Name Game

Happy belated Mother's Day to everyone. We pretty much just spent our day hanging out at home, which is pretty much what we do every Sunday, but it was still a nice day. We did spend some time in the morning outside blowing bubbles. Molly can actually do it herself now which is pretty cool. If you haven't already figured this out, it should be mentioned that you shouldn't waste your money on any other bubble solution besides Gazillion Bubbles. Millions of Bubbles? not enough. The only amount of bubbles that seems to be enough is gazillion. I'm not sure why it's so much better (probably a carcinogenic ingredient) but it's a gazillion times better.


Check out that bruise on her cheek. Didn't see how that one happened.

Look at all these tomatoes! They're mostly sauce now thanks to Jonny.

I don't think I mentioned it here, but at my last appointment I was measuring a couple centimeters big. I'm happy to report that I had my appointment today and I'm back on track. She said that last time it was most likely that baby M was in a strange position. Phew! I'm pretty sure I'll have a plenty big baby without measuring big.
I also think we've settled on a name. Somewhere along the way we decided to use Jane as a middle name (It was my grandma's middle name) but we were still wavering between Maisie and Maggie. Now Jonny has no recollection of this, but a long time ago I mentioned using the name Magnolia and calling her Maggie, at the time he said that he didn't like it. I brought it up again and this time he liked it. Of course this just confused things for me because now Maggie was starting to take a lead over Maisie. The only drawback to the Magnolia/Maggie name was that it kind of sounds a little "La -ti-da" (what's the word Rams? "Hootalah"?). I like the simplicity of Molly and even though Maggie captures that for me, Magnolia sounds kind of fancypants to me. Yesterday however, the universe gave us a sign. My mom called me to tell me that she was at the nursery (plants not babies) in Joplin and there is a variety of tree called the Magnolia Jane. So if you happened to have made it through that whole stream of consciousness paragraph...Magnolia (Maggie) Jane it is! Thankfully it's a very pretty tree.

Apple Pie

Our peaches are finally ripe and they're really yummy! Molly likes them so much that she calls them "apple pie". I see her logic, apple pie is a reasonable descriptive for all things delicious.
Which one?

"MMM, apple pie!"

We made it to gateway park twice this week. Molly thinks it's probably the best thing ever and talks about the "wiver" all the time now . Gran is still on the fence about it

A little post swim potty.

The twin bed is going pretty good now. The past two nights she's slept through the night. She does seem to wake up earlier and nap time is still a pain (*tear), but I'm glad that it hasn't been a complete failure. I'm glad I went with the twin since there's enough room for us to lay down with her, way more comfortable than the floor.

Hide and Seek

I'm not exactly clear how Molly learned about hide and go seek, but she has the basic concept down. I know that there's an episode of "Peep and the Big Wide World" called "Hide and go Peep", so maybe that's where this all started. It first started with her counting to ten and then saying "ready or not, here I come". Now she's escalated it to hiding while telling me that she's hiding or saying "where's Molly?!" It's cute for now, but will probably be bad when she gets better at hiding and realizes she shouldn't yell while hiding."
"Where's Molly?"

There she is!

The big girl bed is going pretty good. Getting her to go to sleep is still kind of difficult (especially naps) but I think by the end of the week (or month) she should be back to sleeping all night on most nights. She has slept one full night without waking up, so I know that it's possible. So basically, just in time for a new baby, we'll start getting some sleep.
Jonny's friend has a greenhouse that he's let Jonny have some space in so we've been going to check on Jonny's tomatoes on the weekend. Molly thinks it's great. We have been trying to teach her to not pick the green ones and so far that hasn't gone too well. I wish I liked tomatoes more because we've had a ton the past few weeks. They must be good ones though because I even like them a little bit, so I'm guessing if you liked tomatoes, you'd probably think these were amazing or something.

Jonny dressed her this day. I think he planned their "matchiness"

Here's a random picture from the paint store. This was of course orchestrated by papa.

My creepy baby ticker has informed me that I only have 99 days to go. Kind of scary, we still have a lot I'd like to get done before then and that doesn't sound like that much time.

Twin Sized

Molly is the proud owner of a new twin sized bed. It became apparent last week that the transition is was probably something that should be done sooner rather than later. I considered getting a new crib and keeping her in the crib a while longer, but in the end this just made more sense. So far, it hasn't been that great, but hey, it's only been one day. I actually did a little test run at Mere's a couple weeks ago where we've set up an old crib mattress on the ground for her to use over there. That was such an utter failure that she almost didn't take a nap that day, until she went to hang out with my mom at her compound house and passed out on the bed there. I suppose I could use the" just wait until she passes" out tactic, but the problem with that is that when she takes a nap too late in the day, it make bedtime at a decent hour difficult and by decent hour I mean 9:00, so you can see why I don't want to get much later than that. Last night went okay, she fought it a little bit, but she was mostly tired and I think she liked that I was on the bed with her. The problem is of course that she can get up and leave a regular bed. It really sucks because I had come to love how simple nap time had become: Read a story, leave the room, feel awesome. Today's nap time went only slightly better than the one at Mere's house. Although the end result was sleep, it was only after tears and frustration (mostly mine on both counts). I thought I could convince her to snuggle up and fall asleep but instead she repeatedly got up and jumped on me, and when she was laying down she would kick me repeatedly, not cool. When I would leave, she would of course just get up and try to leave the room too. Eventually I had to put up the baby gate and close the door (fortunately the strange door jamb allows for that). When I came back later she was ready to lay quietly and fall asleep. Of course my attitude about the whole process is pretty bad because I can't shake the thought in the back of my head that "this is the kind of shit I don't want to put up with when we have a new baby". I know that this is why I'm doing this now and not in August when it would be so much harder.d
Since she's still a crib sleeper in that she rolls around a lot. We thought it would ease the transition if we had something to serve as a bumper so she wouldn't be constantly bumping her head.
She was quite the little helper, helping us clean before we put the bed in place.

We attached some shams to some molding giving the bed a sort of daybed look.


Hopefully this goes better than potty training. After 3 weeks of panties I caved and started putting the pull ups on her. I just felt like I could physically not clean up any more piss (that's what you call it when it's all over your floors, your couch, your life). If I'm going to count any victory from this it's that she at least tells me when she has to poop. I suppose I should be grateful that I've had to clean up very little of that.
Here's an example of an act of defiance (they're becoming more frequent). She was playing in her water table the other day and I told her we needed to go inside. Since she was sopping wet I took her clothes off, but before I could drag her inside, she was back in the water table butt naked.
How come she makes defiance look so cute?



Here's something I feel terrible about. With Molly, from about 16 weeks on, I took frequent belly pictures. This is the first time I have taken a picture and I'm 25 weeks in. This is my formal apology to baby girl M. I am hoping that I get it together and get some nice maternity pictures taken when we get a little closer. Of course, I can't imagine how huge I'm going to look in those.

Easter Bunny

I think that Easter is officially Molly's favorite holiday. More that just her frequent exclamations that she "Loves Easter!" it seemed that the activity of finding eggs was far more entertaining for her than opening presents or getting candy from strangers. I imagine that this will change in the future, but this year, she had a blast participating in all Easter activities.
This year I let her help out in dyeing the eggs, and although I was certain that this was going to result in a cheery rainbow colored catastrophe in my kitchen, she actually did pretty well, and we managed to keep all the messes contained to the counter.
Plunk!

She was so enamored with the Easter eggs from her egg dyeing experience that it took very little encouragement to get her to go find them in the morning. As soon as she saw her first "hidden" egg, she was game to find them all. I'm of course a total buzz kill and didn't get her any Easter candy. Her concept of candy is pretty limited so it wasn't like she felt like she was missing out plus the unfortunate truth is that I would just end up eating it all anyway. Do as I say not as I do.
Getting geared up for the hunt.

The egg on the slide proved to be a little tricky.

with a little help she figured it out.

She found the egg I had hid in an old jar without any help

She even came up with a solution as to how to get it into the basket.

All done! Which actually turned out to be a bit of a problem. She "loved Easter" so much that she wanted more and more eggs to find. I'm guessing she'll talk about it for quite awhile to come.



Fortunately, when we went over to Cassie and Ben's house later, Madeline had a little egg hunt for her too. She was so nice and she actually hid the eggs for her twice so she could keep the Easter buzz going.

Thanks for the great egg hunt Madeline!

All in all Easter was a big hit this year. Fun for Molly and fun to watch.

Dirty Water

Yesterday we wanted to take Molly to gateway park and let her splash around in the river a little. Unfortunately there was a tea-party rally there which made it an unappealing destination for us...for several reasons. Undeterred we drove over into the CA side and saw that there's this adorable little park on the river's watershed (not sure if that's the correct terminology) right by the casino...with a huge gate blocking the entrance and a "park closed" sign. So we kept on going. We powered on and ended up at some shitty little make-shift boat ramp down the road. Jonny thought it was fine and served it's purpose (and he's right) I on the other hand was a total buzz-kill and complained about litter, and the seemingly stagnant water (although since there were water plants and fish it's unlikely that it was THAT bad). Regardless, Molly didn't care and loved splashing around. Jonny has also assured me that if she had contracted Girardia or something, we'd know by now. My mom will be mad at me for including this, but she did make me feel bad about it, confirming my worst fears about why I shouldn't have let Molly near that water. In her defense though she did backtrack and tell me that I'm probably right to not kill Molly's sense of adventure. I guess I'm frequently letting Molly do things that make my mother cringe. Truly it's probably out of my own laziness rather than trying to foster adventure, but I suppose I don't freak out about stairs, running on uneven ground and climbing as much as I probably should. The other day my mother witnessed Molly walking on a little low brick fence we have around our front yard, she tackled it with ease and Gran was impressed. She said that none of her children would have been able to do that until they were much older...mostly because she wouldn't have ever let us try. Even though I'm not as concerned with her learning those kinds of skill at the cost of a few bumps and bruises, I fully intend to walk in my mother's footsteps in other "over-protective" ways. For example I'm hoping to have her convinced she will be doomed to horrible sorrow and pain should she ever step foot in Mexico for the purpose of partying. I still don't even like to look south while drinking an ice tea.
But for now, she's two and she "loves that dirty water"



P.S. Potty Training Sucks! Everyday I have to convince myself not to give up. Right now the only argument I have is that it will be exponentially harder to do after August. Must. Power. Through!

It's Raining!

Yesterday out in the yard, Molly got a hold of the hose. It didn't take her long to figure out how to adjust the water stream and that the fun was much greater when trying to get us wet. It quickly became difficult to take the pictures since I didn't want to get myself or the camera wet.
Needless to say she had a blast.





The whole time she kept screaming "It's Raining!" over and over again. Of course when the whole episode was over, it was all "Uh-oh! I made mess" and "I's all wet". Messes aren't typically a problem for her until after the fact.