Last night I had some girlfriends over for a rousing round of the highly skilled game, Bunco. Much fun was had by all, but while I was dividing up the cash prizes to the winners, I heard Lila start screaming upstairs. I knew she had gotten out of bed to go to the bathroom, so I assumed she was screaming about something totally unimportant like a bug or her pants being on the wrong way. I continued with my awards, but the screaming got much worse and more hysterical, so I started to head upstairs. I quickly noticed Lila standing in my bedroom doorway with blood running down her thumb.
Of course I immediately picked her up, ran her into the bathroom, and started cleaning her up and figuring out what happened. Amidst her sobs she looked at me and said, "Dat is not a toy for yiddle girls!" I noticed that she was gesturing to Johnny's razor. Ah yes, no that is not a toy for little girls.
The sobs continued, but I got the bleeding to stop and convinced her to put a Band-aid on it. I might add here that all my friends are still downstairs, putting this party on the list of "parties where Rachel's kids get really sick/hurt in the middle of the party" like this one. Anywho, I get Lila, who is still crying, into her bed. She starts to calm down and then immediately grows hysterical. "I can't suck my thumb!" Oh crap. She's hurt her sucking thumb.
So Lila is basically potty trained, except that at naps and bedtime she still wears a diaper. I thought I should start moving her toward being totally potty trained, so I told her before naptime today that if she went all through naptime without tinkling in her diaper she could have some M&M's. To this she responded, "Do we really have M&M's?" Once I responded that I was not lying to her and that we did indeed have M&M's, she became extremely excited to earn them.
I knew that Lila was awake from her nap because I heard her knocking on her door and asking, "Elsa?" I went up to get her out, and right when I opened the door I quickly smelled the delightful smell of a dirty diaper. Lila had a huge smile on her face, and exclaimed, "Mom! I didn't tinkle! I can have M&M's!" I confusedly said, "But Lila, you pooped." The smile got even bigger, and she replied, "I know! I didn't tinkle!"
Before we left for preschool this morning, I put Olive in the car, ran back into the kitchen and told Lila to run down to the car. As she went down the stairs, I heard Lila say, "Oh hi Olive! Oh haha dat's not Olive; dat's Baby Chloey!"
Should I be concerned that Lila was not at all concerned about the position the baby doll was in when she thought it was her baby sister?
I've been putting this off for months. I have envisioned putting Lila in the hair cutting chair only to have her collapse into extreme meltdown, totally terrified of scissors cutting off her hair. But her hair finally got to such an unruly point that I either needed to get it cut or start saying she was the neighbor's kid.
So I took her to Beckie at Hair Lovin' in downtown Overland Park, she's amazing, by the way, if you're looking for a new stylist. Though she says she doesn't know why anyone listens to me and comes to her because I get my hair cut about two times a year. Anyway, Lila sauntered right in there, waved to everyone, and scurried up into the chair.
Notice the macaron bribe on the counter.
For the most part Lila did a great job...until Beckie wanted her to keep her head straight, and the tears started flowing. Lila is apparently more of a cocked head kind of gal, and would NOT keep her head straight. But I quickly morphed into the kind of mom that I vowed I would never be and turned on Netflix. While Lila's eye glazed over, I grabbed her head with my hands and held it straight for the rest of the cut. Problem solved!
Success!
Right around the end of the haircut, I thought about how you're supposed to save a lock of your child's hair during their first haircut, but then I thought about how we were recently looking through my grandmother's photo albums and my dad found Olive chewing on and swallowing a large chunk of blonde hair, presumably my mother's or my aunt's. Soooo I'm gonna go with no hair saving in our house.
I told Lila that after the haircut she could go get a cupcake at Small Cakes in honor of Aunt Jessie's birthday and for doing a good job, but they were sold out! So I had the brilliant idea of getting her one at Wal-Mart and letting her eat it in the car.
Wipe your tears, folks! Yesterday was Lila's first day of preschool!
She was so excited!
She even got to use her frog umbrella, making it one of her favorite days in her whole short life. You may notice a change in shoes between this picture and the last. Lila extremely detests wearing tennis shoes (or sneakers or gym shoes or whatever, depending on what state you live in) but decided to suck it up and put them on about three minutes before we walked out the door. That does not mean, however, that she didn't throw a fit about thirty minutes into preschool where they had to go find my mom, who happens to work there, so that she could reason with Lila that she should keep her tennis shoes ON until nap time when she would be allowed to take them off. Hey, I say between 9 and 2, she's their problem.
We love preschool!
So much that she didn't even say hi to me when I came to pick her up. Maybe I'll just drop her off at the curb next week.
Lila finally figured out that Trader Joe's has free lollipops. And it only took a few very long seconds of her creepily staring at and standing very closely to the kids who already had lollipops to figure out where they were kept. She then sucked on it the entire way home and for another 20 minutes on the couch with Dad. She then proceeded to find me in the kitchen with her chewed up leftover stick to say, "I didn't eat it all." "You ate it all! Good job!" "No! I didn't eat it all." I stared at the chewed up stick. "Ok...you didn't eat it all..." "Yeah." And she threw away the stick. She is either confused about the purpose of the stick, or I am going to find part of a lollipop somewhere in the couch.
Oh yeah, and we have another kid too. She's pretty cute.
While I was making dinner last night, I noticed Lila going back and forth between the pantry and the dining room. This is what I discovered she was doing.
It's a little bit better than the towers she was building with food coloring last week.
Now that Olive is a big six month old she is able to play around with Lila a lot more. Their new favorite activity is going into the basement and jumping together in/on their various jumping apparati.
Lila was bugging me in the kitchen yesterday by grabbing important stuff off of the kitchen table. She got a hold of Johnny's keys, and I said, "Ugh! Just go use them to drive your little car!" Thinking that might get rid of her.
It certainly did. She even hung them on the plastic key the car came with.
Now that Olive is sleeping through the night (knock on wood), we decided to move Lila out of the guest room and back into the girls' shared room. Tonight was our first attempt, and Lila was not happy about it. Screaming, kicking, crying, the whole shabang. She eventually calmed down, but when I went upstairs to get something I noticed that she had slipped something underneath the door.
Why yes that is her play knife from her play food cake.
Besides the credit card points, one of the great things about buying $798 worth of groceries at Costco for my bulk cooking group is that we have approximately five million boxes to take to the recycling.
Lila decided to take advantage of the situation and build some bunk beds for her doll and her giraffe and her weird circley monster.
Only the giraffe actually got a blanket.
Weird circley monster had to just suck it up in the corner.
And don't worry, the rest of my cooking group paid me back. Or had their knee caps broken. Whichever one they chose.
Lila: Mama? Where are you? I miss you! I want to let you guys be with me always!
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Rachel: So what do you think you want to be for Halloween?
Lila: A Teacher! Or a mommy! When I grow up.
Rachel: I think you are confused about the difference between Halloween and growing up. For Halloween you could be a ladybug...or a princess...
Lila: I will be a princess. When I grow up.
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Upon playing with Daddy's stud finder for the fourth time.
Rachel: Lila! What did I say!?
Lila: But it's wonderful!
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While playing pretend with Aunt Lauren's roommate's cat's toys.
Lila: You are in time out! Lila: But we want to be with our Mommy and Daddy! Lila: No! You are in time out!
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Lila: I'm Track Star Lila!
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After waking up in a very bad mood from nap time. Rachel: Don't you want to go to the park with Daddy after he gets home? Lila: No! I want him to go back to Army!
In an attempt to be a "cool," "hands on," "involved" mother, I helped Lila build a fort over the weekend, a fort that she promptly decided looked like a bed and commenced playing her favorite game: "Pretend You Are Sleeping." She never even went in the fort. She just kept fake snoring.
PS. I saw something a few days ago on Pinterest bemoaning the fact that there are only something like 940 Saturdays between birth and when your kid goes to college and how you should make the most of those days. Only?! (insert furrowed brow). That's a lot of unused forts.
When we were dating in college, I always went to visit Johnny in North Carolina for the Fourth of July. We thought we'd continue the tradition and take the girls to visit Grammie and Grampie this year. Now, for some odd reason there are no direct flights from Kansas City to Raleigh, so we had a connection in Baltimore. Not a big deal, thought we.
We got to the Kansas City airport around 10:30am for our noon flight. Got a nice coffee, a blueberry muffin. You know, just living the life. I will interrupt here and say that Johnny told me Olive was dressed like a clown for this flight.
We arrived in Baltimore around 3:00, preparing to get on the quick 45 minute flight around 5:30pm. Lila and I decided to stand in line at the airport Chipotle while Johnny and Olive held down a table for us, making friends with an elderly couple going to visit their grandkids in California. While in line, Lila informed me, "Dat yady yooks pretty in her hair brush." I translated for the woman, "My daughter thinks your hair is pretty." We ate our dinner, and checked the departure monitors, noticing that our flight was delayed an hour. Bummer, but no big deal. We went to find our gate and settled down for a bit. At this point, it started hailing really hard. I suppose that should have been a red flag.
Rumors started floating around the gate area that there was a bad hurricane along the East Coast. Fabulous. Before we knew it, the flight was no longer delayed until 6:30 but was now 8:30. A girl sitting near us was growing angry and decided that she was going to go rent a car and drive to Raleigh. "Anyone who wants to can join!" she declared. Johnny and I thought about it briefly, but then decided the five hour drive wasn't worth it; our flight would get in around the same time anyway. Ba ha ha! It's funny, now.
So about three hours into our layover, Lila was really doing an excellent job. She traded off her time between playing on the iPad, pretending with her Disney princess dolls, watching cartoons, and running around in circles. Johnny decided to take Olive on a walk to see if he could get her to take a nap. While he was gone, Lila was squatting on the floor, looking at something, and then whined to me, "I have to go tinkle!" Now this was odd because Lila is not totally/anywhere near being potty trained yet, and she had a diaper on. So I kind of said, "Ok well just go," but I looked at her and realized that she had just gone and it had somehow come out the side of her diaper and completely soaked her leg.
I asked some nice ladies to watch our stuff, and I ran Lila into the bathroom. Johnny had taken the diaper bag and the stroller, so I literally had nothing to cover Lila's butt with. I stripped her down and held her as covered as a could and waited at the entrance of the bathroom in order to flag Johnny down. He showed up pretty quickly and handed off a new Pull-Up. Unfortunately, all of Lila's clothes were in a checked bag getting rained on outside (Fast-forward: I'm OCD about packing and put all of the girls clothes in labeled Ziploc gallon bags, so even though their suitcase was COMPLETELY soaked, all of their clothes were dry. Take that Southwest...and the hurricane.), so Lila had no clothes. Johnny then went on another walk around the airport with the new mission of finding child pants.
Meanwhile, Lila ran around the airport in just a Pull-Up.
After about 30 minutes, Johnny finally returned with the only child pants in the entire airport.
"Crabby in the Morning"
Though happy with our new pants, our happiness was soon dashed when we realized that our flight was being pushed back to 10:30 and then 11:00. We continued to hang out at our gate which was conveniently located by one of the airport bars. This location provided interesting companionship in the form of old people who had had too much to drink. Remember the old couple from dinner? Well that man sauntered over from his Bud Light at one point to check on Olive and actually kissed her on the head. Now I'm not overprotective of my kids with strangers, but I think that might have been a step too far. There was also an older woman who insisted on holding Olive for a few minutes while regaling Johnny with tales of her bad back and bronchitis.
By 10:00, we had one diaper left between the two girls, Olive still hadn't slept, and I was entertaining Lila by walking up one moving walkway and back on the other one ("Tick tock it's yike a clock Mama!"). It was at this point we realized that if we had rented a car at 4:30 we would have been in Raleigh already.
We FINALLY got on the plane at 11:00 and took off around 11:30. Both girls slept on the short flight, thankfully, and I was patting myself on the back for surviving a harrowing layover without a single meltdown, Lila or Mommy. As we landed and I was pridefully unclipping my little angel from her carseat, Lila totally lost it. I mean went bananas. It was almost one in the morning, and she was completely hysterical. She sobbed from the airplane to the baggage claim to the car, "I don't want to get in dat white car! No fank you! No fank you!", to Grammie and Grampie's house. It was almost two in the morning by the time I got her in her bed. At this point Johnny and I are whisper yelling at each other about where the other one put the diaper bag and so on.
Long story short: we survived. So if you ever have a two year old and a baby on a flight that connects in Baltimore, I suggest you bring an extra pair of pants.
Olive loves America! And she thought she would show it off in her five month photo!
Olive is rolling around and chewing on anything she can get a hold of. She smiles at everyone and laughs particularly at her big sister. She also knows when the United States became the United States.
I wanted to make matching 4th of July outfits for the girls this year, and I also wanted to practice my new found applique skills. But who wants a lame old firecracker shirt that says "Baby's First Fourth"? Certainly not the Hutsons. And fabric with Hello Kitty dressed as the Statue of Liberty? Excuse me? Definitely not American. So we decided to go as American as we could possibly go. George Washington.
As we all know, Lila has a slight obsession with putting things to sleep. Yesterday she decided I was next, so I lay down on the floor on this lovely little pillow. Lila quickly informed me that the pillow was NOT for me but was instead for Baby Ahyive.
This was my pillow:
When I complained, she looked at me, sighed, and said, "It's all we have."
She then proceeded to sing "Feed the Birds" to me with her own little twist at the end.
I mentioned earlier this week that Lila really likes to put her little sister to bed. But when Olive isn't around or is being uncooperative, Lila's interests have moved to basically anything else she can find. Yesterday she put the "mommy sunscreen" and the "baby sunscreen" to bed together...on top of a container of chalkboard paint...using blankets, a towel from the front door for wet shoes, two place mats, a burp cloth, and a dish towel.
I like to think she gets her inventiveness from my side of the family.
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