Facetime

I am at a conference for a few days, which has enabled us to try our first facetime (video) phone calls. The last two nights I have talked to Matt and Victoria just before the little girl's bedtime and it has been so precious. I wish I could videotape the phone calls to show her when she is older. She recognizes mama right away, and seems to understand immediately that we can talk back and forth. We wave at each other, and blow kisses. Tonight after we talked about her shower, her puzzles, and her sippy cup of water, she kept leaning forward to kiss the phone. It was so cute, and of course I reciprocated. I'm sure I looked pretty silly in the conference center parking lot kissing my phone. She was also able to show me her toy airplane in a video chat fly-by.

iPhone: $200. Monthly service: $ a lot. Being able to "kiss" your one-year-old goodnight: Priceless.

Wordless Wednesday: Daddy bought me this cool jet

Wordless Wednesday: reading the comics

Apple Picking

It's that time of year again, and this year our apple tree is loaded down with more apples than we've seen yet. It's Matt's job to climb the four wheeler/ladder, and Victoria's job to pick off leaves.

Occasionally one of them falls ...

And sometimes the four wheeler has to be moved to a new position ...

Victoria really likes the bucket and takes great pride in her work.

Look at all those beautiful apples we've collected!

And of course, the other two girls love being out in the field just as much as Victoria.

Happy puppies!

Matt took a few more shots of Piper having fun ...

 Back in the house, it's time for a snack of fresh-picked apples.

And today, we made homemade applesauce!! I felt like a huge success when my daughter, all smiles, kept asking for "MORE!" and saying, "nummy!!"

There was even some to freeze for winter.

There are plenty more apples where that came from, so now I can't wait to make more!

Ultrasounds

Back at 11 weeks, I had an ultrasound as part of a pregnancy screening.

Baby Moses was pretty cooperative at that ultrasound, giving crystal clear images of this cute little alien-like Pinocchio ... seriously, check out these photos.

Here is a picture of the baby's head, looking down towards its forehead. Here is where I see an alien resemblance.

And here is the super long nose! The ultrasound tech said having a lot of cartilage built up is normal at 11 weeks.

Isn't amazing at just 11 weeks this little one looks so baby-like already? Here is a profile shot of Baby all nestled in.

And in this photo you can clearly see an arm lifted up, fist to forehead. I think this is my favorite of all the ultrasound shots I've seen for this baby.

So cute!

Shortly after this ultrasound I was able to feel little flutters when the baby moved. In the last couple weeks, that has been upgraded to full-fledged thumping. The movement never stops (just like with Victoria). At my 20 week OB appointment on Monday, the doctor had a difficult time getting a heart rate because every time she could hear the heart beat on the monitor, Baby would move before the monitor could get a count.

So ... we should have suspected that this little mover and shaker might be slightly problematic at the 20 week ultrasound. We went into it very excited to find out the baby's sex.

Baby moved so fast the profiles were a little blurry. You can see head and chest and at least one little hand...

The tech had to take several measurements multiple times because the movements were making it difficult. She commented on how much this baby was moving, and Matt added his frequently-said opinion: "If this baby is as active as Victoria, we will have our hands full!"

By the end of the ultrasound, baby curled up with back towards us. Any glimpses the tech had seen previously had been obscured by the umbilical cord between baby's legs. At this point, baby didn't move much, though. The tech said, "This is pretty unusual, but I can tell you for sure that ... I just don't know."

In my opinion, there are lots of signs that this is a girl ...

• The heart rate is higher. My doc says the "wives' tale" is that higher heart rates are girls. Even though she calls it a wives' tale, she said it seems to be true most of the time.
• Victoria is positive it is a girl. If we ask her, she will say "sistah" or "dirl" (girl) or "my sistah."
• My intuitive feelings when I try to "reach" out to baby suggest girl as well.
• My uncle thinks it is a girl. He has accurately predicted my cousin's and my babies.
• I've heard that moms tend to be sicker with girls. I'm definitely just as sick with this baby as with V.
• As I told Matt after yesterday's ultrasound ... don't you think if it's a boy, the tech would have been able to see something?

So, at this point, we're leaning towards girl. Baby Moses just must have felt we needed a little bit of extra mystery in our lives and didn't want to confirm our hunch. Obviously, we will adore this baby no matter what, and we don't have any preference for a girl or boy ... it's just that if it's a boy, we will be surprised!

I will be pulling out all the baby clothes which just happen to be girls' clothes. If it's a boy, we'll just have to start shopping after Baby is born. And we will have names picked out for either!

Helping

Victoria LOVES to help. And we love having her help. Projects and tasks are such a great way for her to learn things, and it makes our lives so much easier when she is interested in following us around as we get stuff done.

This may have been her favorite "chore" lately: helping Daddy mow our field.

Around and around on the four wheeler. What could be better? While she monitored Daddy, I was able to do some painting, gardening, and mowing of my own.

Another recent day, Matt was bolting down the pergola on our deck. V actually left her pool to crawl around in spider webs and dirt to watch him.

 You can see in the background that Piper's version of help involves watching for chipmunks and birds.

Toria has helped Mommy too, often with pleasantly surprising results. For instance, last week I was picking up around the house, and kept handing her items to put away. I asked her to put Mommy's jacket in Mommy's room. I asked her to put dirty clothes in her dirty clothes basket. To make things even more confusing, V has her current bedroom, plus her "new bedroom" we are working on. I asked her to take my clean paint brushes, saying, "go put these with the painting supplies in your new bedroom."

I didn't actually expect anything to end up in the right places, ESPECIALLY those going into her bedroom versus her new bedroom. Later that night, I was surprised to find even the paint brushes carefully tucked into a roller tray. I love that she can truly help us with chores! She impresses me every day.

One of my favorite helping scenes is when she helps Daddy fill the bird feeders. If Matt even mentions filling the bird feeders, she marches off to the barn at full speed. She knows her job: find and carry the cardboard tray that catches excess bird seed. She insists on carrying it all the way to the bird feeders, watching Daddy fill, and carrying it all the way back to the barn.

One day while she was filling the feeders with Matt, I was in the garden picking vegetables. When she saw me coming around the corner with a basket full of vegetables, she literally yelled at me for picking them without her. I guess now we need to stagger our chores so she can help with everything we do.

What a cutie! Or as Toria would say, "I tute."

like father, like daughter

I could have titled this "monkey see monkey do." I actually think Toria would like that title better. She's really into monkeys lately, including the monkey on one of her favorite iPad apps. Yep, here is the two of them one morning, each with an iPad.

Several mornings in a row, the first thing we would hear Victoria calling from her crib was "iPad! iPad!"  She loves to sit next to daddy on the "piwwow" (pillow) and play games while Mommy gets ready for work.

stop and smell the roses

Kids live life in the moment, and believe in stopping to smell the flowers.

It encourages us to make time for  things we wouldn't otherwise have done ...

... like feeding the seagulls in Canal Park and marveling over their acrobatics.

 

(on a side note, while at dinner after the seagull feeding, Victoria was very content to sit and color her menu and munch on lemon slices, making very cute sour faces every time she put a lemon in her mouth)

The moments that make a difference are things like sharing a blueberry muffin with Grandpa.

Or watching out the window at all the birds in the mountain ash tree.

I love how sharing a day with Victoria makes everything so much more fun. Like the morning we went to watch a local triathlon. Rather than watch by myself, Victoria and I got muffins and coffee (the latter for mommy, not V) and ate them by the harbor before cheering together for all the athletes (for runners she would say "munning!" and clap. When a bike went by, it was "bike!" and clap).

 
Old ship anchors are perfect for climbing and sitting on.

 

There are plenty of relaxing and fun times around our house, too.

V is especially proud of her ability to "help" by putting water in the puppies' ("putties") pool for them.

 Notice how much water also ended up on her shirt and skirt.

She likes having us bring "my tent!" out into the yard, where she can play in her own little world. Sometimes she likes to shut the door and hide (or play peekaboo) and sometimes she wants us to visit her in the tent. It's especially funny when we can get one of the "putties" to come in the tent with us.

When you're little, there are also innumerable places to sit and take a break. Toria likes finding rocks, steps, and door ledges that make convenient little chairs.

Why doesn't she look so happy in the below photo? This is her, on her way to her first "friend" birthday party, and she isn't very happy that this brightly wrapped package, complete with "putty" on top, is not for her.

She did have fun at the party, though ... her friend Tenley had awesome toys for all the kids to play with. Life is one big adventure, right Toria?

Jenn's Birthday

Yesterday I wrote about Matt's birthday. Today I'll write about mine, which was way back at the beginning of August. Can you tell we are playing catch-up with photos?

I wanted to eat at Valentini's for their delicious, fresh-tasting pasta primavera. We had some time beforehand to stop at the Rose Garden.

It was hot, but that didn't stop Victoria from running in circles inside the gazebo. She ran and ran and ran. When she grew a little tired and fell, she gave her shoes a dirty look, took them off, and just kept running in circles!

We then played in the water fountain for a bit before heading over to the restaurant.

 

I don't think any of us wanted to leave, but at least we had good food to look forward to. A very nice way to spend a birthday.

Sunberries!

At the beginning of summer, V didn't like tomatoes. Whenever I tried to put them on her plate, she would make a face and push them away.

But I knew the Sun Golds (a variety of cherry tomatoes) I was growing in the garden would be sweeter and juicier. I was convinced she would like them, if only she would try them.

The solution came to me over the course of June and July, when I saw how quickly Victoria took to picking strawberries and raspberries right out of the garden and plopping them in her mouth.

And not just the garden. On any walk around the property she had Mommy and Daddy looking for wild raspberries, too. Check out all these wild berries we picked one hot summer morning:



So, my perhaps-devious solution was to call those little cherry tomatoes "berries." At our house, the Sun Gold tomatoes are now called ... sunberries!

And Victoria loves them. She will eat them by the dozen, tomato seeds and juice dripping down her chin and onto her clothes. The only danger we have now is making sure she doesn't try to eat them whole, as she is still little enough that Mommy likes to give her only half a sunberry at a time.

Among the many garden-teaching successes of the summer is getting V to eat tomatoes, teaching her where fruits and vegetables come from, getting her to help pick beans, and even getting her to try (and love) grilled zucchini.

Matt's Birthday

Matt's birthday was a couple weeks ago. Victoria and I took him out to JJ Astor, the revolving restaurant at the top of the Radisson Hotel. Dinner was delicious, and Victoria was super well behaved -- amazing considering she hadn't napped that day at all. I was nervous taking her to a nicer restaurant, but she ate her meal well and even wiped her mouth with her cloth napkin. After dinner, Daddy showed her the views of the Duluth harbor. A very nice evening with our little family!