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.
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.
