Rainy Day

Nothing like a rainy day to help you feel "Christmasy" in the desert. Molly is not the type to be held back by a little water (and it was indeed a little water) so we spent the morning outside playing in the rain, getting muddy.

It was fun to break out her fancy new Jacket that Gran bought her in New York. Probably a little fancy for the compound, but it was cold for us desert folk!

With our luck, it will probably be 85 by Christmas...just add it to my Festivus grievances. These are my grievances:

1) The baby rave that we have in Molly's room Thursdays and Fridays for the past couple months. I'm not sure why a certain bar decided to lose it's "jazz club" feel in favor of a "La Falla" (sp? I was a good girl and never actually went there) feel, but it's super annoying to when your kid, who is already an insomniac, is woken up by profanity laced rap music at midnight.

2) Toddler PJs. Why oh why have manufacturers of children's pajamas removed the zipper cover once you get into T sizes? Molly is fantastic at taking off pajamas, followed by her diaper, when there is no snap to cover the zipper. I know that it is only a matter of time before she figures out the snap too, but hopefully by then, she'll be less interested in undressing or better yet, potty trained. Thankfully my mom is sewing covers onto all of her winter pajamas. I will say Children's Place PJs do have the snaps, but they're too lightweight for winter since she won't keep a blanket on.

I suppose that if that's the worst I have going on right now, I should be grateful. Not in the spirit of Festivus, I know, but still...Now who wants to wrestle?

Even though I'm not 100% ready for Christmas, I am excited for it. Molly's going to be more into it than she was last year (although she did have fun last year) so it should be entertaining to watch her reacting to all of the festivities. We've already sent out our Christmas cards, I won't ruin it for those of you who haven't seen it yet, but here are some outtakes. Jonny and I didn't make the cut this year. That proved to be too complicated for us.

Molly being Merry and Bright!

Don't worry, the bulbs are shatterproof (Jonny wants to know why they don't just say plastic?)

One of Molly's new favorite activities is stacking. At home it's blocks, at the store it's paint sample jars and sanding blocks, at Gran's it's my old wooden blocks. The funniest part of stacking is that she narrates it by repeating "stack" over and over.

Of course the best part of stacking is knocking it over. She doesn't even care if she didn't build it.

Anyone in demolition will tell you that planning is key

Crash!

Morris Family Fun

Since the arrival of their new baby girl, we've been spending some quality time with the Morrises.

Molly with Elmo, Colbie with me.

Just an illusion...not actually holding the baby. Must be magic from the hat!

Hamming it up!


Today we took an outing to the park with Ramsey, Grayson, Colbie, and my mom. The highlight for Molly was of course the slides...anytime she can launch herself downwards at high speeds, she's game.

"two, two, two, go!": Molly hasn't quite gotten the hang of counting yet, but she's all over the number 2. She repeats it over and over while using a "counting" tone of voice.

I tried to get a picture of them going down the slide together, but they were never in sync.

At first Grayson wasn't too keen on even sitting next to Molly on the slide. I think I should put together collage of all of my "Grayson, crying while Molly watches" pictures. I'm of course joking, I don't think there are enough to warrant an entire collage.

He cheered up pretty quickly.

going up!

Getting this picture was kind of tricky! He kept ducking on purpose right when I was about to take a picture.

We even got to feed the ducks...okay it was mostly pigeons, but there were 3 ducks.

We thought putting Grayson in the wagon would slow Molly down, but she could actually pull him...freakishly strong.

This is what Colbie did the whole time.

Ramsey has it good with this one! Can someone explain why my 21 month old woke up more times last night than the 1 week old Colbie? I'm going with teething. It's my hope that when all of her teeth are finally in (8 more to go I think) that all of her sleep issues will magically disappear. Fingers crossed.

Thanksgiving Extravaganza

This year trying to figure out how we were going to fit in 2 Thanksgivings as we usually do, made my head explode. Molly usually sleeps for 3 hours from 12:30 to 3:30 (Awesome, I know!) which is right around the time we would usually be having 1st Thanksgiving. We remedied this with a blowout Thanksgiving at our house with both of our families. I thought it turned out great. Meredith made the turkey and as usual she did a fantastic job of it. Everyone else contributed the typical Thanksgiving side dishes and everything (except my rolls) turned out great. It was also fun to have everyone at the same table. My dad made me a giant plywood leaf to fit my table, so we were able to accommodate all 13 of us. Molly enjoyed her 2nd Thanksgiving although I think she would have rather eaten mac n' cheese or an avocado. She did really like Cassie's mashed potatoes though (who doesn't) . I of course didn't take as many pictures as I wanted to, but at least I did better than last year (zero).

Milling about, waiting for dinner.

Playing blocks with Madeline.

Today was perfect weather, so Molly took her bear for a walk.

Goofy faces: She's full of them.

I do!

I can not believe that November is almost over, but I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at how fast everything moves nowadays.

Molly's still a mover and a shaker and has been super busy lately driving me nuts. Communication is a blessing and a curse. On one hand it's fantastic to be able to talk to her and have her understand us and better yet, we're even starting to understand her. If she wants something, she'll often times ask for it and I'll give it to her...a fantastic transaction. Lots of times though, she wants things I don't want to give her or worse, she wants to do things I don't want to let her do. Her new favorite "sentence" is "I do" (be sure to repeat that in your head at least 20 times). Time to get a new diaper? "I do" time to put on your clothes? "I do" time to get into the car seat? "I do". She has decided that it's time to take over her care, which would be great if she could actually accomplish these tasks. I'll give her the clothes, she has gotten very good at getting dressed to some extent. She can put her feet through the legs of her pants, and has gotten extremely good at putting on her socks and shoes (maybe not always on the right feet though). However, there is no way that I'm going to sit for an hour and let her try and figure out the car seat. Mainly I don't want her to figure it out too well because then I'm going to have a baby flying into the front seat of the car mid trip.

I'm also really enjoying the mock disappointment she expresses with "OOH-NO!" and "UH-OH". When she really gets going she'll intentionally do something repeatedly for the sole purpose of being up-set over it.

Another advancement in language is the answering of yes and no questions. On a positive note, I can get her to agree to almost anything if I put it into the form of a yes/no question. She does answer "no" occasionally, but she generally responds with an enthusiastic "Yeah" which is nice for now.

I'm discovering that there must be some sort of equation that charts the relation of obnoxiousness to cuteness. The little personality that's emerging is both endlessly cute and endlessly obnoxious...I suppose that maybe the cuteness has the edge.

Here are some of the latest endlessly adorable Molly pictures of all the endlessly clever things she's been up to.

Don't know where the football came from but Molly loves it and if some kid comes looking for it...I may not know what they're talking about.

Seriously, this did not look as scary when it was happening as it does here. I love how she now says "wow" "whoa" and "wee". This was probably more of a "whoa" than a "wee".

Molly and her hair *sighs* She wore pigtails the other day, but only after I added the top one. She looks like she's getting ready to be an extra in "How the Grinch Stole Christmas".

She loves her new kickball.

Here she is playing golf with Dink's tennis ball. It rolled between her legs and she went looking for it.

Somersault-she's actually done one on purpose at least once.

This one was not..."whoa"

Dink is poised

I actually cropped my moms hands out of the picture. She was totally killing our buzz.

Molly loves her some dude.

Today we took an impromptu trip to the park. I really should take her there more often now that the weather is nice. When we first arrived, there were several people running around looking for a boy named "Alexis?" with a "blue shirt and black hair". Anyhow, we did a quick glance and saw no children who looked lost and went about our own business. We played on the slides and let Molly kick her new ball around and assumed that they had probably found the kid. We decided to head over to the castle part of the park where they have a little toddler playground and again played on even more slides "again, again" as Molly likes to say. We did realize however that Alexis probably hadn't been found since we kept hearing his name being yelled. At this point I kind of felt a little concerned about this kid who must truly be missing (it had been quite awhile since we had arrived). I didn't really know what we could do though since they had several people looking and had already searched most of the park it seemed. While playing with Molly we decided to check out the little airplane model they have. We plopped Molly in the seat to let her fly and then Jonny sort of jumps and probably uses some mild obscenity (gotta clean it up for the kids you know :-) He says "there's a kid in there" of course you know where this is going, but at the time, we didn't really put it together right away. While we were walking away from the occupied plane, I say to Jonny "do you think that's the kid they're looking for?" he tells me to see if he's wearing a blue shirt and ask his name. He was of course wearing the shirt, but he wouldn't answer me. We then of course flagged down the search party and showed them where to look. It was a really good hiding spot and I'm glad we found him when we did because I can't imagine how freaked out they must have been and I could tell that there was no way that he was going to give his location up on his own. I had seen a few other kids playing around the plane but none of them said anything and other than them, the plane hadn't been too popular, so it might have been quite awhile before he would have been discovered there.

I have some videos that I would love to get on here but they're kind of a pain, so I don't know if I'll get it done anytime soon.

Bye bye MO

I tried to get tricky with the blog because the dates were messed up on my posts and now I'm regretting it because I deleted a whole post somehow...whoops. I've learned my lesson. Now I'm stuck trying to recreate the post. We'll see how I do
We left Missouri on the 28th in order to get home in time for Halloween. It was an extremely long trip and has cemented with me, that when we go to Joplin for Christmas, we will be flying. She was a trooper, but in the end I think one long day is better than 3 long days, even if it does involve possible tantrums in front of strangers.
Here are some pictures from our last days in Joplin.

Obligatory Porch pictures

She learned quickly that her buddy "Gen" was the one to go to if you needed something.

It was fun how quickly she learned to say Margaret and Glen's names, or at least her version: "Mar-gee, and "Gen". She LOVED hanging out at their house and talked about them constantly.

Glen reading his little varmint buddy a story.

Playing in the leave on the deck.

While there, Molly lived it up in Gran's claw foot. I suppose I could give her baths in ours, but she has her own bathroom, so we might as well use that.

On our way home, our biggest struggle was sleep. While other kids seem to pass out in the car and never wake up. Molly cannot stay asleep in her car seat. As soon as her head bobs, she's up. We tried some fancy pillowing to try and keep her asleep, but nothing worked long enough to get a good nap in.

Molly and her pillows

Since this was a problem, on the way home, one day we stopped in Albuquerque to let her get a decent nap in the stroller. While she slept, we walked around old town and eventually ended up in the natural history museum where, when Molly woke up, she had a grand time running around checking out the Dyn-Saws. I think she appreciated the break.

Pushing her stroller around was her favorite activity.