Fall 2010

I haven't really given you a proper update in a while, have I? The first part of the school year has been kind of a doozy for us. Jesse was working a ton of hours to get his students off to a good start, and Sara and Tim have started school, too. Church activities have geared up, and it is officially autumn.

For about a month and a half I was feverishly applying for jobs at New Seasons Market (a local grocery chain). I've heard that it is a great place to work, and it must be, as the competition for jobs was pretty intense. In the end, though, I backed off because I realized I felt challenged and busy as it was, everyone else in the house has a lot going on, and I'm guessing that adding a job to my own personal mix would be more stress than it would be worth.

Miette is more fun than ever these days. She's very communicative in her own not-so-much-word-using but still noisy way. She loves to laugh, drum on things, dance to music, shriek and splash in the bathtub, and give kisses. She learned how to climb onto the side tables in the living room and throw herself onto the couches, and she also likes to stomp her feet as fast as she can, prompting Sara and I to start calling her Happy Feet. In the space of a month, she dropped her pacifier, bottles, and morning nap - so many changes!
The other morning we were playing outside, and in between chowing down on completely green and unripe cherry tomatoes (she loves to eat them for some reason), she found a cherry pit on the ground (another favorite pastime). Before I could say my usual, "No no, Miette. Don't eat that!" she looked right at me, shook her head no, and put it back on the ground - not in her mouth. I was amazed.

More recently, her sleeping got pretty bad with lots of waking up and crying. Ugh. One night she was waking up so much we brought her bed down into our room and I was laying on our bed holding her after getting up for the 15th time. She calmed down and looked over at me with a grin, chirping, "Mommy? Mommy!" and I felt a peculiar blend of anger and adoration.

She still very rarely says mommy or dada, but often says shoes, and now cheese - which sounds exactly like shoes, something like: sschshshssss - a lot of air, no distinguishable vowel. And just in the past day or so I think she may have added 'ball' and 'down'. We'll see if those stick or if it was just a fluke. She's also jumped into some intense separation anxiety with both feet, which is hard. Thankfully I don't really have to leave her anywhere too often, but it is difficult to know when to let her suffer through it and when to just avoid leaving her at all costs. Last night, after a week or two of great uneventful sleeping, she woke up a lot again, so we brought her down to our room and Jesse was holding her to calm her down. She proceeded to throw a royal fit, twisting and arching and yelling because she wanted ME, not him. Yikes. It ended up being a wild night featuring tylenol, a 1:00am snack of banana and cheese, some crying in her crib, and a long stretch of her successfully sleeping next to me, reaching over to pat me every so often to make sure I was still there.

So there you go, our life these days in 10 or 11 nutshells...

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