Helping With Laundry

The girls have trouble understanding that when I'm folding laundry, they are not supposed to unfold it and throw the clothes around the room.  So to distract them, I let them wear some of Daddy's shirts.

 

Baby Hutson 2.0 at 13 Weeks

Well, you officially get to look at fat pictures of me for the next while, so get excited.



Baby Hutson 2.0 is now 13 weeks old.  We have said good-bye to the first trimester as well as good-bye to the dizziness and late afternoon/evening sickness.  Baby 2.0 is the size of a peach and has a head, arms, legs, a beating heart, vocal cords, and even intestines.

Lila seems to be taking all of this very well.

The Best Kind of Neighbors

We have a very sweet older woman who lives next door.  Her husband died a few years ago, and her only son and daughter-in-law live in Texas with her grandson.  We've helped her out with a few things, but honestly, we haven't really done much beyond Christmas cookies.  She flagged us down the other day, however, and gave us this dress that she bought for Lila! How sweet is that?

So Lila wore it to church yesterday, and then she and Johnny went over to our neighbor's house to say, "Thank you."



Johnny also brought her some oatmeal cookies and tried to hand them to her as she stood at the door.  She told him to stop until she could come outside to take them from him because she's Russian, and it's apparently a Russian superstition that you shouldn't pass food over the threshold. Who knew?



Lila prefers to just hold food in her mouth.  Like the raisins she had in her mouth the entire time I was trying to take her picture.

 

 Delicious. 

Pinterest Envy

I rarely peruse the "kids" section of Pinterest because it makes me feel like my kids are under-stimulated cave children who eat anything they get their hands on (I mean you really let your 18 month old play in a "sensory tub" filled with beans and you're NOT doing the Heimlich every 20 seconds? And edible play dough?  Remind me why we are encouraging eating art media again?).

But today, while everyone was napping, I found myself bored with the "food and drinks" section, so I hopped on over to "kids."  I got all excited to do messless finger paint with the kids and to practice their fine motor skills by putting stuff into other stuff.  So this is what our fun play time looked like before they got up from naps.



Then Little Sister got up first and immediately tried to open the Ziploc bags full of finger paint.  I couldn't find any tape to close them with, so that idea ended right there.  She did enjoy, however, putting straws into a milk jug.

And then Lila got up.  The game quickly turned into how quickly can you dump all the straws out and then leave the room and go upstairs so that mom has to clean it up.

I think I'll stick with looking at Christmas decorations.

First Sentences

Lila has been talking up a storm lately, so I wanted to make sure that I documented some of her first sentences.



The very first sentences that she said were variations on "Bye bye" and "Night night" with a person's name added.  For example: "Bye bye Dada"  "Night night baby."  Thrilling, I know.

The first interesting sentence that she said, however, was when she and I were in the car, and she had been rewarded with one of those applesauce pouch things.  She was upset because she couldn't get any more to come out, so she loudly proclaimed, "Mama, sceez it!"  Asking me, of course, to squeeze more of the applesauce up.

Now much of her day is spent asking for "More cackahs!", saying "Sossy" when she does something wrong, making different animal noises (including snail which is kind of a slurping sound), and identifying every object that she knows (which is pretty much dog, book, and bug).

We love our little Lila Margaret.  She is currently sitting in my lap while I'm trying to finish this begging that we watch the "puhpuh!" on youtube.

Socks

Lila found a sock in the living room yesterday and begged me to put it on her foot.  Because it was one of Little Guy's, I told her that I would go get her one of her own pairs of socks to wear.  Being the smart mom that I am, while getting a pair for Lila, I also got a pair for Little Sister thus avoiding a major screaming match of, "Mine! Mine! Mine!"  Actually girls, Daddy bought these, so they technically belong to him.  I digress.



Anyway, the girls haven't really worn socks since maybe April or May, and once I put them on, it was like they had no idea what these foot coverings were.  They were slowly and tenderly walking around the first floor, pointing to their feet and laughing to themselves about these ridiculous "ocks."

I wonder how they'll feel about pants.

The Hutson Family Vehicle

Well, while Johnny was gone for two weeks for National Guard, I did what every wife does when their husband is gone: buy a new car!  I've been scanning craigslist for two months looking for either a Toyota Highlander or a Honda Pilot.  We had very specific criteria because we were planning to pay with cash (no debt makes life better, folks!), so I had been looking and looking to no avail.

But finally, last week I found a great deal on a 2003 Honda Pilot.  It can fit all of our kids plus our double stroller and our groceries, which was the first criterion, and it's not a mini van, which was the second.



Lila was also very excited to find out that it has a DVD player.  We don't watch a lot of TV, but the drive out to our foster kids' visits is an hour round trip, so I popped in Beauty and the Beast, and Lila about had a conniption.  She was kicking her legs and laughing and kept yelling "Mama!" and then pointing to the DVD player.

She stopped laughing, though, the first time that the Beast came on.  After that she just said "Mama" over and over with a worried expression on her face.  We might just stick with Winnie the Pooh for today's visit.

PS. I might add that Lila inherited this fear of the Beast from my sister.  Our grandma didn't have a lot of movies (Old Yeller, Fantasia), but she did have Beauty and the Beast.  However, we could never watch it because Jessie, even as an elementary schooler, was too afraid of the Beast.  Will I ever be allowed to watch it?!  Sheesh.