Wonderscope

Jason has been working every Saturday from noon to 8-9. Or some similar shift. During the week, I work during the day and he works in the evenings.Sundays are busy with church and Awana. So we haven't really had any time to do any fun family activities recently. Today, however, he somehow managed to not be scheduled until early afternoon. I don't work Saturdays, since there is no school. So we finally were able to plan a fun family trip. We took the girls to the wonderscope in Shawnee, KS, which isn't all that far away. It was lots of fun!

I charged my battery the night before, cleaned my camera lens and of course forgot my memory card! So I could only take as many pictures that could be saved into the internal memory of my camera. That was kind of a bummer. But thankfully I got some good ones...enjoy!

As you can see, Kylie was upset she was being held when there were so many fun toys in sight.

This is one of my favorite pictures of all time. It doesn't get much cuter than babies playing with mirrors.

She was having a hard time getting over that hill. It was a lot steeper than it looks in the picture.

Jason was laying her down and letting her go down the slide "all by herself." She LOVED it.

Jason painted the letter "K" on her cheek. That's about the extent of his artistic abilities :).

When we visited this room the second time, Kylie discovered that all the toy cars were scattered around the room. She exlaimed: "Oh no! Mess!" and picked them all up. It made me laugh.

Family Picture Update

Here's a picture of Eve at 7 months. She's very photogenic, which makes my job as "Marsh family photographer" so much easier. We have to put her hair in a ponytail or put clips in it because otherwise it will hang in her eyes and whenever she has a runny nose, she likes to wipe it all over her face. It's just way too disgusting when her hair is in her face for her to get her snotty little hands as well, I'm sure you can imagine what that looks like. I'm also a firm believer that no baby should ever get a haircut before they are at least one year old.













Kylie on the other hand is more difficult for me to capture in a picture. She doesn't often want to look at the camera, much less smile for it. Plus whenever it seems that those conditions are met, I seem to have "forgotten" to fix her hair that day. Well, it's not easy to fix the hair of a busy 22 month old. We are growing out her bangs, so it's pretty important that I try to pull her long bangs out of her eyes. But she's still a doll and such a sweet little girl.
















Jason is doing well, there's not too much to update. He's still working at Sears, in fact in this picture he is wearing his new blue Sears shirts since their dress code now requires blue shirts instead of white or black. So that's the big news lately... :) He is still taking classes obviously and is very busy trying to keep up with all the reading, papers and tests. He also still has his internship at our church and is busy running the Awana program [with my help, of course! :) ].













And here I am, with my new haircut. I think it's the same haircut that I had way back in 8th grade, only updated with a side part instead of down the center. Oh, and I will never curl my bangs the way I did back then, I promise. I can't believe I woke up early to spend time making my hair look so ridiculous. I also think it's the first time since eighth grade that my hair is not colored in any way. And I've course I took this picture of myself since I'm the "Marsh family photographer."

It's too bad that although this photography gig gives me the opportunity to store many memories in pictures, it doesn't bring me any money (Actually it costs me money when you think about it). I'm still working as a substitute teacher, and still looking for a full time job that would allow Jason to be more of a stay at home dad and student. I'm still hopeful.

In other news, I have stopped breastfeeding. Eve was not sleeping at all at night unless she was physically attached to me, using me as her pacifier. After over six months of this sleeping arrangement, I was becoming very tired and grumpy with terrible back pain from the way she was forcing me to cuddle with her all night, every night. So we started giving her more bottles at night to stop her from associating sleep with breastfeeding. My job as a substitute teacher allowed me to pump, but once we started giving Eve more bottles, it wasn't enough. We started formula, which of course made my supply drop until she was eventually all bottle fed. I was a little sad about it, because there's a good chance she's my last baby, but the fact that I could sleep soundly in a comfortable position made up for any sadness. Also, after being pregnant and/or breastfeeding for over the past 2.5 years, it feels nice to finally be able to have my own body back! (Let me tell you how exhausting that "and" part was!) Caffeine here I come!

All about Kylie

Current Age: 22 months

Wow, I can't believe how much Kylie has grown up lately. I have to constantly remind myself that she is still only one year old (this helps especially when she is driving me NUTS :] ). She can now do so many things that I know I will not be able to put everything in this blog post. I'll do my best!

She has definitely reached her language explosion. There is no possible way for me to write down everything that she says now. She also puts words together in sentences and it's fun that we can have conversations. Besides common everyday vocabulary, here is a sampling of words/concepts she knows:
* She can count to eleven. Why stop at eleven? She gets it confused with seven so when she gets to eleven, she says eight next. So she gets stuck in a circle: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,8,9,10,11,8,9,10,11... You get the idea :) As we were driving to church once Jason and I could hear: "8,9,10,11,8,9,10,11" the whole entire drive there.
*She knows lots of animal sounds. It was so funny that she refused to say them for the longest time and then at 18 months, she all of a sudden knew all of them. I'm not going to list all the sounds she knows because she knows lots of random ones like fish and turkey. (I love hearing her version of gobble gobble).
*She knows the words for different colors but she doesn't identify them correctly yet. I wasn't even working on colors with her, so imagine my surprise when we looked at a magazine and she pointed at a car and said "yellow car mommy!" and then a different car and said "Look, blue car mommy!" I told Jason about it and he told me that he had been working on colors with her. I had no idea he was doing that. So ever since then, I've been working with her too but she thinks almost everything is "blue." It's kind of hard teaching her though because she hates to be corrected even if you do it with a positive voice. It's made her cry before when I've told her that something was really green, not blue. So, I'm not really working that hard on the color concept with her. She'll learn eventually, it's not worth making her upset.
*She calls herself "Kytie" which is weird because she used to be able to say her name correctly.
*She can sing lots of songs: The alphabet song is her absolute favorite and she has lately been singing each letter very clearly. When she sees words/letters anywhere (billboards, someone's shirt, books, store signs...) she says: "Look, ABCs!" And they are everywhere, so we hear that a lot. She can identify O and Q and the rest are all hit and miss although she thinks most of them are the letter "E." She also sings "Row row your boat", "Old MacDonald", "Jesus Loves Me", "I love you- Barney song" and "If you're happy and you know it" pretty well but none are as perfectly clear as the alphabet song.
*She tells me when she has a "stinky" but that's what she says also if she's just wet. It pretty much means that she wants a diaper change. I really haven't started potty training yet, I'm waiting to get some absorbable panties but she's really interested in the potty. She will ask to go sit on the potty but she just thinks it's fun to sit on her little potty chair. I always tell her when I'm going potty because I want her to come follow me so I can keep an eye on her (I don't always trust her being alone with Eve. She's usually sweet, but she has some moments) and she will usually reply: "I go potty too mommy!" and she will come sit on her potty. So I pretty much have no privacy!
*She has definitely learned the word "mine". Not only is she in a "mine" stage but she's also very interested in figuring out to whom everything belongs. For example if there are some shoes in the room, she will put mine together and say "mommy's shoes" and put Jason's together and say "daddy's shoes." What's funny is I love to drink my Coca Cola and whatever I'm drinking (even if it's coffee or something else) Kylie will point to and say "Mommy's coke". It's pretty embarrassing when we are in the grocery store and my one year old is yelling "coke! coke! coke!" in the pop aisle. I hope people don't think I'm giving her any soda drinks!
*I have also heard many times the infamous phrase "Look at me mommy!" The first time I heard it, Kylie had dragged one of the chairs from the kitchen into the living room and was climbing up, standing up and jumping off. We have a little dare devil on our hands.
* Every time she sees a big book, she calls it a "bubble" meaning "bible."
She learns so many new words every day and she has become an expert at repeating things, so I think I will stop here before I get carried away :). On to other things besides language.

She is a pretty good dancer and can copy different dance moves which is lots of fun. Sometimes she doesn't want an audience and will stop if we are watching her, so Jason and I will put music on the computer or TV and sneak around the corner to spy on her dancing. There are sometimes, however, that she enjoys being the center of attention. She's so funny. If ever we have extra income I will sign her up for toddler dance class. I think that if she had one talent it would involve music or dancing. I have had nursery workers tell me how impressed they are with the way she copies music. She really does copy tunes very easily. We will see if this continues to be a trend as she grows up. I am NOT musically talented at all, in fact I am quite the opposite. I didn't have any interest in it either growing up, so I know that I'm not forcing Kylie to follow some childhood dream of mine if I get her involved in music/dancing, because it was never a dream of mine in the first place. I just see that she really enjoys it, so I would like to keep her interested as long as she continues to enjoy it.

Last time I posted about her favorite TV show it was Barney (gag!). Well now it has changed. She absolutely LOVES Dora the Explorer, or "Rera and Boots" as she calls it. I don't even know when she first saw it, she never watched it before. I think I must have left the TV on once when it came on. I was surprised when she asked me one day to watch "Rera and Boots". I didn't even know what she was talking about until she added "Map" and "Backpack." In fact right now the only reason I'm able to write this blog post is because we DVRed the new Dora movie that was on yesterday and I'm showing it to Kylie now (and Eve is taking a nap.) She loves it, she interacts with it too. She will repeat the things the map tells and answer the questions Dora asks. Jason even bought her a real Dora backpack toy. It's kind of annoying because if anything else is on TV, she will whine "Rera... Boots...". Seriously, she's crazy if she thinks that all we are going to do is watch it all day. She can dream all she wants.

It's a good thing Kylie also loves books or I would be worried by how much she is obsessed with a TV show. I remember last year, I was worried because she didn't enjoy sitting for more than a minute to look at a book. But that was just her personality, she was enjoying exploring and being mobile and now she is finally content to sit and read books for long periods of time. She is also pretending to read books herself with lots of babbling as she flips through the pages. Her new favorite thing to do is to bring me a book for me to read outloud while she sits next to me "reading" another book outloud. She gets mad at me if I'm not reading mine outloud, what a weirdo :).

My little Kylie Bear is such a fun little girl! She does throw some tantrums and has earned some time outs when she decides to hit her sister, but overall she is a very obedient and loveable sweetheart. I also think she is starting to look more like me when I was her age. She still looks a lot like Jason but now she is also resembling me as well, finally! I will post some pictures when we get the charger to our other computer. I never thought I would have a blonde and blue eyed daughter, that is definitely not the part that looks like me :) I think she might have my facial structure though. Well whoever she got her looks from, she is absolutely a doll baby. The only thing is that she is not very photogenic and I think I take more "blooper" pictures of her than normal ones. Those bloopers are pretty funny though...