Only 11 to go!

Teeth, that is ;-). Ria now has 9 of them!

Ria is up one more tooth, her 1st molar. If our experience with this molar is any indication of what is to come with the remaining ones.....well.....just pity us.

This tooth has been torturing the family for over a month. We thought it SHOULD have broken skin a month ago, her gum has been looking like a boa constrictor that swallowed an elephant for weeks. But after a week of rubbing the gum once a day with a rough washcloth wrapped around an ice cube.....the elephant disappeared (must have been a cyst or something, oops!), and the next day we broke skin!

Whee!

Now, just 11 more to go.

Happy Christmas, etc!!!

Happy Christmas, God Jul!

We had a lovely little holiday here, the four of us. Ria helped Daddy blow up a globe, Iain and Daddy built with Iain's cool new marble maze, we had many fancy meals, and then Ria looked cute hanging out in her new tent, and wearing her new crown:

We finished up Ria's room:

And Ria and Iain watched as Daddy wired up his new electronic toy!

Ahhhhh......

After 3 months of concerted effort, Ria is FINALLY out of our bedroom! She has her own room upstairs now. (Its not "set up" properly, so no pictures yet.)

We really didn't expect it to take so long to complete the process, but clearly we'd been dumping stuff more than a bit in the one remaining "extra" room, so there was a lot to get rid of. Between computer and server re-setup and updating, and curtains, and just generally loads of old CR** piled up in there, its taken a while.

But now....we can turn the light on in our room when we go to bed. Maybe read a little. We're even allowed to snore without fears we'll wake Ria up and end up with a "bad night".

What Joy!

More Grandmother, and "Grandmother Christmas"

Ria has taken to emptying out the pantry....here she is caught in the act:

After almost a week of being quite sick on her visit, Grandmother finally was feeling better, so she and Iain decided to make mincemeat pies. Iain cut out all the decorations for the tops of the pies, and here he is carefully dipping a pastry brush in water to paste the decorations on.

Hey! Mom's taking a picture! SMILE!

Then, on Saturday morning, we had Christmas #1, "Grandmother Christmas":

Grandmother Visits! and Xmas tree raising

Grandmother is visiting!

Here Ria reads under Grandmother's chair:

Then the kids decorated the Christmas tree (which means, Iain carefully placed only decorations that are safe for Ria to chew on the bottom 1/3 of the tree, and Ria pulled off ornaments and chewed them).
Grandmother watches as Iain figures out how to adjust the Lucia crown to fit his head:

oom-ing hoof crawl!

Cows say "Oooom".
Dogs say "Hooof".

And Rias can crawl properly (when on carpet, so its not slippery, and when not carrying things, so her 2nd hand isn't busy).

And Rias get REALLY annoyed when they see little kids, her own age who can WALK, when SHE CAN'T....angry WAAAAAAAH!

That's all for today!

Kissy kissy!

Today Ria learned how to make kissy noises. Here's a video:

And one more piece of exciting news.....

Ria made it through almost 2/3 of a breakfast/cereal bar before she crushed it in her fingers and tried to rub it in her hair! Maybe someday she won't feel a need to pre-process all her food by squishing it all through her fingers, decorating all accessible parts of her body with it and licking the remains off her fingers and palms.... WHEEEE!

We're starting to hit the stage of Ria's life where, for the next 6 months or so, we're convinced we will have no more than 1 child. Hmm....that might not work so well since we already have 2, but still, the 5:30 am fights are going, the intense interaction needs, the molars (lower left is not quite there, but soon), the practicing for walking (all night, and all day), together with the ongoing desire to kill herself by eating/chewing/crawling/poking things inappropriately. Its balanced by an exquisite joy permeating every pore of her being (damn, but they're cute!), but I find myself at the end of the day, utterly exhausted, without even a single neat room or folded pile of laundry in the house. (All the folded piles of laundry tend to need to be refolded at least once, because Ria likes playing with the folded laundry, and then Iain helps her enjoy herself by being even more effective at distributing the laundry far and wide.)

With Iain, we recall that at 18 and 19 months we were CERTAIN that we would never do this to ourselves again, but then by the time he was 22 months we were contemplating if we wanted a 2nd child, so once we hit that crescendo, there's a sudden improvement in sleep quality and death-defying behaviours. Nonetheless, she's about 14 months now, so for the next 5-6 months, we're going to be wrecks. Then, suddenly, around 8 ish months from now, we will suddenly start living a much calmer life, and the never ending chaos won't be so overwhelming.

So, there's the news from Lake Woe-be-gone!