Up to the present day!

Yay, no more catching up! :) So that's the good news. The bad news is that our camera broke, so no pictures for a while again until we get that sorted out. I don't know if we can fix it or if we'll have to get a new one. Wah.

The big news in our lives right now is that both Audrey and Aria have skyrocketed into new phases over the past few weeks.

At almost 4 1/2 years old, Aria is firmly into the "Why?" stage. It's unbelieveable how many questions she has. For example, tonight I was reading her The Sneetches at bedtime - a story we've read dozens of times before - and after nearly every sentence, she had a question.

"Why does that one have a smile, but his eyes are sad?"

"Why didn't that one play ball with those other guys?"

"Why is he leaving with all their money?"

"What does 'trip' mean?"

And so on. We've noticed that she'll keep pressing for details until she's satisfied that you've given her every nugget of information that you have. She'll accept "I don't know," but she won't accept anything that smacks of "just because." It's pretty awe-inspiring, actually, to watch this new phase of learning. It's much more proactive than she has been before. She used to be content to just sit and watch what was going on around her, just soaking things up; but now she's pushing us for knowledge.

The other thing Aria's doing is exploring more music - not at our urging, I should hasten to add. She's started making up more songs and singing along with songs that we're listening to. Hosanna also finally figured out how to record into our computer using Logic Studio (which we bought for this purpose over a year ago, but haven't ever devoted much energy to until now) - and has recorded Aria singing some lullabies along with music that Hosanna recorded. They're really fun to listen to. It's also really fun watching Aria take part in the creative process - she's already got opinions about what sort of thing she thinks would sound good.

As far as Audrey goes, now that she's about 18 months, her big expansion has gone into several worlds at once. First, her vocabulary is increasing quite a bit. She regularly uses the words Mommy, Daddy, Aria, Nana, Up, Down, "want dat," "don't want," "other side" (when she's nursing and wants to switch to the other breast), among others. She also is fascinated by letters. She can't say them all out loud - so far, that's limited to A, E, I, O, D, N, and maybe a couple others - but she knows them all by sight. Meaning, we can put a group of letters in front of her, and say "Where's a T" and she'll always point to the right one.

She has a voracious appetite for books. Sometimes, I mean this literally - she's been known to chew them up. But mainly, I mean that she tears through them with an urgency quite unlike anything I've ever seen. At bedtime, she can easily go through ten board books. She's not patient enough to listen to the story most of the time, but she wants to point at various pictures and find out what they are called.

Big hits with her right now are:

• Bear in a Square - she likes to find the bees and go "BZZZZZZZ." She can find all the shapes on some of the pages, but not on all of them yet.


• Hippos Go Berserk - she likes to point to the numbers.


• The Very Hungry Caterpillar - she turns almost immediately to the page in the middle where the caterpillar eats all the different kinds of food, and then points to them all, over and over and over again, hearing you say all the different names.


• Whatever Aria's reading. (Which, guaranteed, Aria won't be happy about.)

Audrey is also continuing to be very active physically and is constantly pushing new boundaries in that realm. This weekend, at the park, she was climbing up and down the circular steps that go six feet off the ground and are spaced about two feet apart. She's climbed up onto the bathroom counter and the kitchen counter. She's up on the dining room table about ten times a day. She's climbed onto the backs of the toilets, over the fence into Aria's safe zone (resulting in a "MOMMMMMYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!" from big sister), and onto the piano (making a curious kind of music along the way). I don't even think about it anymore when she goes up the stairs - the thought of her having trouble with them is laughable.

The only thing Audrey seems to have a fear of is she doesn't like certain big guys. For example, she's not too keen on Uncle Manny for some reason, but likes Uncle Adamen and Uncle Gabriel.

Audrey is also showing some musical signs already. Today, when Hosanna played Twinkle Twinkle on the piano, Audrey sang along "deet deet deet," matching what Hosanna was playing in rhythm. She continues to dance anytime music comes on. And at bedtime, if I sing some lullabies to her, she'll tell me which ones she likes and which ones she doesn't.

She is still not sleeping through the night by any measure, but it has gotten a little bit easier lately. Most nights now have three wake ups. She goes to bed about 8. Usually there's one around 10:30 or 11, then one somewhere around 1 or 2, then one around 5. Hosanna and I are in a rhythm now where we are trading off shifts, and we both more or less know when it's our turn to go in. I've mastered the art of falling asleep in the glider with Audrey on my lap or shoulder, so the middle of the night wakeups aren't killing me quite as badly as they used to.

Of course, Audrey is teething again now - getting all four canines in - so the nights when a tooth is cutting through have been more disruptive and difficult for us. Overall, though, we feel like she's slowly, slowly, slowly moving in the right direction.

The other biggest thing in our lives right now is dealing with how the sisters deal with each other. We are expending a LOT of thought and energy trying to find good solutions to common problems such as: how to keep Aria from hurting Audrey when she's mad at her (which is frequent); how to keep Audrey out of Aria's stuff; how to get Audrey a nap without sacrificing activities for Aria; how to give them both the attention they crave without sacrificing the other; etc. It's a new road for us, one which we're barely getting our footing on now.

Catch up #9: Christmas

Like Thanksgiving, Christmas this year was also a small, mellow time at our house. We were too tired to think about going anywhere: Audrey was still waking up 4 to 5 times a night, and I was working downtown on a different project that required longer hours and a longer commute. In short, it was a stressful few months, and we didn't have much energy to give to the holidays this time around.

But, even so, we had a pretty nice time at our place. The kids were REALLY excited about Christmas. On Christmas Eve they each got to open up a present; Audrey's turned out to be this stacker (which is one of her favorite toys now):



Then, after we explained to Aria that the sooner she went to bed and went to sleep, the sooner she would wake up and it would be Christmas (and she could open the rest of the presents), she stood up cheerfully and announced to everyone: "Well, it seems my bath is ready now. Good night!" And went up to bed. Never seen aything like it. :)

Aria got pretty excited because she got some cars from the movie Cars, which has replaced Finding Nemo as the Big Thing in her life.



Tobin joined us for the festivities too, and although he doesn't often like to have his picture taken, he graciously allowed me to snap this shot of the three of them together - for which I am eternally grateful. I can't believe how much Aria looks like Hosanna as a kid in this picture. The likeness is stunning.

Catch up #8: Thanksgiving

Scenes from a mellow Thanksgiving at our place:

Audrey likes to eat it AND wear it.



Aria entertains us with Babushka dolls.



The table:



Yummy food:

Catch up #7: The arrival of Rubber and Glue

Most of you already saw this on Facebook, but just to reiterate for posterity: On November 16th, we went to the SPCA and picked out a couple adult cats to rescue and take home with us. Going to the SPCA was such a fantastic experience, not only because we felt good about rescuing the animals, but because we got to meet so many different kinds of cats, and spend time getting to know them; so we were really confident that the ones we brought home were a good fit for us.





Their SPCA names were Mr. Man and Mr. Dreamy, which didn't really work too well for us ("Which Mr. is this again?"). After a few days of debate, we settled on calling them Rubber and Glue. Rubber is the orange one, and Glue is the cream one.

Now about these names. We have this book, Corduroy's Halloween, which for a while Aria was wanting for bedtime practically every night. It's a lift-the-flap book. There's a black cat which appears under a flap on every page. I don't know how this came to be, but at some point, Aria started calling it Glue the Cat. Maybe it was because one of the flaps ripped, and someone said we needed to glue the cat? I really have no idea. But the name stuck (ha ha). And so then it was natural that Aria wanted to name a real cat Glue, and so then Rubber was a no-brainer after that, because of "I am rubber, you are glue..."

For the most part, the cats are pretty happy here. Except of course for scenes like this, which happen pretty frequently:



But then, to make up for it, they get this:



The only down side of these guys is that they have quite a taste for human food. The SPCA people didn't mention that, but then again, they probably had no idea, since the cats aren't around human food at all there. It's a bit of an annoyance having to shoo them off of the counters all the time.