Summer's Bounty

Jonny and a few of his farming buddies planted a big "garden" for themselves. There is currently a ton of green beans and there will soon be a ton of corn and melons (not that we've ever been short of melons). Today we went out and picked some beans. Molly tagged along too and was even helpful for maybe a minute. Then after her helpfulness had worn off, she even managed to entertain herself near us without being a pain/causing damage to property/herself.

Then her shoes came off and she took off making me chase her all over the place while she threatened to cause irreversible damage to everything she touched. Not to mention making a huge muddy mess of herself

"Look at that!"-one of her favorite exclamations.


Here is the result of our labors. A 5 gallon bucket o' beans (+2 eggplants)

Add that to the little bell peppers Jonny's co-worker brought from a trial, and I think we have more than we know what to do with.

Then there's these little gems. Unless you plant your own, you probably won't get to taste one because I'm probably not sharing. Before we had this tree I had only ever eaten a black fig, but I like these way better. This variety is called Kadota. Jonny picked two for me today, they're already gone. We'll have more this year than we did last year, but probably not so many that I won't be able to keep up with eating them all.

Molly continues to be equal parts cute and pain in the butt. Her latest thing is to try and explain her miss-behaviors to me in what I consider to be a condescending tone. For example last night while I was laying next to her, waiting for her to "Go the Fuck to Sleep" (go here to see what I'm talking about) she kept pulling my hair. I kept telling her to stop, but she just kept doing it to the point where I'm sure she could tell from my tone that I was getting pissed. Of course getting pissed doesn't work with her. Sometimes she just laughs at me, gotta love that. Or what she did last night which was lecturing me. Possibly my favorite (and least favorite) Molly quote to date- "Oh mama, it's okay. Sometimes I pull your hair". Fantastic! According to my two-year old pulling my hair this is just something that I need to learn to deal with. I really wish I could capture the sincerity she had in her voice, she was really trying to be sympathetic. Haven't quite figured out what I'm going to do with this, so far all I've been able to do is hold back laughter.

Meow mow mow

First things first, in case you hadn't already heard, my parents and aunt and uncle are fine and their houses are not damaged. You have probably heard about the horrible tornado that took out Joplin on Sunday, fortunately my mom and dad just missed it because they had been visiting Chris and Stephanie for the weekend. They were also fortunate in that their house was not in the tornado's pathway. Although they were in town for the storm, Margaret and Glen's house was also spared. We're just really grateful that they're okay, because it seems that is not the case for a lot of people in the area.
The title of this post now has a double meaning. "Meow mow mow" is Molly's word for Watermelon." This is probably going to be one of those words that I have a hard time correcting since I kind of like it better than the real word. Meredith even tried to get her to say "watermelon" and she said to Mere "No! you mean meow mow mow". Too funny. The Morris' shared some of their Meow mow mow with us and it was all Molly could talk about. She's like her Daddy and LOVES melons.
The other Meow mow mow that Molly can't stop talking about is the kitten that imposed itself on me in the Sam's club parking lot this morning. When I was putting the stuff in the car, this little white kitten starts mewing out from under a car. Since I'm not in the business of taking in stray animals, I made no eye contact and generally tried to ignore anything that I saw/heard. Unfortunately this kitten was determined to get my attention and it walked right over to me. Molly was thrilled and pretty much lost her shit screaming and carrying on about how much she loved her new best friend the white kitten. Since I'm not a complete monster I decided to take the poor thing in and take it to the pound. Of course the pound in closed on Mondays so Meredith has been kind enough to take on my burden and is taking care of the cat for now.
Molly is absolutely in love with this kitten and isn't holding back in her profession of it. She's even given it the name "little dude cat".

She really wanted to pick it up herself, however it didn't prove to be a good idea since she tended to be a little "Lennieish" (totally a word) and not know her own strength and also completely unable to control her own excitement.

This picture cracks me up because of how she's trying to remove Mere's hand. She wanted that kitten all to herself.

The plan for now is that tomorrow at 10 it's going to the pound. Molly's pretty sad about this, but we've said our goodbyes tonight and hopefully she'll forget about it. I kind of have my doubts though, she seems to remember everything. Kind of off subject, but she even remembers nursing and occasionally brings it up even though it's been months since we've done that. I'm pretty much screwed when Maggie gets here since there's a pretty good chance she'll want to get in on the action too.

Golfing Buddy

The past few days have been pretty eventful. Poor Jonny hasn't been golfing in almost a year. He's either too busy or his golf buddies are too busy. I'm usually a buzz kill and don't want to go since I'm terrible, but last week I decided to be a good sport and Molly and I went golfing with him. The plan was to have her take a stroller nap while we golfed. At first we were going to go to Desert Hills, but at the last minute we went to Arroyo Dunes with the thought that she might wake up and want out of the stroller which could be a problem for other golfers. Since Arroyo Dunes doesn't really have other golfer's, it seemed like the better choice for a two year old's first golf outing. This turned out to be the right choice since she did wake up 4 holes in. She had a blast though and since the course was deserted it wasn't a big deal that she was whooping it up.
Golfing with my girl.

This was her main mode of transportation between holes.





Unrelated: Earlier that same day, Jonny and Molly spent the morning together. When I got home I saw that Molly's dress was on backwards. The funniest part is that he took her out like that. It doesn't seem too obvious except when you see the back (front) of the dress.

Yesterday we drove up to Phoenix to go to zoo and to see Jonny's uncle Mike and aunt Chris. The Zoo was fun, but a little hotter than I would have liked it to be, especially carting this belly around. The funniest story from the zoo was the scary peacock story. Molly was in her stroller eating some popcorn when one of the wandering peacocks (male of course) that the zoo lets roam free came over looking for a handout. At first Molly was pleased that she had made a new peacock friend but then when he practically had his head in her stroller, she wasn't so sure she wanted to share. When I started to move her and the peacock saw that he wasn't going to get the popcorn he had hoped for, the peacock expressed his discontent with a very loud yelp, right in Molly's ear. That's when she lost it screaming, crying and blubbering that the peacock was scary. simultaneously so sad and so funny. poor thing.
After the zoo, and cleaning off the zoo stink in our room, we headed over to Jonny's uncle and aunt's house. It was fun to see them since it had been a very long time, and Molly had never met them before. She warmed up to them and their house very quickly and was thrilled to play pool and bake pretend cookies with Chris. Even though it was a short visit, it was good to see them and hopefully it won't be as long before we see them again.
New buddy at the zoo




Ready to go home after a long day

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.