In...

Since I tend to write less in a chronological way and more in a topical way, as I was getting ready to post today, I was trying to decide which subject to talk about. Not that I have a lack of things to say (never a problem for me!) but rather that I have so many things. The fact that I missed several posts last week and have a lot to catch you up on doesn't help either. So, I was sitting here with a bunch of kind of random things on my mind when I realized they're really all tied together by one little word: IN....

Yep, at our house it seems to be all about IN, in some way or another. Noah, in particular is all about getting IN to things. In fact, his army crawl has gotten soo fast when he's really wanting to get somewhere that I don't think it even qualifies as an army crawl anymore. It's more like olympic freestyle carpet swimming. Although, we may see the end of that soon as he's been spending a lot more time working on being up on his hands and knees and may either move to traditional crawling soon, or even skip that and go on to walking, he's been pulling up on things too. So, after he carpet swims like a speedy shark over to wherever it was he was headed, you can be sure he's gettting IN to something. One of his new favorite things is exploring in and out. If he sees a basket of toys, over he goes and dumps them out, a pretty normal thing for him to do. The funny part for me is, then he proceeds to carefully put them all back IN the basket, one by one. He could sit and do this for hours, dump it all out, put it all back in. I even caught him doing this with his food the other day. He was sitting in his booster seat with the tray on and I had set a little plate with peach dices on it for him. Instead of eating his peaches right away he actually spent a good 10 minutes, picking up peaches and moving them from his tiny plate, onto his tray and then, once they were all on the tray, all back onto his plate. I find it very fascinating how intent he is, at only 9 months, on doing this to everything right now. Not sure what that says about his personality, his need to sort things like this...but if it's anything bad, I blame his father! :) Noah's other new obsession is opening the cupboards (or, in other words getting IN to them!). He's discovered he can crawl over there, hook one or two tiny fingers behind the cabinet door and yank it open and then, hooray! he can throw all the tupperwares out! Which means it past time to officially baby proof my house, my goal for this week. Especially because Bree's gotten in on the act. For awhile there she was "old" enough that if we told her not to get into things she wouldn't do it. But now, seeing Noah do it, or perhaps because she's at the age where she thinks she's big enough to get open the pantry, shove a kitchen chair over, stand on it and help herself to a snack without asking (not something I encourage, I one time found her pulling out a bag of shredded coconut she wanted to munch on). She's been as bad as Noah, both of them managing to pretty much turn the kitchen, or any room, inside out. So now a large majority of our stuff will be either locked away, strapped down or otherwise kid-proofed. Which, hopefully, won't cause Noah to have a melt down. I've mentioned it recently, but as he gets older you can tell he has a bit of a temper and it comes out when you don't do exactly what he thinks you should. He's starting to show this recently by pushing things away. Say, you're changing his diaper and he's fussing so you try to calm him down by handing him a toy to look at while you finish. Nope! He'll just shove it away or throw it and fuss harder...

Other than helping Noah make messes, Bree's still all about being grown up, you could say, she's INto it. Which, sometimes make us clash a bit, since she wants to do everything for herself, like, get her own snacks or buckle herself into her own car seat. But mostly it's just kind of amusing, like when she saw a picture of herself and Noah recently and somberly informed me, "Mom, that's when me and Noah got married!" (Yes, she's still quite smitten with the idea that she'll get married when she grows up.) It also made me laugh since this year she's more aware of Mother's Day. So, last Wednesday when I picked her up from preschool they had apparently been working on making some Mother's Day gifts and had also apparently been sworn to secrecy. How do I know this? Because there was Bree chattering away in the backseat, "Mom, we were making cook books for Mother's Day presents but Miss Jo said we're not supposed to tell our Moms!" I don't think she realized she'd let the cat out of the bag already. Then later in the week she told me, "Mom, Dad and I got you presents but I'm not supposed to tell you. Dad said it would ruin it." To her credit though, this time she didn't tell and I had no idea what they were up to. What did I end up getting? Well, a huge part of my day was putting IN our front flower bed and getting that all prettied up the way I wanted it. We moved in early enough we could have done it last spring, but I was pregnant and more obsessed with the interior at that point. So this year I've really been wanting to get our front yard in order and looking good. So we put in a retaining wall and raised the flower bed and all kinds of things. We have a few more bushes we want to put in so it's not done just yet, but close! (Maybe I'll post a picture when it's all done.)

As for me, I've been INfected (all right, I know I'm stretching it a little with some of these IN's) with a bad head cold, watery eyes, headache, all stuffed up for the past week or so. Hence my tardiness in blogging, but I am determined to get back into the rhythm of regular posting.

Anyways, that's been our life over the past week or so.