Monday Morning Videos

Lily had a very entertaining morning on Monday and was doing and saying all sorts of silly stuff. So I figured I would share it all with my faithful readers.

This is Lily climbing all over the couches.


Hand go?


L-I-L-Y... how do you spell Lily?


Whenever Lily counts, she starts with 8. She gets quite a few of them in order, but always starts with 8, 10 turns into 2 and she goes back up to 10/2 over and over.

Ye Olde Weekend Recap

I can't believe I forgot to take pictures at our Super Bowl party! Oh no, what am I saying!? I don't want to get sued or anything. What I meant was, "I can't believe I forgot to take pictures of our Big Game Watch Party." Yeah, that's it. Ok, in case you have no clue what I'm talking about, the NFL is super picky about what people say on the radio, or write in print because they don't want their copyright infringed upon. In fact, apparently churches are having to be careful how they advertise their parties. Here is the skinny:

You cannot say or print:
* “Super Bowl”
* “Super Sunday”
* The Super Bowl logo
* “NFL”, “AFC”, or “NFC”
* “National Football League”
* “American Football Conference”
* ‘National Football Conference”
* Any team name (e.g., “Buccaneers") or nickname ("Bucs")

You CAN say or print:
*"The Big Game in (host city, i.e. Houston)"
*"The Professional Football Championship Game in Houston"
*The date of the game
*The names of the cities of the teams competing in the Super Bowl (i.e. New England v. Carolina), but NOT the team names themselves (i.e. Patriots v. Panthers)
*You can make fun of the fact that you cannot say the phrase "Super Bowl" by bleeping it out

So there you have it. If you went to a Superbowl Party yesterday and called it such, you might just get sued! :)

But our weekend was more than just our super-awesome Super Bowl party, and I have pictures of the rest of it!

For the first time ever, I was able to put all of Lily's hair into a ponytail. She wasn't a huge fan. She kept saying "ouchie" and touching the back of her head. She probably had a couple of single hairs that were pulling and hurting (you women know what I'm talking about). Jim said he didn't like it because it made her look too "grown-up". :)

A ponytail video.


Lily was helping me cook on Friday night. She found my oven mitts and was having a great time!
What can I say? I'm a great chef!
Saturday it was pretty warm (probably in the high 40's or low 50's) so we went outside and played in the yard. Jim scooped a bunch of poop so that the kids could play outside during the Super Bowl party on Sunday
Lily was reunited with all of her outside toys.
One of her favorites is the watering can... even when it's empty.
Lily enjoyed running around the yard, playing with the empty watering can, chasing the Nuts, and "helping" Daddy scoop poop.



Lily found a big rock and kept having Jim help her get on and jump off of it. It was fun.
Lily kept saying "big rock" and then she would point to the smaller rocks and say "little rock".
Lily in action.


My first attempt at a family picture, Lily was fussing because she wanted to get on the rock. So we put her on the rock and gathered around, and it turned out much better!

Lily is getting much better at recognizing her letters and numbers. She was playing on her laptop, which asks her to press a certain letter. She had gotten several in a row correct without help, so I decided to film it. Of course as soon as I turned on the camera, she got shy and wasn't finding the right letter as quickly, but you still see that she's learning her letters.


P.S. Just as I suspected! Lily was yet again chewing on her fingers this weekend, and was distracted by something, so she actually let me feel in her mouth, and guess what I found? A new tooth! She is starting to get her two-year molars, which explains the runny nose, early waking, and hand-chewing that has been going on for two weeks.

Funny Story Friday

I guess Lily is her mother's child.

My Grandma Sue tells a story from when I was about two years old. We lived in Bozeman and Grandma Sue was driving me somewhere, and from the back seat I piped up and said, "Papa's car!"

Grandma was driving her own car, so she corrected me and said, "No, this is Grandma's car."

I grinned my mischievous grin... "Papa's car!"

Grandma was onto me now, "No, this is Grandma's car!" and we went on like that for a while; me being a stinker and Grandma laughing at me and correcting me.

Well a few weeks later, Grandma had to drive Papa's car for some reason and gave me another ride somewhere. From the back seat, I piped up and said, "Grandma's car!"

Well now she knew for sure that I was just being a tease, but she played along and said, "No, this is Papa's car!" and so on and so forth.

Flash forward about 25 years, and it was like deja vu.

When we're driving with Lily, we play a game where we point out the color of the traffic light, and try to get Lily to say "stop" or "go" depending on the color. Usually she gets pretty into it and says "GO MOMMY!!" or "GO DADDY!!" and it's really fun. Well the other day Lily and I were driving home from the Kroc Center and as I went through a green light, Lily said, "Go Daddy!"

It could have been a slip of the tongue, so I corrected her and said, "I'm Mommy, silly!"

Then out came that mischievous grin, "Go, DADDY!"

"I'm Mommy!"

"DADDY!"

"I'm Mommy!"

"DADDY!"

By this time I was cracking up partially at my silly girl who was teasing her mommy, and partially because it reminded me of the story Grandma Sue had told me about myself. I guess silliness must run in families!

Planning

I have something I need to plan out. I'm not a huge planner in general, especially when it comes to vacations. I kind of like to fly by the seat of my pants. I mean, a vacation is supposed to be relaxing, and what's relaxing about having every second planned out? It's not that I don't like to do stuff on vacations, but I like to leave my options open so that when the moment hits, I can decide what sounds fun or convenient or relaxing at that time, and do it. But making a bunch of plans and appointments and having to rush off to make it on time is not my idea of a good vacation. So while my flexibility will be a major asset in this upcoming trip, I also need to bite the bullet and plan some stuff ahead of time so that I'm not wandering around lost.

Here's the deal, Jim has a business trip to Philly for three weeks in March. Three weeks home alone does not sound like fun to me, so we talked about it and decided that Lily and I could fly out for a portion of the trip and stay with Jim. During the day while Jim is at work, Lily and I could hit the town and see what all Philly has to offer. And then we could all spend the evenings and weekends together as a family. That sounds like way more fun than three weeks at home without my sweetie, and with little to no adult interaction! Plus, Lily will turn two a bit later in March and then we'll have to pay for her plane ticket... yuck! And we had enough credit card points to cover mine, so we're going on the cheap.

But the other side of the coin is that I will be almost 6 months pregnant and will be flying with and traipsing around Philly with a nearly two-year-old toddler. I had better have my ducks in a row! I mean, if I were by myself or just with Jim it wouldn't be a huge deal if we got lost and spent an hour figuring out where we were or backtracking or anything like that. But with Lily in tow, and me solely responsible for finding our way and keeping track and entertaining her, that could be a huge disaster! So I'm taking the month I have between now and when we leave to figure out what Lily and I are going to do all day.

Here's what I have so far:

First of all, I found this website that has all sorts of suggestions for seeing Philly with a toddler. Actually, that site is cool because you can pick any city and any age kid and it will rate all kinds of popular sites according to what that age child will enjoy. So from this site, I found out that Independence Hall is not so interesting to two-year-olds, but the Please Touch Museum is! Good to know! And while on that subject, the Please Touch Museum is going to be a must-see for us! In fact, it's one that I'm going to save for a weekend so that Jim can enjoy it with us. I think Lily will have an absolute ball there. Another thing I found was the Philadelphia City Pass. If you've never used a City Pass when doing the tourist thing in a new city, you really should! Twice, Jim and I have visited Seattle and bought a City Pass and haven't regretted it one little bit. You get to see a bunch of stuff that you would probably want to visit anyway, for a way reduced price. For $59 we can get in to the Franklin Institute, Adventure Aquarium, the Zoo, a day pass on the trolley, the Please Touch Museum (ooh, that's new since I last looked at the site... AWESOME!), and the Academy of Natural Sciences. If you look at the site, you'll see that there are actually a couple of other options, but that's what I would choose (I don't think Lily would be that interested in the Eastern State Penitentiary, and being the nerd that I am, I'd choose the Academy of Natural Sciences over the National Constitution Center any day! Sorry mom :).

Now my task is to make sure that everything is going to be open on the days we plan to go to them, and to figure out transportation. I have the one free day on the trolley with the City Pass, but I'm sure I'll be utilizing the subway system as well. If you buy tokens, it's $1.45 per trip, or $6 for up to 8 trips in a day. So I'll have to see where all I want to go and how many transfers it's going to take to get there and see which way I need to do it each day. I also need to find out what places will be free for Lily, and where I'll have to pay.

Oh, and the Cheese Steaks! My favorite sandwich in the world is a Philly Cheese Steak sandwich. So you can bet that 6-months-pregnant Alyson in Philadelphia is going to be mapping out all the best Cheese Steak sandwich shops. My motto will be "A Cheese Steak (or two) a day keeps the crazies away." There is some serious research that is begging to be done on this subject.

Yesterday I also bought some stuff on Amazon. I did some research and found that for my needs, Frommer's would probably be the best guide book out there. When I went to Europe I didn't have a guide book, but was always jealous of those who did because they would have all this inside information and interesting tidbits about the places we were visiting. So I decided to invest a few dollars so that I could have some tidbits of my own. And I also bought a good map. My sweet geek of a husband suggested that I have GPS capabilities on my phone, and could probably find some good apps for touring Philly, rather than carrying around a bulky book and map. And he is right. But I'm just too old-fashioned. I like a map that I can hold and fold and I don't have to wait for it to load. God created my eyes to zoom in automatically without having to reload the page, and I really appreciate that. Thanks God!

Another great thing about this trip is that we're staying right downtown, and probably within walking distance of a lot of things we want to see. When Jim travels, he has to find a hotel that offers a certain government rate, and we were able to find just such a rate at the downtown Embassy Suites. So we'll have a suite with a kitchenette (so we don't have to eat out every meal) and a second "room" for Lily to sleep in. And we won't have to rent a car or take an expensive cab ride into the city every day. It will all be at our fingertips! Yay!

AND (that's right, it gets better!) One weekend while we're there, we're going to rent a car and travel 2 hours to NYC to visit Dave and Anna and Madison (brother, sister-in-law, niece). And they might even be able to come in the other weekend to visit us in Philly!

So between reading my tour guide book, planning and mapping things out, and doing online research, I'm pretty sure that I'm going to have fun and not go crazy. I'm wavering between super duper ridiculously excited for this trip, and a bit nervous. But it's mostly excited!

Lazy Wednesday Morning

Lily likes to look at her sign language book, and has started attempting a lot of the signs. We practiced the first few letters of the alphabet this morning. Here she is asking how to do H.


Lily likes to have Cookie Mouse do her dirty work sometimes. While she was eating breakfast, she had to feed Cookie Mouse every bite before she would eat it. And then of course when she was playing, she had Cookie Mouse send the car down the slide. But my favorite part of this video is at the end where she says "octopus." She has a light projection mobile in her room that has fishies that go around and around. Sometimes I narrate the fishes and say, "yellow fish, blue fish, pink whale, purple octopus." So last night I was doing that, and after I would say purple octopus, Lily would say "purple opocus!" So cute!


And this video is me singing the alphabet song. Lily likes to move her lips and her hands as if she's singing and doing the signs. Then she loses interest.


P.S. I'm glad the floating baby on my sidebar is starting to gain a little weight. It was looking a little skinny there for a while!

Proof! (For You Doubters)

Some of you didn't believe that my belly is showing. Ha! I sure showed you! Here is the cold hard proof that I do, in fact look like a pregnant lady. Unfortunately, I have zero hard evidence to prove that I didn't look like a pregnant lady last week. You'll just have to take my word for it. But maybe it's the shirt. I saw my friend, Katrina, today, and she had read my blog and said that she didn't believe me that I'm showing (because she saw me as recently as yesterday and didn't think I was showing) but she said, "Now that I see you in that shirt, you do look pregnant." But there's really only so much a shirt can do. I look pregnant. Sorry that the pictures are fuzzy. I had to turn off the flash for it to look even remotely normal.



P.S. Those are my regular jeans, thankyouverymuch.

I Popped

Despite my insistence that I wasn't "showing", my belly begged to differ. It all happened in the matter of about a week. I went from a generally flat belly and fitting into all my old clothes, to *BAM!* preggo belly. I kind of skipped that whole look-chubby-but-not-pregnant stage, at least that's my story and I'm sticking to it. (Truthfully, I was a little chubby to start with, but I went from looking normal to pregnant essentially overnight.) I've gained about 3lbs so far, but my belly is all round and sticky-outie. And much to my chagrin I've even started wearing maternity tops, which remind me how much I hate all my maternity clothes. I mean, when you wear the same 10 shirts for a year (yes a year, I didn't fit into normal clothes until a few months after delivery) you get a little tired of them. And the second time through they're even less appealing. But I'll be 17 weeks along on Wednesday, so three more weeks and I'll be halfway done cookin' this kiddo! And if Babycakes comes as early as Lily did, I'm already halfway there! :) (But we hope that Babycakes takes all the time he/she needs.) I'm feeling pretty good. The general nausea is mostly gone, I just get the occasional urge to throw up. I can hardly brush my teeth without gagging (brushing teeth is the worst.) My headaches and nosebleeds are quite a bit less frequent. The heartburn is getting worse and my joints are getting super achy. I forgot how utterly painful pregnancy is! I don't know about you, but I'm in pain of one sort or another pretty much the entire time. I'd much rather give birth than go through pregnancy. But overall, I'm feeling much better than I did first trimester. Our next doctor's appointment is in a week, and we're not sure if they're going to do an ultrasound to determine the sex, or if we'll just schedule that when we get there. I'm certainly far enough along that they could tell. The office here does things differently than the office in Moscow. See, in Moscow they had two locations; one in Moscow and one in Pullman. They did all their ultrasound stuff in Pullman, so you had to schedule a special appointment if you were having an ultrasound. And they had a technician who did all their ultrasounds. From what we can tell, though, the office here just does ultrasounds on the fly, and the doctors are the ones who administer them. It's interesting to go through pregnancy at two different doctors' offices and see their different ways of handling the situation. Since I had Lily so early last time, we talked to Dr. Randy about pre-term labor and whether or not he was concerned for us. He said that it sounded like I didn't actually have pre-term labor since I didn't feel any contractions before my water broke. He says it sounds like my water broke for some unknown reason, which induced labor. He also said that it sounds like I'm an easy laborer, and that if I do have contractions that I should go in and see him so that I don't start shooting out kids while at the supermarket. That's always a concern. Anyway, I'm sure that's all the pregnancy information you care to read right now. On to bigger and better!

This is a video of Lily and Jim measuring the basement. Lily loves playing with the tape measure. She loves helping Daddy do all kinds of fix-it things. She is always offering (insisting) to help him take out the trash, and when he was tightening all the screws on our bar chairs the other day, she was right there with an allen wrench of her own, "helping." What a sweet little girl!


We moved the new chair downstairs for the Superbowl party next week, which made the sectional couch really close to the wall. Jim took that opportunity to make a tent for for Lily, which she loved.
Lily and I in the tent reading books. We found a Little Golden Book of nursery songs and we read/sang through it about 10 times. Lily loves for me to sing to her. She's just getting to the point where she wants to try singing, but I think she's not sure exactly how to do it. She bobs her head and moves her lips in big dramatic poses, but rarely makes any noise. It's super cute, though. In the car the other day, she said, "Mommy singing pretty." Awwwwwww....


Lily quote of the week:
Lily has had a runny nose (but doesn't seem sick... I'm thinking maybe 2 year molars?) and has been stuffy. So I had a tissue and was trying to "help out" with her nose situation yesterday and Lily said, "No, Lily pick nose self." Well there ya go!