Labor Day Weekend & Week Ending 9/8/09

Kaley is growing so much. We noticed teeth five and six today for the first time. That’s a lot of teeth for a little one. She’s also started grinding her teeth. It sounds awful and just makes me cringe. Last week she mastered self-feeding. She’s been working on it for awhile now, but last week she finally figured out how to pick things up between her forefinger and thumb and get it into her mouth consistently. It’s made mealtime less stressful because she can entertain herself with her food. She does enjoy looking over the side of her high chair, opening her hand, watching the food fall, and laughing as the dogs eating it. And of course banging the tray so the Cheerios bounce wildly is also lots of fun. She’s incredibly active. She’s always moving, squirming, rolling, reaching for things, etc. It makes it difficult to hold her. But she loves being held and squirming all over the place. So much fun but really, really tiring.

And the latest and greatest in Kaley news is that she really knows the word “Mama.” She uses it so often that Makayla has even started calling me that sometimes. It’s cute and it’s fun that she’s really nailed it since she’s been playing with it for almost two months. The problem is I only hear it when she wants me to feed her or pick her up. Therefore it’s not a particularly happy word. Hopefully that will change.

One night last week at dinner Makayla was thanking Jarl for making dinner. Then she looked at me and said, “Mom, thanks for not making dinner.” Ouch. Yep that ones goes right up there with the kids telling me that Jarl reads books better and that they’d rather have him read to them. Lovely mommy moments.

I went to Makayla’s school for a conference/fill-out-a-million-papers thing today. She loved being there and playing with the puzzles and such. She’s excited that it’s finally her turn to go to school. She’s dropped Jacob off for the last two years and has struggled with that because she’s done everything with Jacob and gotten everything Jacob’s got at the same time practically. She’ll start next Monday. Her class time overlaps perfectly with Jacob’s—so much so that she’ll be late everyday because we have to drop Jacob off first—so I’ll get about a three hour break from the two of them. I’m looking forward to that and will be working hard to train Kaley to sleep during that time so I can have time to myself.

Jacob continues to enjoy Kindergarten and didn’t even freak out when I was late to pick him up today. We cut out of Makayla’s conference thing early and were still late picking him up. He also brought home his first homework packet. Every night he gets to practice writing his name, doing two handwriting worksheets, practice counting ten objects, and getting read to for twenty minutes. It’s a lot of work to be a five year old. And it’s even more work to be a five year old’s mother. But it’s also lots of fun.

We really enjoyed the long weekend and having Jarl home more. Saturday we all went hiking in Millcreek Canyon with the dogs. At the fork in the trail we let Jacob pick which way we went. We didn’t know the path he picked but we took it anyway. We ended up hiking up the mountain on switchbacks for 45 minutes until we turned around and went back. Next time I’ll insist we stick to the relatively flat Pipeline Trail. It was good to get out and do something with just our family. We really enjoyed being in the mountains and spending time together. And Molly and Penny were thrilled to be included.

The kids did well and hiked on their own for 90 minutes. Jacob only tripped twice (because no matter how many times we remind him he won’t watch where he’s going). He skinned both knees and elbows and cried like it was the end of the world. But three days later he’s over it (and yes it really took three days). After we hiked we had a picnic lunch. Makayla fell over backwards off the bench and smacked her head hard. It was sad and yet another illustration of why Jarl and I are always nagging them to sit on their pockets.

With the return of football season, we’ve continued our tradition of going to my parents to watch the BYU away games. It’s really nice this year because we can record the games at home and then leave my parent's when we’re ready, put the kids the bed, and then pick up where we left off in the game. Very slick. And Saturday was lots of fun because our BYU Cougars beat 3rd ranked Oklahoma by 1. Jarl was so excited to tell me we dropped to number 9 in AP poll when he got home today. We’re hoping to have a good rest of the season and break into one of the BCS bowls. But we always hope that.

Monday we stayed home and worked on stuff around the house. Jarl even shocked me by painting the ceiling in our room. We’ve only had the paint to paint our room since before the kids came the first time last year. Then we planned to paint over Thanksgiving last year until the kids came back. So after a year and half we’ve started working on it again. Now I just need to make myself paint the walls while the kids are at school and Kaley is asleep. Slowly but surely we’re getting the house to where we want it.