Farmer's Market

Today we went to the Webb city farmer's market. In Yuma, our farmer's market is total bullshit (straight off the truck on the way to the supermarket), so going to a real farmer's market where all of the stuff is from smaller local farms is awesome. We got lots of produce as well as some homemade baked goods, even some pork chops. I'm pretty excited for dinner tonight.

At the market, there was live music that Molly was a big fan of. She started out reserved but captive, but she soon was clapping, slapping and even dancing here and there. It was pretty cute to watch.

Just taking it all in.


Aunt Margaret and Molly listening to the music.


Getting into it.


Really letting loose!



Before we left for the market I snapped a couple pictures. They illustrate a new trend I've noticed with Molly. As soon as she registers that I'm taking her pictures, she starts putting on this really, kind of creepy face. I'm not sure why this is the face she's settled on. It's kind of cute in a funny way, but I don't think I want all of her pictures to end up looking like this

Cute

Creepy

My mom says that it looks like a Jack-o-lantern face. I guess she's practicing for Halloween.

MO Molly

Right now Molly and I are with my parents in Joplin. Most of you know that my parents have an amazing victorian house here that they've been fixing up little by little. the house has come a LONG way and is a great place to hang out for a couple of weeks. I'm particularly glad I'm trading a couple weeks of still warm/hot weather for nice cool weather.

We don't really have an agenda while we're here. My dad has been working on the house and my Mom, Molly and I have been hanging out. Schedules are a little kooky since AZ is two hours earlier, but we're working it out and having a good time.

We drove here, which was a very long drive (2 long days +a couple hours on a 3rd). Molly was actually pretty good considering how long we made her stay in her seat. She watched her DVD's read her books and listened to her "musi"...my ipod. I had hoped she would sleep better in the seat, and she did catch some zzz in there, but mostly her head flopped around so much that it was constantly waking her up. I had a pillow that didn't do much and have now purchased a different one that I'm hoping will work better on the way home, we'll see.





Her 1st order of business after arriving in Joplin was running crazily around and busting her face and shoulder open on the sidewalk. Fortunately her bangs cover the worst of it so people won't think I beat my child. I'm starting to reconsider the toddler helmets I've seen in some catalogs.

On our first evening we went to Glen and Margaret's for dinner (Molly's Great great aunt and uncle...they're very great!) In addition to being great they have a great yard (maybe yard is the wrong word, it's huge) where Molly had a great time running around in the leaves.

We told her that acorn's have little hats and she thought that they might fit her too. You can't really see that in the picture, what you can see if you look closely is her busted face.

Buckling up in Uncle Glen's lawnmower.

Go Fetch!

Molly and Papa taking a walk.

Gran and Papa's kitchen is full of good times:

You can sit under the island and read a book.

you can practice your yoga moves.

When Gran gets you a giant piece of red rosin paper you can go crazy coloring on the floor. Not everything made it onto the paper, whoops!

Last night we went to a park and Molly tried out a slide for the 1st time. She loved it. Can you tell?

She went down so many times that her hair was standing up from the static.

We have one more week here, hopefully I'll take some more pictures to post when I get home.

Running in Circles

We've been outside A LOT lately (the weather has been nicer), mostly because Molly demands it. Every morning it starts with a call for "shoes, shoes, shoes!" then it's followed by "AWWWE-SIGH, AWWWE-SIGH, AWWWE-SIGH" (that's "outside" for those of you not fluent in Toddlerese) I feel bad if I deny her, but sometimes you just have to do the dishes and chasing her around outside doesn't seem to make that happen. It would be awesome if it did.

She's decided that running around in a little circle until she falls over is pretty entertaining especially while laughing maniacally. I tried to teach her "Ring around the rosie" but she didn't think that was as cool as her game. Maybe she doesn't like the dark undertones of the game...or maybe she doesn't want to hold my hands.

Spin spin spin!

Fall fall fall!

Get up and start over!

When we're outside she's also really interested in getting into the parking lot. I'm not as interested in being in the parking lot since to me it's just dirt and mesquite trash full of bugs and other nastiness. I don't understand how we can have such a huge expanse of grass that she has such little interest in.

Trying to escape to the freedom of the parking lot.

Also of interest outside is her wagon, but she's really not interested in riding in it, she really loves to pull it around. She hasn't quite mastered it yet in that she doesn't understand that she can't just manhandle it wherever she wants.

It isn't for lack of effort, but I just don't think she's going to get it up the step.

The other night while Jonny was laying on the floor, Molly decided to bring her blocks out and play with daddy.

Then she decided she was done and started taking them back to the playroom.

Run Molly run!

Don't forget that last one!

Then it was time to play with her animals.

I wish I knew what she was thinking.

Here's another clever trick she has. This is related to her new love of "relaxing". It's only for a few seconds here and there but she loves to pretend to relax like us lazy big people.

I'm hoping that being able to relax will help some on the sleeping front. We did have a pretty awesome milestone just this afternoon. She actually fell asleep for her nap without any help from me. For the past several months she has pretty consistently gone down for her nap by nursing to sleep (which is why the nap time feeding is the last holdout). Lately however she doesn't fall asleep, so I end up rocking her to sleep. Today she kept wanting to get down and play instead of relaxing. So I put her in her crib and left the room. She didn't cry and she played for about 5 minutes with her doll and blanket and then she got very quiet. When I looked in on her she was fast asleep. Unfortunately she had also taken a dump. I was actually able to take her out, change her diaper and put her back without her waking. If you had told me 6 months ago that this would be possible I might not have believed you.

The next three pictures are only here because she just so dang cute.

I'm so sweet.

I'm so thoughtful.

I'm so hilarious.

Housebroken

I can't wait to show Molly's cute Halloween costume, It's too funny. I chose it because she loves to say "woof woof" and because it's just too freaking cute!

Doing a puppy walk with daddy.

Despite her adorable Halloween costume, she isn't housebroken yet, but we have made some small steps in that direction. My original approach of rubbing her nose in her accidents and beating her with a rolled up newspaper isn't working, so I'm implementing my new plan and trying to "catch" her after lunch when she typically goes and put her on her potty in the hopes that she will get the picture and start thinking that it's the cool thing to do. So far we've had one success and a couple misses. The misses seem to occur because she thinks of the potty as a sort of tag style home base. That is to say, if you're touching it, your safe. Unfortunately things don't magically fly into the potty just because you're near it. This approach is definitely not the "done in a week" approach but it's a start for now. Potty training right now might just be wishful thinking on my part and if she doesn't seem to show any further interest I'm probably going to back off until she's a little older.

This morning was a blast. While I was putting clothes in the washer, Molly wandered into the computer room, found a purple sharpie and gave herself a Juvie tat. I hope marking herself up with a sharpie doesn't mean she has a future as an annoying "emo" youth. I actually think that it looks kind of like a Chinese character. Maybe she's been watching too much "Ni Hao Kai Lan" and it says "Share and Care FOR LIFE".

Pa-THETIC!

If anyone has any of their own sharpie related incident, you should know that hand sanitizer works wonders. I'm grateful to the parent that had shared that with me. She of course knew it because of previous experience.

After:

"Graysontime"

So we go to babytime at the library yesterday and it's a completely different experience from the other times we've gone. The only difference that I can find is that Grayson wasn't there. Maybe it was a coincidence and she was just tired, but she was comparatively quiet and reserved. I think Molly might have been just showing off for Grayson the previous times we've gone. She actually sat on my lap a few times without fighting me and when she did venture out into the center, she mostly stood there just looking around. At one point she even went to the door, started to open it and repeated "bye bye..." I guess babytime just isn't the same without Grayson.

Last night Gran and "Pa-pah!" (as Molly says) came over and babysat while Jonny, Mere, Jeffrey and I went to watch "The Big Lebowski" at the Historic Theater downtown. Since it's Jonny's favorite movie, we just couldn't miss the opportunity to see it on a big screen. We even managed to have a good time despite the D-bag who thought he was as witty and clever as the movie, and felt the need to yell out quotes and comments right before they were relevant. I suppose this was his way of showing familiarity with the movie which I guess equaled "coolness" for him. While we were gone Molly had a great time hanging out with my parents and even pulled out a few new tricks, like what we're now calling her "peep walk". While watching "Peep and the big wide world" (think birds) Molly came up with this little crouching walk with her hands behind her like little tail feathers. It's pretty funny to watch. When we got home, Molly was asleep and she hadn't even put up a fight for Gran, maybe I'll invite her over for bedtime every night!

I don't have very many pictures which is sort of surprising, but probably good news for my hard drive.

Rocking out and giving us some jazz hands.

She's finally getting the hang of the lady bug rocker.

Molly Mac: Looking towards the future.

Petting Zoo

I don't know if it's because she thinks she's eating like a dog, but when snacking, sometimes Molly likes to do it pie eating contest style.

When feeding your toddler like this it's important to remember petting zoo rules and keep your hand flat.

Molly's little baby mullet is getting longer and I've been hoping that soon I'll be able to actually do something with it, but I think these pigtails look pretty pathetic. Also as you can see from her hand placement, she has no intentions of keeping them there.

I'm still a fan of the bow clipped bangs but Molly's still not having it. The only way I can get her to tolerate it long enough for a picture is to sit her down in the chair and bribe her with her favorite "toy", my ipod. I suppose in her defense I should disclose that I have actually installed apps for her. Mostly she just likes to scroll through the music. She's kind of like her uncle Chris in that she can't ever finish a whole song before she has to find a different, probably better song. Just kidding Chris :-)

I'm getting her to smile here by doing a sweet, cookie monster puppet show with her cookie monster puppet.

The way she works the ipod is really impressive to me. She knows how to unlock it, find her apps, use her apps, find music, play the music, skip to the next track, change the juxtaposition so that she can look at the album art and flip through that, even search google for "aeeeeekklllllaaajjjbelkwpdkkkkkk" which every mother knows is of the utmost concern for babies today. I now turn off the wifi before I let her go crazy on it so she's not able to go into facebook and "like" that someones hamster died...or worse. Of course it's only a matter of time before she figures out how to turn it back on. In about 5 minutes she's going to surpass me in technological knowledge. Really I think her ability to figure it all out so quickly is a testament to how intuitive these things have become. Still, I have visions of creepy techie babies getting ready to take over the world.

Tunnel Vision

The other day I had this genius idea of making a little tunnel with a blanket between the ottoman and the couch. I really had high hopes for how awesome this was going to be for Molly. I was convinced that this would place me in Molly's eyes as "the coolest person ever". I know that I'm Molly's favorite person, but I'm not always the coolest person, so this was going to be something. Well, I tried. She did get into it a tiny bit, but she mostly wished that she could somehow sit on top of it, which she tried once unsuccessfully.

It would be WAY cooler if I could jump on top.

I don't really get it.

Lately the cute thing that Molly has been up to is getting her See n' Say (which sings "Old Mac Donald") and "singing" "Ee-I-Ee-I-Oh" over and over. It cracks me up mostly because this is something that she came up with on her own. I have never sang this to her or even accentuated it when her see n' say was singing it. Actually I find that I even go out of my way when playing with the See n' Say to avoid all of the music since I find it kind of annoying.

Another cute thing that she does (there are many) is how she eats raspberries. She like to put them on her fingers and now she even does a little dance before she eats them. This video showcases her talent.

Today we went to babytime at the library with Grayson. I again had to ask myself if she could possibly belong to Jonny and I. Jonny is pretty much socially anxious and while I'm a little better I'm never trying to be the center of attention. For the entire first song of babytime, Molly stood in the middle of the room (while everyone else sat with their parents) and enjoyed herself while everyone sang to her...or so she thought. I'm conflicted most of the time, on one hand I don't want to crush her spirit, on the other hand I'd rather she didn't believe that babytime and the world revolved around her. They said in the rules of babytime that I should feel free to let her wander...but maybe I should have made her sit with me, even if she protested.

I recently bought Molly a Fisher Price record player. I bought it mostly because I had one when I was little and have vague memories of it. We also found a long lost record deep within the pockets of the pocket doors of this house when we were fixing things up. I guess I had inserted it in there when I was a toddler. Maybe I believed that the house would play the music in some grand fashion if I put it there. I think I may have over estimated her abilities to play nice with it though because she probably only needs about 10 more minutes with it before she breaks it. I've since hidden it from her because it was sort of expensive for a toddler toy and let's be honest I mostly bought it for myself.

Here are some pictures of Molly being Molly in her playroom. Having a playroom is the best thing EVER! There is a significant reduction in toys in the living room. Since Molly doesn't sleep through the night (she has been taking epic naps though...awesome!) it reduces the chance that I will die tripping over something with wheels onto something that is surprisingly sharp for a baby toy.

Molly also wants to wish uncle Chris safe and pleasant traveling on his big trip! Hopefully this blog will kill 10 minutes or so on one of your many, probably lengthy layovers! Take Care, we love you!