Baby Rimes

So, as 5:30 rolled around again Tuesday morning, Mommy’s principal called and said those precious words “snow day.”

With that, Baby and Mommy had a grand morning of playing in the living room before heading off to daycare to play with our friends.

Mommy totally needed the day off. Although, by 1 pm I thought, hmm, what are the odds of another day off? Nah, no way. Besides by then, I had totally had enough of the whole snow day thing and was anxious to get back into my regular schedule.

I had two glorious days of crafting, sewing, cooking, eating, and playing with my baby.

Daddy had to work both days.

What’s the latest at Camp Rimes?  The terrible twos.  Yup, I know, she’s only 18 months (will be on the 1st, anyway).  She is independent, opinionated, and very aggressive.

Her latest trick is to bite Mommy.  Whenever Mommy turns around to do something on her own (like stir the macaroni or go to the bathroom) little miss decides she is not getting nearly the attention due to her.  She grabs a hold  of one of my legs, or a sleeve, or whatever she can grab and then takes a big ol’ bit out of Mommy’s nice, soft flesh.  At first, I was quite distraught over this development. What an awful Mommy I was for allowing my child to even get to this stage. Then, I realized, wait, she’s not that unique, other moms must be going through this as well.

Sure enough, a few clicks on the internet and there’s my answer.  Yep, everyone goes through some biting, kicking, pushing, yelling, and otherwise being a terrible two.

So, we have started ignoring her when she bites us.  She gets a time out where Mommy and Daddy ignore her and pay no attention whatsoever to her.  It seems to be making no difference to her at all.  But we’ll keep up with it and hopefully this biting thing will be done soon.

We’ve also been showing her “nice touches” on her favorite kitty.  She likes to pet Kitty, so it seems to slow her down at least.  She still tries to grab on to my arm like a rottweiller,  but at least it buys me another 5 minutes of stirring the mac and cheese.

Until the time when she becomes a serene three year old,  we will just start referring to her as our little vampire.

Even though it was a Sunday, we still had ourselves a lovely snow day.  We all got up at 7 am and peeked out the windows to see the snow falling in light, flaky drifts.  How pretty.  Daddy thought, hmmm, maybe I should go out and shovel.  Mommy said, nah, let’s eat some breakfast first.  8am and we peek outside again, and the snow is falling so thick that we couldn’t see the houses across the street.  yikes!  Now is not a good time for shoveling either.  Let’s play a game!

  that’s the view from our front porch
9 am, let’s call Papa and see if they’ve gotten out of their driveway yet for church.  Nope.  They didn’t finish their driveway until 10, but then couldn’t get out of their driveway because the roads hadn’t been plowed.

11 am.  No church, maybe we should start shoveling.  Daddy goes out to start shoveling and makes a teeny tiny path to the garage.  Mommy goes out a little later and re-shovels the teeny tiny path.

Here’s what the driveway looked like at 11.

By 2 pm, we had about 20 inches of snow.  Daddy and Mommy had both taken turns shoveling the driveway a couple more times, and finally decided that if we could just get the CR-V out of the garage, we were going to splurge at Lowe’s for a snow blower.  Not just any snow blower, no way.  We were going to get ourselves a big, fat monster, eat through anything snow blower.

4 pm, Daddy arrives with monster snowblower to finish the work in 30 minutes.  Nice.

So, overall, we had 4 hours of procrastinating about shoveling, 3+ hours of actual shoveling, and 30 minutes to do more than half the driveway with a snowblower.

Hooray for snowblower!

Lately, we’ve been really pushing the words with Baby Rimes. When she says, “Eeeaa,” we say, “would you like something to eat?”  When she says, “teee,” we say, “would you like to brush your teeth?”  And, when she says, “cooee,” we respond, “are you putting on your coat?”

But, the other morning, as Daddy and I were sitting in our bedroom chatting while Baby was on the floor playing, she simply astounded us.  She looked up at Daddy, said, “Eeaa.”  He said, “Are you hungry?”  She got up, turned around to the door, and said, as clear as could be, “Time to eat!” and marched off to the kitchen.

We stood there looking after her, and then at each other, both asking, was that what we think she said?  Yup, there she was, standing in the kitchen at the refrigerator, ready for breakfast.

It’s amazing what happens when you aren’t looking.

 

It’s our newest word.  I’m so astounded how, quite all of a sudden, we have a linguist on our hands.  She’s even putting together little phrases and requests.

This morning, it was apple.  Well, more app-ple with a little pause in the middle.  So, I handed her the big red apple on the counter.  She looked so pleased with herself and took a big bite out of it. 

Baby Rimes can almost make the shopping list all on her own now.

We’d have a lot of Nannas, App-ples, jue, maah, and cheeee. 

With all that time off for the holidays, what do you think we did?  Well, besides visiting the fam, and opening presents, we also painted a bathroom, went to a New Year’s Eve party (for awhile), and took a trip into Chicago.

Here’s some photos from our trip to the Shedd Aquarium.

    

The dolphins.

The Caribbean Reef and a giant fish.

Standing over the rays habitat.

We all had a great time watching the fish swim, the dolphins play, and the baby beluga with her mommy.

Happy New Year!

Now with pictures!

Santa visited while we were gone!

           

Christmas at the farm.

     

Christmas with the Herrmans.

Overall, she had a pretty good Christmas.  Lots of toys, lots of unwrapping, lots of treats, and lots of hugs.

Hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas!

Here’s a post just for Nicole.
We do have a Christmas tree this year. We wrapped up our little ornament stealer and trudged out to a tree farm with Aunt Sara and Uncle Paul. She was such a trooper. Even the cold hands weren’t enough to stop her from checking out all the mud puddles between the trees. She even got to wear her new purple boots.
Mommy and Daddy finally chose a beautiful white fir tree. It had nice fluffy branches, wasn’t too scratchy, and so full that we wouldn’t need any ornaments for little fingers to break.
We brought the tree home and it was then that we realized we had chosen an 9′ tree with a 5′ span. That would never fit in our tiny living room.
So what to do with the perfect tree? Screw the tree stand into our kitchen porch and put up our tree outside. Crisis averted and ornament problem solved.
We now enjoy our first live tree as a family from the warmth of our living room.

Pictures will follow as soon as Mommy can find the camera cord to plug it into the computer.

“What’s on the cereal box?”
“BABY!”
“Who’s that in the book?”
“BABY!”
“Who’s on the Huggies box?”
“BABY!”

Yes, that’s our word of the week. Daddy took our own baby to the grocery store last weekend and they got stopped up in the baby aisle. Our little munchkin took her sweet time walking down that particular aisle pointing out EVERY SINGLE BABY on the shelves.

It’s a good thing Daddy has such a good sense of humor. There must have been at least 100 babies on those shelves. Now, I’m not sure she got every one of them, but I’m sure she will next week.

Baby’s first Turkey Day that she could actually appreciate has come and gone.  She amused the visitors with belly button antics, ba-byes, and kisses.  She loved the sweet potatoes, corn, green beans, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie. Mommy and Daddy did too. 

A big thanks to all the early gift givers as well.  Baby loves her new baby doll, the singing dolphins, and Mommy loves all the nice warm pink pants. 

The long weekend was really nice.  Baby Rimes got to go outside and play in the leaves that Mommy and Daddy tried raking.  She also enjoyed sleeping in and visiting with Grandma while Mommy and Daddy got some much needed time away from the house and the Baby. Thanks Grandma!