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.