More play

We had some crazy fun visitors this weekend. Here we have an "Eve sandwich."

Kids at the table. What happened to our babies? They're growing up so fast!


Molly is really looking forward to the chicken wing party this weekend. She was blurting out "drive. Oma. Grandpa. house." this morning at various times when she was playing with Rhys. This is a video I took when I noticed she was talking to herself about Grandpa and Oma and Grandma and drive while painting. When she says "cheep" I think she might be saying she drew a bird. She drew a bird with bathtub crayons in the bath the other night (really just a dot) ;) and then pointed up to the ceiling and said "bird fly."

Fashion sense

Lovin' this outfit...


So lets see, what's the silly girl up to? It's been a very quiet week. Why go anywhere when playing at home is so much fun? Molly has gotten very good at playing by herself while I cook or clean or read a magazine, so once in a while it's fun to make a point of sitting down to play with her. She's been pretending to cook a lot. She likes to serve drinks and snacks. At the library the other day she made "iced tea" and walked around saying "some? daddy?" The other night she served me "cheese" (yellow Post-it notes on her toy plates). I wandered over and saw her doing this the other day...





She is constantly talking about people she knows. We get a lot of "Rhys. Heidi. Monday." (We get together with our neighbor Heidi and her son Rhys most Mondays and Molly seems to be constantly thinking about it). Out of nowhere she'll say "ocean, Grandma" or "Bo-bo, Grandpa" or "Teddy, vacation." She talks about Lucy all the time. Today she's been saying "Eve." In one of her books says "you can have a party in your dreams tonight." The other day we read it before nap and I asked her if she was going to invite Oma and Grandpa to her party and Grandma, etc. She fell asleep listing names, almost as if she was sleep talking.

Speaking of naps, we've had a big leap forward in our nap routine. We are no longer nursing to sleep. Instead we read three books in bed, take some deep breaths, sing a few songs and then just lie there until she (usually we) fall asleep. That puts us down to nursing just two times a day, first thing in the morning and as part of the bedtime routine (not the last part, either -- she's usually awake when I put her in the crib). She doesn't even really seem to be thinking about milk at other times of the day, which is such a dramatic change from just a couple months ago. If she does ask now, I ask if she wants cow milk and usually she does. Phew!! She didn't even nurse at bedtime Tuesday because I was out getting my hair cut and she chose to rock with Daddy rather than wait for me to come home. We went 24 hours without nursing and she didn't even seem to notice.

And speaking of hair cuts, I got my hair completely chopped off and I'm not happy about it. I gave my hair dresser a picture of a messy chin-length bob and she gave me more of a shaggy, poofed hair helmet. I don't think the hair on the top of my head has ever been this short. Wah!!

So I've been wearing a lot of headbands. Molly thinks this is an exciting development. She really likes headbands.

Putting words together

Molly just tripped in the kitchen while Jim was packing his lunch. She stood up and innocently said to him, "Kiss. Butt. Kiss. Butt." She had no idea why we were laughing.

Swimming

We took Molly to Good Harbor Beach in Gloucester yesterday. She really loves swimming. We've taken her to a couple local pond beaches and she really got into it. This was her first swim in the ocean. It helped that it was probably 90 degrees and unbelievably humid, so the icy water was really refreshing.

Imagination

It blows my mind how all of a sudden Molly has learned how to play on her own. This morning while I was folding laundry she took a curved block over to the screen door to our deck and held it up to the door frame and said "fix." Then she picked another shape block and carried it over and held it up. After a while she had a little pile of blocks in front of the door and she said "tools." (We just fixed our screen door recently and she's been following Daddy around lately watching him fix things with tools).

Just now as I was catching up on blogs she was filling a glass with water in the sink and stirring it with a fork and saying "cook." The other day she found three chopsticks and a sushi rolling mat in a drawer and it kept her busy for a ridiculous amount of time. She rolled the sticks into the mat and, I assume, did a bunch of other stuff -- I was so grateful to have some time to focus on my own stuff that I missed most of it. Here was the part when she was laughing and sticking the chopsticks into the wheels of this desk chair.

She spent a while trying to get them to stay in her pockets. She LOVES clothes with pockets.
This is almost as delightful as the new words she blurts out every day. I can't keep up. It's amazing the amount of things she's absorbing. She can pretty routinely count to three and occasionally makes it to four. She has recently added orange and yellow to her repertoire of colors and even gets colors right most of the time now. Just yesterday we noticed that she's starting to put "s" on the end of plural words, something you really only notice when she says
things like "two sheeps" or "two milks."

We've had a lot of activity in the past week, the highlight being a visit from Oma and Grandpa. One of the coolest things about her learning to talk is she can tell us at odd moments when she's thinking about somebody. All this week it's been "Grandpa. Oma." all the time. Now she's randomly saying "Freddy" because we just watched a video of him and "Lucy" because we saw her picture (she didn't even need me to tell her who Lucy was -- she just saw the picture and started saying it). We were in the sandbox yesterday and she held up a toy and said "Grandma."

A few more random shots. On a whim (because her nap was short and I felt like I would go crazy if we stayed home all day) I took Molly blueberry picking yesterday. She ate herself silly and then we went to a playground to continue eating ourselves silly. It was the first time I felt like I could just sit at a distance and let her climb around by herself on the smaller part of the playground. After we were there a while, a mom showed up with a baby and two older boys (3 and 5) and Molly walked right into in the middle of the boys' Star Wars/army/Transformers game. They pretended she was the bad guy, climbed over her and even at one point playfully kicked her. She ran around after them and couldn't get enough. She followed them up a ladder and down a big-kid slide. At one point one of the boys shouted "activate!" and Molly said "activate!" It was fantastic.

Here we are back at home with an empty blueberry container -- a whole quart consumed in less than 24 hours.



Oh, and one more shot. This is Molly licking homemade hummus. She gets right up close when I'm cooking and wants to eat everything ... bread dough, jalepeno peppers, raw green beans. It makes things pretty crazy. She's taken to taking big bites out of raw onion.

Now she wants peaches. She's been very patient. Time for lunch!

A Day at the Beach

This morning we took Molly up to Portsmouth, NH to play at the ocean. Below are a few pictures from out adventure.

Molly gets suited up to go

Our first stop to see the rocks and the ocean

After which we hit the playground for some swings and sliding. Molly really enjoyed seeing daddy on the slide.

Strolling the streets of Portsmouth after lunch

Molly enjoyed seeing the "Bath!"

A fountain at Strawberry Banke park captivates Molly

Zoo

Jim's taking a few days off work this week, so we kicked off the mini vacation today with a trip to Southwick's Zoo. We weren't sure how much Molly would get out of it, but she had a great time. For at least the first hour, if not two, she was interested in the animals, especially the monkeys.

Here she is with the baby giraffe, also named Molly.

When we talked about the zoo before we got there, I was telling her what kind of animals we might see and she fixated on the giraffes. This morning she picked up a dinosaur magnet and told me it was a giraffe. Turned out it was a diplodocus, but it did have a long neck -- very clever. Anyway, the giraffes at the zoo were really cool, but it turned out Molly wasn't very interested in them.

Here we are at the deer exhibit. It was around this point where she became more interested in the green bench than the animals.

Looking at the Watusi bulls...

Watching, and getting greeted by, the gibbons (monkey-like apes).


OK, Molly's licking my leg and my feet (saying "yuck" but still licking) and saying "Bunny. Bunny." I've made her wait long enough. Time to visit our own little basement zoo.