Rambling

This is going to be more of a journal entry than most – notes so I can document what’s going on in every-day life should I care to read it later.

I'm tired more mornings than most lately. We’ve had our share of stress and smiles lately at home and there’s no end in sight….

Vacation got changed a bit lately which was frustrating because of the hours and hours I put in researching accommodations and locations- all of which now is moot. Still waiting for some outstanding information before we can finalize plans. We’re all still going, that’s the good news.

Nicole has been singing more lately, especially when we put her to bed and turn off the lights. I sat outside her room the other night and listened to “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” about 6X through. She can’t pronounce all the words but she “uh uh”’s the right amount of syllables to fill in things like “the world so” and then concludes with a clear “high”. It’s really really cute. She was up singing until 9:05 last night (went down at 8:30 like normal).

Other thing she’s really into – pulling all of her bed items (2 blankets, 6 animals, 1 Curious George book) out, surrounding herself on the floor with them and laughing hysterically. We’re not sure what’s so fabulous about having your bed friends out of bed, but it never ceases to make her outright giddy.

In my toddler 1/week newsletter I get via email it gave a chart of what kids should and might be able to do in the months ahead. She can already do some of the things that are 24 month “shoulds” like name body parts, make 2-3 word sentences, etc. but can’t yet put on clothing (a “might” for 22 months). She does understand some non-physical concepts like “sorry”, “ready”, and “here” and “now” and uses those words correctly in everyday speech. Thanks to Sarah's zoo book she knows roughly 20 animals by sight now (walrus, penguin, lizard) and can say most of them like rhino, lion, frog, etc. too (though flamingo is still "pink bird").

Yesterday at daycare the sorries came out more than a few times as she bit another kid not once but twice. She was put on the time-out step after they explained why & she cried the whole time she sat. When I came at lunch to visit Marsha told me what happened and I sat her down and firmly explained that teeth are for food only. There’s no doubt she understood that – she burst into big tears as soon as I said the word “bite”.

Jim’s been spending hours drawing deck plans so that we can submit them to the county for approval. At Home Depot we’ve designed and refined the plans in their software system. More than one associate knows him and our plans now and when he comes they say “oh, you have the nice deck”. In fact, our plan is called “nice deck” in their system. We’re investigating hiring part of the building process out because of the ledger board primarily – hopefully we’ll know more by the end of the week on this front.

We bought a new Dell and sold our old one for about a third of the cost of the new. We still have to buy a monitor though (sold the old one with the computer) so as of yesterday we can't actually use our new toy...

We’re not going to NYC anymore but are going to do a popular “staycation” instead.

I think our bed is finally broken in – I'm more and more comfortable in it than ever before and don’t like to leave it if I don’t have to. :)