Saturday

My little forest nymph...



and the picture that took a pretzel to get Morgan into position...

Happy 6 month Birthday!!! ( I know, we are all surprised!)

(...including Miss Lily)

Somehow Lily managed to sneak her 6 month birthday on us today. I can't believe it. In fact I can't believe it so much that a tiny crazy hormonal part of me wants another baby. Of course this is never going to happen, so don't worry. This age seems to be the turning point for a lot of developmental changes. She is a squirmy wormy baby. She wants to get into everything her brother is in. She used to hate being put on her tummy and now that is the only place she wants to be. I am somewhat convinced she might skip crawling and start walking first. She is ready to go! She has been severely cranky this week because she is teething. She also has been getting really fussy when she is not where she wants to be or isn't seeing what she wants to see or when she isn't playing with what she wants or...well, anything that is not on her agenda she will let you know by screaming bloody murder and then once she gets it everything is fine. Like nothing happened. Sometimes it scares me because she sounds like something is hurting her or there is something seriously wrong. Morgan never screamed the way she does. She screams so hard she turns purple, I kid you not! I have a feeling we are in for some fun with her. :)

Today also means we are embarking once again on the soft food adventure. In preparation last week I started Morgan out on his booster seat at the table (which he loves) and deep cleaned the highchair so it is all ready for Lily. Today I got out the food processor and made some peas and tonight we are going to give it a whirl with her and see what she thinks. We will post a video later.

I have to also include a couple cute sibling stories too...

This morning when we were all cuddling in bed Morgan grabbed Lily's hand and made it wave and he kept saying "Bye! Bye!". Not sure if he was hinting at she needs to leave or the fact Steve was getting ready to go to work. He also held her hands and made them clap. So cute!

During one of Lily's major freakouts I left her in the living room for a few minutes so that I could get a second to rest and Morgan followed me in the bedroom and shut the door. You could tell he was agitated from all the crying too. Poor guy.

This afternoon, I put Lily in her crib upstairs and Morgan pushed one of our stools up to the crib and he grabbed a puppet and did a puppet show for her along side of the crib rail. It was freaking adorable. Wow. I wish I had the video camera to catch it. Oh well, I am sure there will be lots more to come.

Mini-Haircut...

Monday morning I couldn't take one more minute of Morgan's hair in his eyes so I set him up on a chair in the bathroom, handed over a coveted toy he doesn't get to play with much and then busted out the scissors. He was extremely well behaved and I cut his bangs just as a friend suggested and I think they came out not half bad! My only problem is once I get going I can't stop. It reminded me of the time I reallly really wanted a Bonsai tree and Steve finally got me one for Christmas many years ago. I then spent two hours cutting this poor little tree to almost nothing and it later died. =D

In this case I managed to hold back and stopped myself almost just in time of over doing it. My main goal was to get it out of his eyes without it looking like a straight cut across his face. I wanted it to look natural.

This was the only picture I could get of it. He was having a serious discussion on the Giraffe phone at the time...

"Ooh Jealousy"

I have had Natalie Merchant's song 'Jealousy' stuck in my brain for a couple days due to Morgan's new found feelings of what is his is his and what is anybody elses is his too! Phew...

Poor little guy is extremely jealous of Lily. If we dare give Lily any of his toys to look at he runs up and tries to take it away from her. This behavior is even more distinct if we try to read to Lily or show her a book. We encourage him to share with her or join in on the reading time and when he does we highly praise him for it. I don't think being negative about this right now will do much good, in fact I think it will escalate problems so we are going to take it easy for now until his verbal communication skills grow.

This morning the most adorable little sequence of events occured while we were all cuddling in bed after Steve left for work. I had them both lined up on the pillows with the covers over all of us and Lily's binky fell out.  She looked at Morgan and saw he had one of her binkies (only because we couldn't find his) and so she reached over and snatched it out of his mouth and put it in hers. This is probably the worst thing you could do to Morgan first thing in the morning. He is unfortunately very attached to the binky at this point. Amazingly all he did was furrow his eyebrows, reach over to Lily and grab it back out of her mouth and plopped it right back into his. Lily looked back at him without missing a beat and snatched it right back. Let this scenario repeat about 2 more times and then I felt bad so I found her lost binky and gave it to her. After they both had their binkies and everything was right in the world again, well as right as it can be for a toddler with a baby sister, Morgan reached over and patted her hand and she grabbed it and studied it just like she does ours. Morgan was so sweet and let her examine it thoroughly until she was done, they even held hands for a bit. I hope these are the sweet innocent moments I remember later in life. I cherish them so much when I am privileged to witness them right before my very eyes.

For the most part Lily seems to be like one of the dogs that Morgan occasionally pays attention to during his self absorbed playing. He will go up to her, pat her on the head and if she cries he will try to give her a binky or find a bottle and try to give it to her too. (Oh my melting heart..) It's just been the past week that he really has started acknowledging her as an actual person and not just any person, but one that he has to compete for attention with and protect his toys from. Of course like in my story above there is also this very tender side where he will come up and offer his toys to her or even kiss her on her mouth or hug her or...yeah.

I would say a good 90% of Lily's day is spent watching Morgan. He is free live-in entertainment for her. If he is in the room that is all she cares about. It is so funny. She gets so excited when he runs around screeching and chattering. Today Lily laughed out loud at something he did and he saw her laugh and it made him laugh right back at her.

I guess this is just the beginning. If I start to think too far ahead I start to panic a little. Soon she will be walking and talking and they will be sharing their childhood with one another which inlcudes fighting, sharing, love, discipline, etc. It's very hard to wrap my head around all of it and wonder how am I going to handle this huge responsibility to ensure that later in life they will be friends and close siblings and not alienated from one another. Ugh. This is when I remind myself to stick with the present and trust that everything will work out.

On a different note, have I mentioned I am in love with the upstairs?! Every day is filled with so much fun now. If Morgan had his way we would never go downstairs for anything! I feel incredibly thankful and blessed for my amazing family and home.

Randomness...

Eskimo Kiss

"Look what I can do!"

Love

Going to the Zoo, zoo, ZOO!

I think I adjusted it so you don't have to have an account to comment. If one of you want to try and let me know if it works that would be great!

Saturday we took Morgan and Lily to Woodland Park Zoo for their first time. What a craZy experience it is with kids. Not like how I remember it being. We could only see a few exhibits and play in the Zoomazium toddler area before Morgan was done and exhausted. Steve and I will not be doing the Zoo again unless we have help. We each had a baby to take care of so I was unable to take hardly any pictures and missed Morgan seeing a lot of the animals because I had to stay with Lily. The Zoo was packed which didn't help things either. The worse part of the Zoo were all the crappy parents that infiltrated the place. It's sort of scary to see what people are doing to the next generation emotionally. I am probably somewhat of an extremist when it comes to gentle/positive parenting, but seriously yelling at a tiny toddler that is already hysterically crying isn't going to help the situation, just an FYI. Ugh. I saw three kinds of parenting while at the Zoo. There was the overwhelmed and angry parent, the parent that didn't parent, and then the involved loving parent. The third was sadly few and far between. I guess I should just try and block all the people out and enjoy our visit, but it's hard. I am still trying to figure out how to handle things and be a good parent myself so it's interesting to see other parents in action (or not). I like to see what works and what doesn't. Next time we go to the Zoo I would like to go during the week to avoid the crowds and bring both Grandmas.

On the positive side of things Morgan had a great time! He really wanted to just run around and do his own thing. He is so independent. He loved the play parts of the Zoo the best. There was this kid sized cave he ran around in and he was yelling and chattering so loud it was echoing out and it was hilarious. Many people found this amusing. We have some of it on video we will post later. Their is also a toddler play place called the Zoomazium. He wasn't too impressed with it, but he had fun. We went and saw the barnyard animals, the Flamingos, theTigers, the Monkeys, the Elephants, and we saw a Giraffe but I don't think he saw it because it was too far away. We realized half way through we needed to pick out the exhibits with bigger more active animals he could actually pinpoint out. We went to the bug exhibit which was a waste of time. Lily enjoyed the whole experience too, she looked in complete wonderment the whole time and was very happy.  I actually want to go again, but this time to Point Defiance and with a couple helpers. I spent my summers as a kid going there and I like it much better than Woodland Park.

Here are some pictures for better or worse...

This is when we got to the Zoo, Morgan had just woken up.

This is how we found Lily when we got there. :)

Zoo cave

Flamingo Ghosts...

Zoomazium Kid door(very popular!)

This is in the Zoomazium. Morgan was stamping and was very serious about it.

I love this Tiger, it totally looks like it is thinking, "Nah, nah, nan-nah na!" =P Actually he is probably thinking something much worse.

Furry tree

Elephants!

More Elephants!

and Elephant.

We took a break in the field by the Carousel. Lily is so beautiful!