulls them out, and flings them at you with a "Mwaah" sound.  Sometimes with a spray of baby spit. 

Just had to share that.

Area Baby Takes First Steps On First Birthday

Milestoneville, USA:  No kidding.  There was one this morning, when she stood up and took a step while rotating herself toward the couch in order to grab on.  That was her very first.  Then later, after supper, she was playing on the floor with balloons and took a step and a half before grabbing onto Dad.  She's been working up to this for a couple of days: lots of pushing up from a squatting position to stand up, then holding the pose for several seconds before plopping back down or reaching out for something to hang on to.  It's just so cool that the official first steps happened on her birthday.  Av's first steps, out on the front walk, happened on her 11-month anniversary.

It was a good day.  Mostly.  El had some...ahem...bowel trouble this morning, but took a long leisurely nap afterward and woke up in an awesome mood, just in time for the party.  It was nice enough to play outside for a bit, so she got to swing and slide and crawl through her tunnel.  Av made a wish for her and blew out her candle. (I'm not telling what the wish was. It's a cool one, trust me.)  Av also helped her open her present (a pull wagon with blocks in it) and helped her play with it.  By which I mean Av played with it and complained loudly when El knocked down the structures she was trying to build with the blocks.  El later played Manny Pacquiao with her helium balloons, coached by GW.  That was super cute.  It's hard to believe that she's a year old already.  Everybody says that, I know.  But truly, it feels like she was born a few weeks ago.

The night before this day last year, I gave GW his birthday present, twelve days late.  It was a DVD, the second season of Life On Mars, which I'd ordered from the BBC online and it was on back order and arrived way later than expected.  Anyway I wrapped it and gave it to him after Av went to bed and we joked that I could finally go into labor now since his birthday present came (El's due date was GW's birthday, 1-16, hence the joke).  That night I woke up at 2:30am with contractions.  The midwives came within an hour or so, and at 5:59am our second little girl made her entrance.

Loves her swing.

Big Sis is so pretty.

Av made a wish for El, and blew out her candle for her.

Yeah, I made the cake.  And the cookies.  Sure, you can have my autograph.

Yay!

Sis helped her open her present.

So I'm Having Trouble Writing....

It's not that I don't have inspiration.  But as they say, it's been busy lately, what with the holidays and the recovery from the holidays and all.  It does usually take me a good month to get back into some kind of normal groove after all that.  And because there's also a lot of weird stuff going on with various people in our lives, I'm thinking about and working on things like trusting my instincts about people and about how people treat me and my family.  The kids have still been doing noteworthy stuff, every single day.  We are fast approaching El's first birthday and Av's fifth, both of which are really big for me, so there's a lot to do to get ready for both. 

So more later....

El, 10 Months Old

Wow, double digits.

She's dying to walk - has the cruising thing down pat, and has the bumps and bruises to prove it.  Makes a bee-line to the most dangerous thing she can find, whenever possible.  That means if someone has left a toilet lid up, she rushes in to go "potty-diving" as Av calls it.  If the toilet lid is down but the bathroom door is open, it's the next best thing as far as El is concerned.  She can still get in there and fish in the trash can  or at the very least, unwind a roll of toilet paper.  God help you if you've left a space heater on in a cold room somewhere - she can smell it.  She can hear a piece of hard candy drop from the kitchen table, from upstairs on the opposite end of the house.  Her head whiplashes around and she hits the floor to run-crawl toward it.  She can psychically divine where the dirtiest corner of any floor is.  Her favorite cabinet to try to open is the one under the sink where all the cleaning stuff is.  Dead bugs within her reach call out to her like she's Jennifer Love-Hewitt.

I read recently that you can tell how smart a baby is by how exhausted the parents are.  I think El might be a genius, judging by that.  She is one tough kid to keep up with.

Other little things are changing, too.  She still loves to unload stuff out of a container or drawer, but recently she figured out that if she puts it back in, she can have the thrill of taking it out again.  She has started to imitate words and sounds she hears more often.  The funniest example is when she emits a deep, grunting "Aaaaahhh" of satisfaction after nursing, the way a person might after downing a refreshing glass of ice water on a hot day.  She gets that from her father.  She's learned what "no" means, and like most kids her age she finds it hilarious.  She's very social, loves people.  Even the crappiest of her moods can be fixed by a trip to the store, where she can smile and play peek-a-boo with everyone, or by a few minutes at Av's school when we drop her off in the morning and El gets fawned over by kids and parents alike. 

She's got four teeth - the top two just came in and it looks like two more are on deck (the top eye teeth).  She's eating a little more food now with less gastric upset.

I'll think of more later and continue this, with pictures.

Choppin' Brok-a-lehhh

Well, cabbage.  Gotta make potstickers for the kid's school Thanksgiving festival.  That is not to imply that I myself am doing the chopping.  Nay, it is GW's job to chop cabbage in this house.  Does anyone remember Dana Carvey's piano composition on SNL about a hundred years ago?

Could this post be any more non-sequitur? Don't blame me, I have a four-year-old snapping me in the arm with a pad of note paper and a baby trying to jam a fork in her nostril.