Bed Head

Anna's hair is out of control.  This is how she looks in the mornings when she wakes up!

I have no clue what she does in her sleep to make her hair do this!  I also have no clue where her hair type came from!  Her hair is so thin and wirey.  It drives me crazy when it's not pulled up out of her eyes. When it is pulled up, she tries to pull it down a lot of the time.   

Her hair is finally getting thicker on top of her head.  For the longest time, she had a balled spot on top of her head where she wouldn't quit playing and pulling at her hair.  She still plays with her hair when she's going to sleep or sitting still watching TV, but she's not pulling at her hair so hard that it comes out anymore. 

I think she's going to be my cute little bob-hair girl!

Testing the Limits

Oh, boy! Is she ever! Anna has hit the terrible twos a couple of months early! I don't remember Aubrey being like this, but then again, she didn't have an older sister who tried to boss her around and act like a mommy to her!
Anna has started hitting and pulling Aubrey's hair - sometimes for no reason and sometimes this is her reaction whenever she and Aubrey are fighting. The fighting has dramatically increased, but so has their playing together. Before, Anna really just wanted to play by herself, but now she's starting to follow Aubrey's lead and she likes to do all the same things that Aubrey is doing. Occasionally, she will bite Aubrey, but I hope she's getting past this stage.
Anna will also take toys from Aubrey for no reason. I honestly think she just wants Aubrey to react...which Aubrey always does in her melodramatic way. Her vocabulary is also growing and her two favorite words are "No!" (as she is pointing her finger at you) and "Stop!"

She gets time out and/or spankings with the No-No spoon regularly throughout the day. It's very exhausting to be disciplining her every time I turn around and I have to watch myself so that I don't lose my cool with her. After telling her the same things five times in a row, I'm just ready for her to "get it."
With Alexandra, Anna has started pinning her to the floor! Yes! She will walk up to Alexandra and just lay on her. Obviously Alexandra will start screaming and then Anna will get in trouble.

Sometimes when I send Anna to time-out, she will look at me smiling and then sort of skip to time-out. I have no clue how to prevent this from happening. I can't give her a spanking for every little thing she does, but I want her to know the small things that she does are wrong too.

Then on the other hand, she can be the sweetest and most gentle child. She loves to come up and kiss me on my cheek. The other day she came up to me and kissed me on both cheeks. No reason...just because. If I'm ever talking to her (mostly during the face to face time following time-out) and my hair has fallen in my face, she will take her hand and gently pull my hair out of my face. It's really hard to continue disciplining her when she does this! She's always eager to apologize to Aubrey and give her a big hug after she has done something to her and she LOVES kissing on Alexandra.

I'm praying hard that this acting out is just a typical two-year old phase and that it's not going to last long!

This is a typical Anna look!  She loves her baby dolls and had me wrap this one up in her blankie. 

The Small Milestones are just as Great!

Last night as I was getting ready to put Alexandra down, we did our normal routine of going around, kissing everyone and saying, " I love you."  After all the kisses, we then head to their room, but we always stop and let the girls wave to everyone and say "Nite, nite" before we go into their room.

As we were doing this routine last night, Alexandra stuck out her hand and started moving her fingers in and out to wave to everyone!  It was so cute and Aubrey just loved it!!!

This is the first time I've seen her wave and she waved like she knew exactly what she was doing!  She is growing up so quickly.  In a few months, she will be one and I will have another toddler on my hands instead of a baby!  It makes me sad....but not sad enough to make me want another one!!!!!!

Conversations with Aubrey

Aubrey can absolutely melt my heart sometimes! She truly has such a sweet spirit and I love hearing the things that she says to me. Whether it's funny, sweet, or just plain surprising that she knows to say some of the things that she does, I just soak it all in.
A few of her recent comments:
Yesterday I was hugging her and I told her that she was a great big sisters. She looked at me and said, "You're a great big mommy."
Another time, I was calling her into the house the other day from being outside. Once she stepped in the door, she looked at me and said, "Yes, your majesty?" I gave her a thumbs up for that remark.
This morning, she looked at me and said, "Mommy, you're a pretty princess."
She is starting to see commercials for toys and telling me that she wants whatever has been on the commercial. She has asked me about some sort of shoes that she has seen on TV several times recently. Most of the time I will tell her, "maybe" when she asks if she can get something and then sometimes I tell her she'll have to put it on her list for Santa.
A couple of days ago, she asked me how we would get the shoes out of the TV. I told her we would have to buy them with money. She also associates "buying things" with going to the store. So her next response was "I'm not allowed to drive to the store yet. Remember?" So I asked her how she was going to buy them if she couldn't drive to the store. She very matter-of-factly stated, "I'm not buying them. You are."
Oh, this is going to be interesting as she gets older!!!!

Aubrey's Quote of the Day

As we were driving home from church tonight, Aubrey asked Danny to turn the DVD player on. 
Danny:  I can't reach it.
Aubrey: Your arms aren't long enough?
Danny:  Nope.
Aubrey:  Well, I guess that's how God made ya. 

Notice the "ya."  This is how Aubrey says "you" all the time. It's not "I love you" it's "I love ya."

She couldn't understand why we were laughing at her!

Alexandra's 9 Month Check-up

Alexandra had her 9 month check-up on Monday.  She now weighs 17 lbs 2 oz (Aubrey weighed 19 lbs 14 oz and Anna weighed 19 lbs 8 oz at their 9 month check-ups) and is 26.5 inches long (Aubrey was 28.5 inches and Anna was 27 inches long at their 9 month check-ups).  It's funny how Aubrey was the largest child (although there was a time when Anna was 3-6 months that she did weigh more than Aubrey at that age), Anna is the second largest and Alexandra is the smallest.

Alexandra's hemoglobin level was border line low.  Dr. Connolly wasn't too concerned at this point, but he wants me to start feeding her meats, maybe some citrus (either food or a little orange juice), and he said I could always give her Poly-Vi-Sol, which is an iron supplement.  I gave her some oranges today and she loved them!  Next is to try her on meat.  I looked on the internet today to see how to prepare meat for babies and I think I'm going to cook chicken with broccoli and carrots for her.  We'll see how she likes it!  He plans on rechecking her hemoglobin at her 12 month appt.

As Dr. Connelly looked into Alexandra's ears, he also found infections in both!  I was shocked.  She hasn't been running a fever, hasn't been acting fussy, and hasn't been pulling at her ears.  It's one of those moments where as a mom, you feel like you really haven't been paying enough attention to recognize that your baby has double ear infections.  Dr. Connolly said that the ear infections probably started gradually while Alexandra was fighting her cold for the past two weeks and it's probably uncomfortable for her, but she has just grown used to the feeling so it doesn't bother her as much.  Poor baby!  She's now on antibiotics.

Other than that, she's perfect!

Outside Classroom

I know we are going to be spending a lot of time outside this spring and summer, so I want there to be plenty of things outside to entertain the girls.  We already had a small chalkboard outside, but I really wanted to do more with this idea.  So now we have three large, framed chalkboards outside! 

We aren't quite through with the third one and we are also planning on hanging another board (same size) to be our paint board.  The girls will be able to hang their papers on this board and paint away...and the mess will not be inside the house!

The chalkboards will be great as we play school and have an outside classroom for the girls! 

Now we just have to do some landscaping.  For the landscaping, my plans are to plant flower seeds (with the help of the girls), so that these flowers can be their flowers that they plant, water and watch them grow.  I think Aubrey will expecially enjoy this. 

We are so lucky to have such a handy husband and dad!  Look at the cute flowers he made to hang on the fence too!  The flowers are just particle board that was left over at one of his job sites and I painted them with paint we already had in the garage.  He also made a mud box for us to put our shoes in before coming in from outside.  It's made of particle board (which means it was free).  I've painted it and plan to put all of our footprints inside it.  I'm trying to get up the nerve to actaully do this with the girls.

Hopefully we can accomplish this...more pictures to come of all of our projects!

Our Little Pianist!

We got this cute little piano mainly for Aubrey and Anna this past Christmas (did I mention we got it for free from a friend of Danny's sister), but Alexandra seems to enjoy it more than them!  She will crawl into the playroom, pull herself up in front of the piano and bang away!  Music to my ears!

Carrots, Anyone?

There are a lot of lessons learned when you have small (and I'm sure big) kids.  Another lesson learned for me...never leave food on the table unattended!  I was feeding Alexandra her carrots and Aubrey started yelling for me to help her in the bathroom.  I got up to go help Aubrey and when I returned (just a couple of minutes later), this is what I found.

Anna quickly took advantage of the fact that Alexandra's food was on the table and Mommy wasn't there!  Alexandra is normally not a messy eater, so I had not even put a bib on her.  Needless to say, Alexandra won't be wearing this shirt anymore because the carrot stains did not come out!

I think Alexandra enjoyed it as much as Anna!  I didn't get any pictures of Anna because I didn't want her to think what she did was funny or cute.  This would only lead to more attempts to feed Alexandra!

Anna's First Black Eye!

This picture was actually taken about 5 days after she first got the black eye.  Typically Aubrey is the accident proned child who runs into things all the time, but this time it was Anna!

Danny and I were out for the night at a wedding shower and some wonderful friends of ours, Joy and Andrew along with their little boy Gabe, offered to come and keep the girls for us.  The girls and Gabe were watching a movie in the playroom and Anna turned and ran into the corner of the door on the TV armoire.  

It looks a lot worse than I'm sure the accident really was.  I'm really surprised that she bruised this much.  It has been two weeks now and you can still see some bruising under her eye.  It has taken forever to go away.  I hope this is the first and very last black eye she ever has!

Anna loves her Cody!

Tight Spaces

One morning, I couldn't find Alexandra, but I could hear her.  I looked over in the corner of the living room where her toy basket is, but still didn't see her.  It sounded like she was behind the couch???  So I got down on my knees and looked under the sofa and there whe was! 

I guess she found a shortcut!

She looks happy in this picture, but about 5 seconds later, she started screaming becuase she couldn't get out from behind the sofa!

She has not attempted this trick agian!

Razors, Knives and Ladders

Doesn't sound like a good title for a post about children, does it?  Well, we are quickly learning that we are going to have to do a lot more child proofing to our house with Anna than we did with Aubrey.  Anna is now tall enough to open doors!  I always keep our bathroom door closed just so Anna can't get in there without me knowing.  I discovered her new found skill of opening doors a little too late. 

First, she went into my bathroom, opened the cabinet (that has a ponytail holder around the knobs so that she can't get in) and somehow managed to get her hands on a bag of disposable razors that were in the very back of the cabinet.  She then took the bag of razors to the playroom to play.  When I discovered her, the razors were all out of the bag, she had taken the top off of one and had cut her thumb in two places.  She wasn't crying, she was just holding her bloody finger up for me to see.  Naturally, I freaked out.  The cuts were not too bad.  Once sliced the corner of her fingernail off and the other scraped a small top layer of skin off.  I could not get her thumb to stop bleeding!  Finally after about 30 minutes, the bleeding slowed down enough for me to put bandaids on her finger.

Secondly, with her new height, she can now open drawers in the kitchen.  What was the first drawer she opened?  The silverware drawer with steak knives.  She got a knife out of the drawer (all while I was on the phone) and was scraping it all over the front of a kitchen cabinet!  Luckily she didn't do too much damage to the cabinet and I was able to get the knife from her before she damaged herself!

The ladder incidenct actually happened a couple of weeks ago when we accidentally left the door to the bathroom open.  I had the ladder in the bathroom hanging drapes and left it up so that Danny could finish hanging them when he got home.  After he got home, Anna went missing, so we went searching and this is where we found her. 

Lego Castles

Everything these days is about princesses and castles, so naturally, Aubrey wants to build castles with her legos.  Here are two of her masterpieces!

So this is the one that Daddy helped her build...

and this is the one that Mommy helped her build. 

Can you tell we have a construction guy living with us?  I was going for tall and Danny was going for nice and sturdy castle!