Tuesday, May 30, 2006

Molly

Abby's grandparents, Jake and Rita, came to visit for the long weekend. It gave Damon and me an opportunity to go to the design studio and pick out everything for our new house without having to take Abby. While they were here, I discovered something so completely tragic and heartbreaking.

I'm allergic to dogs.

They recently got a dog. She's a 4-month-old miniature Shi-Tzu puppy who weighs a whopping 3.5 lbs. This is Molly. Isn't she adorable?!?


She and Abby got along beautifully. I was concerned that Abby would be too rough with her, but she was surpisingly gentle. They quickly became the best of friends.













I, on the other hand, suffered an allergic reaction to Molly and didn't get to play with her. My eyes burned like crazy all weekend, and I couldn't stop itching and sneezing. My grandparents have always had a dog, and I never had any reaction to any of them growing up. I became allergic to cats about 10 years ago and the reaction I had to Molly was similar. The first time I was allergic to a dog was Susie's dog, Gizmo, over Christmas, but I just assumed it was because she had cats. Of course Damon thinks this is a perfect excuse not to get a dog, but after seeing Abby with Molly I definitely think she should have one someday. I'll just have to take medication.

Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Earning her keep

Now that Abby is the ripe old age of 17 months, we decided it was time she had some chores. Well, one chore really. She's been a big fan of clothes baskets for a while now, and since she's always RIGHT THERE when I'm loading the washer, I've trained her to hand me the clothes from the basket. She loves helping me with this, and gets so excited when she sees me haul the basket to the washer. Unfortunately, she has the attention span of, well, a toddler, so she's only good for a few minutes of manual labor before she gets bored and wanders off. Her favorite part of doing laundry, though, is when I put the clothes fresh out of the dryer back into the basket. She loves to bend over into the basket and sniff our clean, warm clothes. She also hands me clothes to fold too, but I have to watch her because she loves to wander off with a pair of our clean underwear to smell!

Thursday, May 18, 2006

17 Months

Abby's still not saying too many words. She'll sometimes make word-like sounds, but they rarely mean what you think they mean. Like "cheese" (tees). Sure she opens up the drawer where the string cheese is kept and says tees, but she also constantly points at her feet and calls them tees too. Abby's recently been pointing to her nose and saying "nananana." She loves this, and says it constantly. Sometimes, though, when I tell her no and she gets upset about it, she'll point to her nose and say "nananana" in between crying fits.




Damon and I are becoming quite fluent in "Abby speak," which makes her so happy. Yesterday, we signed the contract in the sales office in the community we're going to build in, which was the garage of the builder's model home turned into an office. If you've walked through models you know what I'm talking about. Since there was a big opening to the house with so many things to see and look at, it was impossible to keep Abby occupied in the sales office. When it came time to actually sign the paperwork, our realtor and the new realtor who'd tagged along with him babysat Abby down in the finished basement. She loved every minute of it. During one of my shifts, she and I were crawling down the stairs to the basement and she kept pointing at something and saying something completely indecipherable. At first, I gave her the "sure honey, whatever you say" treatment, but then I figured out she was pointing to the light fixture. She was so thrilled to be understood when I said "light." It was such a great moment for the both of us to realize that even though she may not be able to say what she means, we can still understand her.




While she may not be saying much, she undertands everything we say to her. If we ask her where something is, she'll find it and bring it to us. She understands when we tell her we're going out, and she'll pace by the door like an excited puppy. We ask her is she wants to go "night night" or if she needs her diaper changed, and she'll walk into her room. If she's hungry she hangs out in front of the fridge and her high chair.


Abby has developed a new skill this month: she loves to sing. She has this little Elmo radio that her aunt Paula gave her for her birthday, and it plays about 5 different songs. One of them is the "Elmo's World" song. She loves to "la la la" along with it, but she can't actually sing along with it yet, so she just makes up her own "la la la" song. We often catch her singing some nonsensical little ditty while in the car. Sometimes when she's playing by herself, she'll break into song. She doesn't dance very often, but she loves to twirl around in circles until she gets dizzy and falls.




Lately, she's becoming such a GIRL! She is obsessed with shoes. When she's not bringing us one of her shoes to put on her, she's stepping into our shoes or trying to put our shoes on our feet. In the mornings, when she sees Damon in his suit, she brings him his dress shoes. She gets it right every time, even when I actually get around to putting the shoes away so they're all together. When she gets comfortable with strangers, she loves to squat down and touch their shoes. She's also starting to show a love for clothes. A couple times when it's been warm enough for her to run around in a onesie, she's gone through her dirty clothes and brought me a pair of her pants to put on. A few weeks ago, we were in Target and I saw a cute sweater for her, but it was only available in a 2T or 4T. The 24-month zip-up hoodie she'd been wearing was getting a little snug, so I put the 4T on her to see how it would fit. Luckily, it wasn't too bad because she refused to take it off. I did manage to get it off her eventually, but then she wanted to hold it and love it, so I had to rip the tag off so the cashier could scan it.


Wednesday, May 17, 2006

We have a house!!!

Well, sort of. We actually just have a lot to build the house on. Except the lot won't be ready for them to even start building until August/September. After looking at a million homes (which is so much fun with a toddler in tow), we decided to go ahead and build in this newer development in the north part of town. The few houses that we liked were in the higher end of our price range, and we kept saying that we could build for the same price, so we're going for it. We signed the paperwork today to make the lot ours. Now, we have to get pre-approved for our loan, and go to the "design studio" to pick all the pretty stuff. Then we wait. And wait. We'll be moving in sometime next February or March.

I got the picture to work today. The windows on the left side on the main floor are a single car garage. Having the garage split like that gives the entry a really cool courtyard feel.

Sunday, May 14, 2006

Saturday, May 13, 2006

Flickr

I'm finally up-to-date over at flickr, so if you want to see even more Abby pictures just click on the picture box to the right. For those of you who don't know about flickr, you need to click it once to "activate" it and again to get it to take you to the picture site. You can leave comments or add notes directly to the picture or view them all as a slideshow. I've grouped the pictures into sets, so the most current ones are in the "16-17 Months" set. I'm having a blast with my new camera, over 300 pictures already taken, so I'll be adding a lot of pictures there in the future.

Friday, May 12, 2006

More Pictures












Telling the plant who's boss.


She spent a good half hour sticking rocks in that hole.


















Thursday, May 11, 2006

Abby's New Chair

Abby's constantly climbing up on the furniture, so we decided it was time to get her her very own chair. It's nice and big so it will last a long time.












Sorry for the lack of posts lately. School started back up the beginning of May and it's kicking my butt! After many months of not-so-subtly hinting, I got a new camera for Mother's Day, though, so I'll be taking lots of pictures. This camera has a lot more manual features than my old one, so you'll have to excuse the quality of pictures while I learn how to use it.























Attack of the Killer Baby!!



Tuesday, May 02, 2006

Saturday, we went out and bought one of those rail guard thingies that attach to the side of the toddler bed, so Abby wouldn't fall out in the middle of the night. It wasn't until after we took the front rail off the crib and had the guard thing assembled that we realized we'd bought the wrong one. Oops! The one we bought was for twin beds with a box spring and mattress, not toddler beds. Since we already had the crib converted to a toddler bed, we decided to let her sleep in it and see what happened. We laid our heavy down comforter on the floor to pad it in case she rolled out. We couldn't have asked for a better night! We went through our usual bedtime routine and she never got out of bed once nor did she fall out of bed like I'd feared.

Naptime the next day, however, was a nightmare.

Abby still takes two naps a day, and usually goes about 3-3.5 hours between them. When she starts to look tired, we'll ask her if she wants to go "night-night" and if she does, she'll walk into her room and pull on the crib. Not on Sunday, though. The first time I laid her down for a nap went ok, until she came out of her room a minute later. After that, she'd scream as if I was laying her on a bed of hot coals every time I tried to get her back in bed. We tried everything we could think of to get her to nap. We even tried laying on the floor in her room so she'd feel safe. 7 hours later she still hadn't napped and we had stuff to do, so we loaded her in the car to run errands.

She was asleep within minutes.

While out, we picked up a baby gate to put in the doorway with the hope that it would keep her in her room and eventually she'd fall asleep. Bedtime Sunday was just like naptime. The gate didn't work because she tried to climb out (and got stuck at the top like in her crib). I happened to remember something I saw on the Gilmore Girls and it's worked since. See, Abby's crib is a sleigh-style crib with the back being higher than the front. I figured if we flipped the crib around so that she shorter side (or in our case, the open side because we were too lazy to put the rail back on) faced the wall, she wouldn't be able to climb out. Genius! Hopefully, that's bought us a couple months because our only other option is to lock her in her room until she falls asleep.