A few more pics

Happy Halloween!

We had a great time yesterday. As you can see, Erin was a little hesitant to put on the costume, but ended up tolerating it just fine. She even put on the hat for a short time, before letting us have a chance to wear it. Muggy and Paul were in town, so we met Laura over at Jan and Dean's for a great Halloween dinner. We only ventured to a few houses for trick-or-treating and Erin was a good sport and roared for everyone when asked. The costume was great and we may get another year of use out of it. She did enjoy getting a bite of candy and eagerly asked for "more, more" of the peanut butter cup. She's got good taste.


Now we are frantically trying to pack, clean, and organize before we leave. To throw a curve ball at us today, Oscar ate through the door to the bathroom cupboard. He's been on a diet and also on steroids for the last week and we're not sure if something pushed him over the edge tonight, but it's the most destructive that he's been in his 9.5 years with us. Yikes. Laura and Tom have graciously offered to take both dogs while we are gone and we'll have to be sure to send Oscar's kennel over with him.

As always, wish us luck for the plane ride, I'm just thrilled that I'll have Matt along this time.

PS. Thanks for the photos Laura

Roar

We have eagerly been awaiting Halloween. We've had Erin's costume for a few weeks, but she's been refusing to wear it at since we got it. That it, until yesterday. After her bath, I convinced her to try it on. I figure that getting her to wear the body wouldn't be a huge fight since it's just like pajamas with a tail. The head is a little more involved. In any case, she agreed to wear the head. Imagine a scrawny, pale little girl with a huge lion head on... it was awesome. She didn't want to take it off and we only got it off with promises that we would wear it again in the morning. This morning, I walk into her room and the first words out of her mouth are "more roar." So funny.

We've had a busy week trying to get some house projects checked off the list and get ready for our trip next week. Erin has had fun sweeping, vacuuming, washing and folding laundry. She even helps set the table and loves to take the napkins and the cups (plastic) to the table. How helpful.


Today we headed out into the pouring rain to tour some childcare options. We saw two centers that are pretty close to our house. One is Spanish immersion, has a great curriculum, feeds the kids fresh, organic meals prepared on site daily, uses cloth diapers and is just all around awesome. The other is fine. It is a quarter mile from our house, and is fine. Matt compared the first to paradise and the other to a prison camp. It's really not like that and Matt was just being a little dramatic. The problem is that the one we like is only open from 7:30-5:15. While this might work in the real world where people have grownup jobs and work normal hours, we're having trouble trying to figure out how we could make that work. We're supposed to see a few more next week and try to figure this whole thing out. Jan and Dean will still take care of Erin until she's close to 2, so we've got some time, but it would be really nice to have it settled.

Cold feet

It seems that the only time we can get a picture of Erin that is in focus is when she's sleeping. Otherwise it's just a blur. She's running around and we're lucky if she's actually in the frame. Either we need a new camera or we need to drug her. Hmm... we'll have to think about it.

We're having a tough time with keeping Erin warm at night. She won't keep blankets on herself and she's outgrown all of her sleep sacks. Usually she's in a pair of pajamas and then has a sleeper on top. We were out of sleepers last night, so I figured she might keep socks on if we put robeez on too. You can see how well it worked. One shoe on and one shoe off. At least it doesn't seem to bother her. She also loves these pajamas because she'll tell you the ghost says "boo." She woke up this morning and all we heard was "boo, boo," then giggles. It's good to find yourself funny.

Snow and 17 months

I shouldn't be surprised since we're living in Minnesota, but it does seem a little early for snow. But, alas, winter appears to be well on it's way. We've now woken up to snow 2 mornings in the last week. It not terribly cold yet, but it's such a shock to the system and it's making it tough to want to be outside much. Plus Erin is refusing mittens, blankets in the stroller and often times the hat goes as well. It might be a chilly winter for her.

Otherwise Erin is doing great. She's getting better and better every day with one nap. Evenings are still a struggle and out bedtime routine is often accompanied by lots of tears. Tonight sitting in the bath sent her into hysterics and it was just downhill from there. Strangely enough, even when she is upset she doesn't really fight anything, she's just unhappy. We've found that the song that will temporarily calm her lately is the "abc" song. She loves it and will stop crying to here me sing it. Silly girl.

She's learning new words and sounds on a regular basis now. She now knows that the ghost says "boo" and the wolf says "howl." Her favorite new word is "go" and she loves to repeat it endlessly whenever she hears it in conversation. I'm not sure that she knows what it means and can't use it herself yet, but I'm sure it's coming. She's stringing more words together and will often say "night- night Duncan," or "bye-bye Dada."

At home she's quiet excited about playing with her tea set at her little table. She loves to have people sit with her and have them drink from the cups. She also gets a thrill out of chasing Duncan around the house with her stroller, kissing him and hugging him. Poor Duncan. He loves the attention, but we have to put him in his kennel to get a break from her because he gets really stressed being chased by a maniac with a little pink stroller. Man, I'm never gonna let this kid drive, she's going to be a terror. She also gets a kick out of sitting on Oscar. Man he is one patient dog. Between Erin and Duncan, I think that his golden years are shot.


Other than the trouble at bedtime, testing the limits and some short lived tantrums, Erin is still a really easy kid. We had dinner with a bunch of friends from Grinnell last night. There were 3 other toddler there, all born within 6 weeks of each other. It was interesting to see the differences in temperament and I was reminded repeatedly about what a mild tempered child Erin is. I certainly agree, but part of me is just waiting for the other shoe to drop.


Erin has had some great times in her highchair lately. She is very into feeding herself and always wants a spoon to feed herself with. This is getting very messy, with lots of yogurt mustaches and beards. The messiest, however, was the couscous. She managed to fling it everywhere. The dogs loved it, but I found couscous between her toes, in her ears and all over the house for days. I think that we'll stick to bigger pasta for a while. She's also gotten very interested in the newspaper. She loves to grab a section to read while Matt and I read. Today she was very taken by a picture of a man skiing and carried that section of the newspaper around the house all morning.

As you can tell from the pictures, Erin is starting to ham it up for photos. She'll look blankly at the camera unless you say "laugh Erin," and then this crazy smile is what you get. She's also developing quite the social laugh. If the adults are laughing about something, Erin chimes in and laughs so hard, totally oblivious to what is funny. It's hysterical.


We're starting to get excited about Halloween. Mom was nice enough to make Erin a fantastic lion costume. We got it in the mail this week. She's a little reluctant to wear it, but we're working on it. Just as a sneak peak, here's Erin in the hat. Thank you so much Mom.

I think that's about it. Matt and I are counting down the days until vacation starts next week. I've got 4 more days of clinic and 3 day of back-up call (cross your fingers I don't get called in) and Matt works for the next 6 days. But then it will be sweet vacation. We're planning to fly out to Portland, see everyone out there and then head out to Hawaii sans Erin for a week. I can't wait.

Apple orchard

Matt and I got the chance to take Erin to an apple orchard this weekend. Since we're cutting back to one nap a day, we're trying to keep her really active and out of the house in the morning. It's working OK, but mornings are still pretty rough. So, we felt pretty brave to drive all the way to the orchard yesterday morning, but she did great. She thought it was tons of fun to pull the apples off of the tree. She liked the hay ride and loved seeing the animals at the petting zoo. She didn't want to touch them, but squealed and laughed when they came near her. We topped the day off with a nap (for me and Erin) and some home made apple pie. Good stuff.

16 months

I guess that it's good that our extreme lack of posts for a good chunk of the summer wasn't all due to laziness. Unfortunately it was mostly because we were too busy to stop and reflect on life and it was mostly just me and Matt putting our heads down and plodding forward. Things have finally eased up a bit and we've gotten to enjoy a few afternoon outings this week. Thank goodness for a little down time.It occurred to us at the beginning of the summer that we might be leaving Minneapolis in June 2011. While that seems like a long ways off, the thought of selling the house in its present condition was terrifying so we have set forth to tackle some long due projects. Matt already posted pictures of the kitchen, which was a huge ordeal and is still not totally done. Next Dean and Matt are working on tiling the entry ways to each unit. They've done a great job and just need to grout the tile and then we'll get to cross that one of the list. It's been tough to get these projects done in a timely fashion while juggling working all the time and taking care of Erin. I guess this is why we started so far in advance. Slow and steady....

Erin is 16 months now and will be 17 months in just over a week. Man she is becoming more and more opinionated and willful. And while it's wonderful to see her personality develop, the testing of limits and the tearful meltdowns are trying. To confound the situation, she's in the transition from 2 to 1 nap and it's getting ugly. We can no longer get her to take 2 naps, but she is truly tired in the morning and has a tough time making it until midday to sleep. But now even with the 1 nap, she's only sleeping for an hour or so. Clearly this is not enough for her and she has near constant meltdowns in the late afternoon. We're doing our best to compensate by a really early bedtime, but this is wearing on all of us. I'm hoping that we settle into some kind of routine again soon.

Erin's vocabulary is growing. She now has about 25 words and a half dozen animal noises. Her latest word is "bottom" or in Erin-speak "bomb0." She also says button, buckle, bubble and a few other words that seem less useful than milk or book, but it's hard to reason with her. She jabbers constantly and loves to talk about her favorite people and is starting to string 2 words together. She now says "bye-bye Dada," "night-night mama," and "Mama all gone." She loves to pretend to talk on the telephone and will even hold the phone next to Duncan's head to give him a turn.

We took her in the bike trailer today and she did great. She didn't melt down until we were close to home. We only made it for about 2 miles and had a break in the middle, but this is a significant improvement from before. We also took her to play tennis the other day. She squealed as she chased the balls around the court while Matt and I hit a few balls. She loved it and hopefully we'll get a few more chances to go out and play before it gets too cold.


We got Erin a potty chair recently. I know that it's way too early to start training her, but I thought that we could have it around and start talking more about it. Over the weekend she discovered that she could get a raspberry if she sat on it and she had fun running back and forth from the fridge to the chair. She's also found it to be a great place to hide treasures. This afternoon I found her bubbles, her pull-along doggy and a book in it.


Erin's in love with her belly button. She likes to grab it and say button, she likes to look for other people's buttons and she likes to poke and grab it when she happy and laughing. This explains why we have so many pictures of her grabbing herself. Tons of fun. She's also trying her hand at climbing, although she still doesn't do much of it.