We had a good day. We had considered going out and doing something, like we did for Meredith’s first, but the weather wasn’t very nice and Fiona seemed very content to play outside, so we stayed home and did some gardening and worked on our future chicken coop. We didn’t end up getting back inside until almost 5pm, at which point I realized I hadn’t even started on the cake I was going to make for her. So I just went to Thrifty’s and bought one there, which none of us really ate. Funny how different those things taste now that we’re all so used to homemade! It did make for some good pictures though. Here are some highlights from our day.

An impromptu hug after Fiona unwrapped the ball Meredith picked out for her.

Swinging outside

A newt we found in the garden.

The chicks checking out their future coop.

Cake! Originally I was on the other side to take pictures, hence the backward candle.

Nom nom nom.

Homemade coconut milk vanilla bean ice cream

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Moving went off pretty uneventfully. We got everything into the truck, to the new place, and unloaded in about 5 hours. Meredith had no problem watching all her stuff being packed up and moved into the truck. In fact, she was even helping.

Now that we’re here, everyone seems to be adjusting well. The cats took a day or two to get comfortable, with Sebastian taking a little longer than Casper. He’s spent the last week or so exploring to see just how high up he can get. The kitchen cupboards seem to have won out. We are watching a friend’s dog for the holidays, and she is obsessed with Casper for some reason, but is pretty good about stopping when we catch her.

So far, Meredith is taking everything pretty well. She asks about her friends back at the co-op a lot, but so far hasn’t been upset when we’ve told her we can’t just go and see them whenever we want anymore. She has asked when they will come visit us. She really seems to love this new house though. She loves that her room has a little play area, and she loves the trampoline.

We went to a Solstice celebration with some local home schoolers. It was neat to meet them and put faces to names that I so far have only chatted with online. Part of the celebration was singing songs and adding lanterns to a spiral nearby.

Celebrating the Solstice is something I want to spend more effort doing with the kids in the future. In fact, I’d like to make some changes to the way we celebrate the holidays in general. I’d rather it not be so much about one day of presents that’s over faster than it came. I love ideas I’ve read on other blogs this year about stretching it out (either 12 days of Christmas or advent), starting some new traditions, inviting the kids to participate more in choosing and making gifts for others, etc. This Christmas I made Amazon wish lists for the girls, and most of our family did follow it. Meaning we got a lot of useful things we will actually use (an art easel, books, some indoor physical play toys, etc.) We also got some beautiful handmade gifts which I always love.

Christmas morning Fiona started taking a lot more steps. Still only one at a time but she was doing it frequently. Yesterday she started taking more than one at a time.

Here are some more holiday pictures:

Decorating the tree. All the ornaments Meredith put up ended up in the same spot.

Christmas Eve presents

Opening stockings Christmas morning

Some Christmas day shots:

Playing Pretty Pretty Princess, a game we used to love as kids. It was a bit of an inside joke in my family because my dad often won (and we have pictures to prove it!). He bought it for us and addressed it to Kris and I with a note to “have fun”.

Our main gift to Meredith was supposed to be a puppet theatre with puppets (inspired by Sarah). Meredith loves puppets, so when I saw Sarah’s post I knew it was perfect for her. Unfortunately, the cloth I bought for the actual theatre is packed and we don’t know where. We found all the puppets we had bought (some nice soft ones for Fiona and some wooden ones for Meredith), so we had fun anyway. Here is Kris showing Meredith how they work.

We also did lots of house maintenance, exploring, swinging, gardening, walking, driving, planning, and so much more. I hope everyone reading had as good a time as we did.

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More Wordless Wednesdays at Hobo Mama, Natural Parenting Network, and Simple Whimsy.

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We took this video the other day and I thought it was a sweet look at the kind of big sister Meredith often is. Even though we had mentioned Fiona doesn’t need help, Meredith wanted to be right there to catch her and help her. She does this on the stairs too, standing behind her ready to catch if she falls. I wish I hadn’t been so quick to turn the camera off, because Meredith helped her back up and got her hands back on the chair.

Fiona and Meredith

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Fiona has been getting up on her hands and knees and rocking since she was about five months old. She’s been creeping along on her belly and rolling around to get places since about that time. Last night, she figured out the crawling thing.

Nothing is safe anymore! She is having a ball crawling around. She crawls in a sort of half-scoot sort of way. Meredith always crawled in the “normal” hands and knees crawl, so it’s pretty cute to see Fiona’s way.

See how her left leg is bent under her? That’s actually how she has been crawling. She gets up on her right knee or foot, but with her left leg she just kind of pushes herself with the leg down. Her arm movements are very exaggerated still. She lifts each arm way up and out to move along. (Though today she’s also been getting up on both feet and crawling in a more monkey-like way too.)

I am loving each new stage all over again, though it sure seems to be going faster with Fiona. Didn’t I just give birth yesterday?

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Fiona is already over three months old. Unbelievable! She’s growing so fast and definitely not my tiny, squishy newborn any more. Now she’s my tiny, squishy baby. She’s very chatty, much more so than I remember Meredith being, though it’s hard to remember so long ago. She’s starting to be able to roll over fairly consistently on soft, flat surfaces, and occasionally on hard surfaces as well. She can sometimes balance a little bit to sit unassisted for very short periods too. She reaches for things and will play with toys. She already seems to adore Meredith, and smiles and reaches for her. Unfortunately, often she ends up with a hand full of hair. So far Meredith has been really understanding, and will normally just tell her “No grab my hair, Nona!” and pull her hair out. (Meredith calls her Nona or Nenona or sometimes Kiona. She can’t pronounce “f” yet.)

Meredith still seems to be doing well with Fiona, though she is going through a bit of a difficult (for us) phase right now. She seems to be much more sensitive to things like being hungry or tired, and as a result has a lot more tantrums. (I don’t love the word tantrums because it has such bad connotations, but I’m not sure how else to describe them in a way that’s obvious what I mean. I feel very similar to this author about tantrums and what causes them though.) And now when she has tantrums, she will often scream when we’re trying to talk to her or help her, and if we come near sometimes she will hit at us (though she hasn’t actually hit us yet) and scream at us to go away. It makes it especially difficult, because often when she’s really upset, all I want to do is hold her in my arms. Once she’s feeling better, she will usually let me hold her and I try to talk with her about how she’s feeling and why she’s feeling that way. Thankfully, so far she hasn’t taken any anger out on Fiona or the animals, though if Sorcha or Sebastian come over to see what’s wrong sometimes she will tell them to go away too. She hasn’t yelled at the kitten at all yet. These more intense tantrums are a pretty new development just in the last couple of weeks. We try and explain to her that it’s hard to help her when she’s screaming and we don’t know what she wants, and I’m hoping this phase is short-lived.

I’ve discovered too just in the past couple of days, that if we go out earlier and get home before 2 or 3, she seems to do a lot better. If we’re out around 2:30, she will often start getting upset over things that normally wouldn’t upset her, and is often inconsolable. If we’re home, that’s the time that she wants to do something quiet, like reading a book, cuddling and watching a movie, or even just playing alone in her sand box. So I’m going to make an effort to do things earlier in the day so that we can be home and have some quiet time in the afternoon.

Of course, most of the time, she’s still very sweet and I just love watching her imagination starting to take off (she’s making me all sorts of different foods and juices in her play kitchen as I type this ) and continuing to discover the world and learn and grow. We recently repeated the toddler science experiment we did last spring, and it was once again a big hit with the kids.

A lot of people tell me how much Fiona looks like Meredith. I don’t really see it. To me, Meredith looks more like Kris and Fiona looks more like me. But I’m bad at seeing those things anyway. I found a picture of Meredith around the same age Fiona is now. Fiona definitely has more hair. I thought Meredith had a lot too but hers was lighter so not as noticeable, but looking at the pictures there’s a difference in the amount too.

Fiona around 3 months

Meredith around 3 months

Lastly, our kitten is really awesome and I think he was a really good choice for us. He’s fun and friendly and loves to come cuddle on our laps. Meredith can be a little too much for him sometimes, but then five minutes later he will be following her around looking for attention. I hope he stays so friendly and social as he grows.

I have lots more to write about and some things bouncing around my head I’d like to say. We’ll see if I actually get to them or not. I’d like to start posting more regularly again. I see this blog as somewhat of a journal for myself to look back on. I want to be able to come and have a timeline of when we did things, and what’s going on in our lives at any given time. But I don’t want to spend so much time on the computer that I miss my girls’ real lives either.

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Meredith has been needing her bangs cut for a while. I’ve been hesitant to do anything about them. For one, because I didn’t want to do it myself, but I don’t think she’d sit still while a stranger came at her face with scissors. Also, for a while at least, I think it was bothering me more than it was bothering her. But it got to the point that they were obviously bothering her, and we needed to do something about it. She won’t let us clip them back even. Luckily, a good friend offered to cut them for me. Since Meredith knows her, we figured she might actually sit still for it too.

She wasn't so sure about the cutting though!

After the cutting started, Meredith started squirming away a bit and turning her head, so it ended up having to be a quick job. I am really happy with it though and think it looks much better and more comfortable than having her bangs in her face. I don’t have any good after shots of her yet with her looking straight at the camera. This is the best I could find.

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Meredith is 18 months old today, so I wanted to write a post all about her and what she’s been doing and saying recently. I realize for people who have never met us this may not be of much interest, it’s more for myself to look back on and for friends and family who live far away (Hi Alice!).

One of the questions we get asked a lot is how many words she is saying. My answer is, I have no idea. Do people actually count all their kid’s words? I thought of writing down all the words she says because it would be interesting to come back in a couple of years and see what she says, but I know I’d forget some. So, suffice it to say that she has been talking a lot recently. However, I am going to list a few of the ones she says a lot or I might like to remember about in the future.

My dad was here for a week and by the end of it she was calling him Grandad (“Ganda” or “Nanda” is how it sounded). She loves to say “no”, sometimes repeating it several times or else just saying it once very emphatically. She doesn’t say yes yet (though occasionally she’s said “yeah”) but she does nod her head. “More” is another favorite, and she’s started stringing that one together with other words, either spoken or signed. She said “more cookie” to me the other day when we were eating cookies, and often signs things like “more water”, “more food”, “more nurse”, etc. We got a fish tank at Christmas time, and she’s learned the sign for fish and loves to watch Finding Nemo. She will often bring me the controller and start signing fish and pointing to the TV even if we’re watching another movie at the time. We need to find other fish movies, Finding Nemo is getting old lol! She likes to yell our dog’s name while patting her leg, or yell “kitty!” for the cat, again while patting her leg.

She says “nigh nigh” now most nights when we’re heading to bed, and “love oo” (which melts my heart, of course). She started saying “sock” the other day, but it comes out sounding like “cock”, haha. One of her first words was “thank you”, which she mostly says when she gives things to someone, rather than the other way around. She also says “there it is” (most like one word though) when playing peek a boo with objects.

Her favorite toys right now are both wooden Plan toys. The Hammer Balls and the veggie set that has velcro veggies to cut apart. I’d love to get her the fruit one too. She also enjoys shape toys and any toy that involves putting rings on sticks. She has two dolls that she loves to cart around too. She loves to jump on beds and tables, stick stickers on things, and colour. A friend lives in our co-op who has a two-year-old boy and him and Meredith get along really well (most of the time, they are both two though!). They hug a lot, which is adorable, though other times the little boy doesn’t want to be touched. She loves to mimic him and often their games involve him doing things that she copies. They run around after each other and play peek-a-boo around his fish tank. It’s really sweet to watch them.

She loves to help out. If she sees me get out the broom she wants to hold the dustpan and is quite good at balancing it over to the garbage and dumping the contents out. She likes to help stir when we’re cooking and is very careful around hot things. She will take a scrubby and help wash dishes. She also likes to pick out socks. She can match colours, though not exact socks.

As far as EC goes, some days I think she will be potty trained in no time (like the other day when she went and got her potty with no prompting from me, sat in it, and pood and peed), but other days (most days) I realize we still have a ways to go. I’m okay with that though. She’s still young and we didn’t do EC for early potty training, we did it for self-awareness and communication. But it would be nice not to have to worry about diapers anymore.

She still only has seven teeth. The last time one popped through was at the beginning of November. I have friends with kids the same age who are getting molars already! She still nurses more than she eats solids, though she has been nursing less through the night. In fact, at night she often will pop off still partly awake and fall asleep on her own. Last night was the first time ever she fell asleep at night without either nursing or walking. I was lying down trying to nurse her, but she has a cold and was having a really hard time breathing while nursing and so she did nurse a little bit but ended up mostly giving up and just fell asleep on her own. She was also really tired though as she woke up from her nap after only 5 or 10 minutes and never did get back to sleep.

Of course, regardless of any of the above, we love her so much. She is such a little ham and so sweet. She definitely has a mind of her own and can be as stubborn as Kris or I, but I love that about her too. Part of me just wants to bottle her up as she is and never have her grow older, but in reality I am looking forward to watching her grow and learn and explore.

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Meredith has been enjoying helping to dress herself for a while now.  I kind of wish I’d taken more notice on when it started, not that it matters but I like to write things like that down in her baby book.  Probably before she turned a year, but getting so much more lately.  She will go and find her shoes and then hold them to her feet or hand them to me to help her put them on.  She lifts up her feet one at a time as I put them on.  She will bring me pants too, and will stand and lift her legs one at a time while I slip them on.  She also knows to put her arms through arm holes in shirts.  A couple of weeks ago, I started to put a shirt on her and she cried and pulled at it.  I took it off again, and she went and found a different shirt and handed it to me and quite happily let me put that one on.  She’s already picking out her own clothes!  She is showing some independence here too, as she sometimes doesn’t appreciate our help.  She spent about 20 minutes one morning with a pair of socks, examining them, finding the hole, trying to slip them on her feet.  She almost got one on, and I reached over to slip the last little edge around, and she yanked her foot and the sock away from me and started all over again.  Silly me!

She’s signalling more when she needs to go pee, but still definitely not consistently.  She wears the ecaPants we got around the house mostly now, but I still put her in diapers, or at least a wool cover/longies, when we go out.  However, she has learned a signal for when her diaper is wet, which is patting her hip, and is getting pretty consistent with that.  We just started patting our hips this past week when we asked her if she needed her diaper changed, and she’s caught on really quickly.  She obviously knows when her diaper is wet/dirty, so I’m hoping that will extend to her doing it before she needs to go too.

Speaking of signs, she made up her own sign.  I still haven’t quite figured out what it means.  At first I thought maybe it was her own sign for milk, even though she’s been using the ASL sign for it since she was about 6 months old.  But I think maybe it means “more” now.  Mostly she uses it when she’s nursing or wants to nurse, but she wants to play with the other breast while she’s nursing.  But she did do it once on the swing when I asked her if she wanted to swing some more.  What she does is tap her index finger into the open palm of her other hand.  I feel kind of bad that I don’t know exactly what she means by it, but I may never know.  At least I’m aware she has a sign that means she needs something, and can respond.  I’ve been trying to sign a lot to her.  We have a deaf cousin, so I’d like her to learn sign language at least enough to be able to communicate, since I’m close to my cousins and we see them a few times a year.  I’m trying to get Kris to learn some signs to do with her too, but I know it’s hard to remember to do them.  I think once she catches on, she will probably learn them pretty quickly.

Two signs she has learned in the past couple of weeks that she uses a lot now are shaking her head for no and nodding for yes.  I think though that sometimes she shakes her head no when she means yes still.  But it’s really handy to be able to ask her something and have her tell me for sure yes or no!  I think at first she shook her head (or bobbled it really) because she thought it was funny, but she caught on pretty quick that she could communicate by doing so too. 

She has discovered the park in our complex, and has fallen in love with it.  She will go get shoes/pants and then head to the door and stand waiting patiently (or not so patiently at times ) for us to get our own shoes on and follow her there.  Sometimes we go out the back way, and there is a forest behind our house with tons of blackberry bushes.  As we walk to the park, she wants to stop and pick blackberries.  Lately she doesn’t want us to pick one for her, she wants to do it herself.  She will grab on to one and squeeze as she pulls, which usually results in the berry bursting and purple juice flying everywhere.  I’m not sure any of us own clothes anymore that aren’t stained purple.

Another really cute thing she’s taken to doing lately is sitting on the bottom step.  She will take a sock, or a sippy cup, paper, a toy, really anything she’s semi-interested in, and toddle to the stairs, and plop herself down on the bottom one or the second from bottom.  And then just sit and play.  I think maybe they are the perfect height for her to sit comfortably right now?  I actually set up table and chairs that my mom had bought for her.  They say they’re for three and up, but I don’t listen well.  She can get up on the chairs herself but I think they’re still a little tall, but the chair itself is small enough that she sometimes finds it hard to get herself positioned comfortably.  The stairs are much shorter but there’s lots of room for her to sit.

We bought her crayons for her birthday.  At first they were just yummy food, but she will colour with them now.  She doesn’t have a ton of interest in them yet, but she’ll sit for a few minutes and scribble.  She also loves the little keyboard that used to be my grandfather’s (though she sits on it to play it) and the bigger keyboard that was my uncle’s (which she actually uses with her hands).  She will go to one or the other and point and yell until we turn it on for her.  I’m trying to show her how to do that herself, but she hasn’t quite caught on to the smaller one (it’s a sliding button), and the bigger one she can turn off but can’t quite push hard enough to get it on yet.  We have noticed since she was quite young that she seems very aware of music and seems to enjoy it.  She loves to dance and occasionally even sings a bit.  She seems to actually sing/dance with the beats for the most part too.

Lastly, she is teething big time.  Remember a couple of months ago when I said she’d cut a second tooth?  I lied.  That tooth came through a bit, but then disappeared.  I don’t know if the tooth actually goes backward, or if it stops coming and the gums end up growing back over, or what.  As a biologist (at heart at least), I really can’t quite wrap my brain around why that would happen physiologically, but anyway.  She had one tooth for a long time, then suddenly she has 5 teeth coming in.  That bottom one I thought was through is still coming through, and the four top front teeth.  The two on the sides at the top are the furthest through, with one having already cut through.  I’m thinking this amber teething necklace we got has to be doing something now, because though she’s had some very fussy nights/days, except for one instance none of them have been anything as intense as the first tooth coming through, and that was only one tooth.

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It also means that instead of crawling around to get toys she wants, she sits (or stands) wherever she is and points at what she wants and yells. I’m a big believer in allowing her to play without interference from me. I am there if she needs me or seems to want me to join in, but most of the time I am reading, or doing dishes, or whatnot, and she is doing her own thing nearby. But I am needing to be there for her much more recently, to help her get to where she wants to go. I don’t jump up and go running at the first peep though. If she drops a toy or something quite close to her and wants me to get it, I might say something like: “Oops, you dropped that block. I bet you can reach over and grab it pretty easily” first. I don’t let her get to the point that she’s really frustrated or upset, but often just pausing and saying something like that is enough that she will grab it on her own quite happily. And if not, I don’t mind doing it for her. I know her intention is not to be lazy or bossy.

I think she may be teething again, which of course might have something to do with her wanting us to do more for her recently.

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