Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Time marches on...

I can't keep up with these babies growing so much :p

Frankly I'm too tired to try to catalog their developments, but to put it briefly: Storey is a big squishy Michelin Man, and she's super sweet and mellow. She smiles and laughs with a twinkle in her eye and a big dimple on her cheek, especially at her big sister. She's also a master of funny faces, like Minnow was :)  No colic, and really only complains when she has a wet diaper--since we do cloth, she gets uncomfortable immediately, so we change her diaper like 10 times an hour :p She has been able to hold her head up since day 1, and she's pretty strong in general. She loves baths to put her to sleep, which is appropriate since she was born in the bath.

Minnow is a total chatterbox, but she's extremely articulate, and her conceptual understanding constantly surprises us :) She's currently interested in how bees make honey and spread pollen, and how crabs have pincers. She loves doting on her little sister (she still doesn't display any jealousy toward Storey), and she's currently enjoying reading (especially Winnie the Pooh, Caillou, the Mole Sisters, and various others), sledding, ice skating (mostly slipping around on the ice) and going to the indoor pool with Papa.











We recently cut her video-watching time to 1 hour a day because it was getting a little out of hand, and to our surprise, she actually responded very well. I think even she was tired of watching so many videos. She did get hooked on nature documentaries at the dentist's office, however,--especially ones about ocean life--so she uses some of her video time watching David Attenborough videos :3

We made sure to spend more time playing with her, to replace her video time, and she's thriving. She doesn't even use up her whole hour now, usually. Some of her favorite toys include dollhouses, like her magnetic dollhouse and Caillou's treehouse, play-dough, her toy tool set, especially the hammer, her train set, and her rubber duckies and and stuffed animals, which she loves to nurture and put to bed. She alsi likes to help out around the house--washing dishes, cooking, vacuuming, and "going laundry picking."

We went to the snow festival this past weekend, and she enjoyed bouncing on the inflatable jumpy toys, being pulled in a sled with her friend Jilly, the slides that ended with a run of slippery ice, and drinking hot cocoa.

Minnow has also just started drawing actual pictures instead of manic scribbles (coinciding with the reduction in videos, hmmm). Here is a sample of one of her favorite subjects, the Mole Sisters:

The first page is her trying to figure out how to orient the mole sisters

A mole sister just hangin' out


 This one is a mole sister with a pot of honey
And more recently. she has graduated to adding garish clothes to the mole sisters. She has a lot of fun scribbling on a mass of color for the clothing. Our markers never last long :p 


So now here's a whole slew of pictures. Enjoy!