No camera for a few weeks

Check out the cool image artifact on our 3.25 month old camera (click on the image to zoom it up to full size for a good look):

Its been sent in for fixing....so no pictures for a few weeks....sorry!

15 months old!

Whee! Ria is 15 months old!
(Well, technically that was last week, but the pediatrician visit was yesterday, so we only now have the all important stats ;-) Weight: 24# 11oz (11.2 kg) = ~75%
Height: 32.5" (82.5 cm) = ~95%
Head circumference: 47.7 cm = ~90%

11 teeth (that's 1 more than yesterday!)
stands & pulls to standing
cruises along the furniture
crawls properly
can climb the full flight of stairs (but can't go down)
1 nap

She's not yet walking, but we saw her let go for maybe 1 or 2 seconds the other day while standing, so she's contemplating to start working it soon! She is completely stable when "standing" on her knees, and when standing on her feet she just holds on with one hand.

We've been forced (largely by her crankiness at us feeding her) to allow her a spoon and full access to her morning bowl of applesauce and yoghurt. Its somewhat terrifying, but not as bad as we'd feared.

There are meals where she spends her whole time working her fork technique, and I swear no food gets in, but she's happy.

She's finished with "Qaaaaaaak", and has moved on. She no longer calls cats "ki-i", now they (and all animals) are labeled with their sounds. "Eeeow": cat, "hoof": dog, "ooooo": cow, "ba": sheep, "thzz": bee. We still have "ma ma", "da da", "buh buh" (brother), "na na" (banana). She seems to be working on "own" (down). A strong shake of her head, with a push on her hand and an "OH" is "no". "yes", on the other hand, is merely a calm shake of her head (not a nod, but a shake). We'll need to work on differentiating 'yes' and 'no' over the next few weeks.

She no longer eats her books quite so obsessively. She likes them to be read to her...but FAST. She actually stops what she's doing when i say "NO", or "no mouth". Sometimes she comes when we say "come come" (more likely if mom says it than if Iain says it, which annoys Iain).

She is no longer howling like a banshee when we brush her teeth.

She likes to crawl from the back door to the car by herself....which is a LOVELY turn of events with that 24#11oz weigh-in.

That pretty much covers it, I think....

Two days in early January (WITH power ;-)

So, we were planning to grow Ria's hair long. Iain (and, I think, all the kids at Rachel's) felt that as a girl, she needs long hair. Rachel told me stories of braiding Jo's front hair to the side when she was 18 months old and having it last 2 days, so I figured we just had another 3 months to go until Ria was likely to be stopping the bit where she rips the hairbands and/or clips out of her hair and stops with the "feeding my hair" bit.

Well, it turns out Jo NEVER ripped the hairbands out, not even at 12 months. So, the hairband ripping out issue is more of a personality thing than an age thing. That knowledge, coupled with Ria's recent decision to MASSAGE her food into her hair at most meals (imagine soaping up your hair with shampoo, and you get the drift) has caused me to throw the long hair plan out the window and just chop it all off. So, now she looks like a boy. Rather a lot like Iain, in fact. Same haircut (since that's the one haircut I do). We'll recontemplate long hair when she eats more neatly.

Here is Ria post-food massage last night (there's some women who would pay a hairdresser good money to get that "do"), and post haircut (the one picture I managed this morning where she looks less boy-like).

Some silly pictures of us playing at the table:

And a boy and a girl taking a bath together:

I was a bit apprehensive about bathing them together without me in the tub too to ensure Ria stays sufficiently vertical (we've been doing baths lately with 3 of us in there), but there were no problems with kids bumping eachother into water faceplants, the bath was fun and reasonably uneventful. I'm quite pleased with this, its easier to bathe them from outside the bath.

Finally, after the angst of molar number 1, this morning I noticed Ria already has molar #2! Not sure when it came in (now THAT'S the kind of tooth entry procedure we LIKE!). I'm guessing yesterday or the day before, as I'd noticed a rather raw, red knuckle on her right hand recently (she has a tendancy to gnaw her hand when teething...ouch!). In any case, 10 down, and 10 to go!

(I got the Kindergarten registration papers for Iain today--eep! he's almost 5!!)

83 hours

From Friday 4 January at 10:15am to Monday 7 Jan at 9:15pm we had no power. 83 hours.

We had hot water (bless pilot lights), but no heat (pilotless with electric safeties hardwired without an easily accessible plug). Our neighbors Shane and Ann rotated their gas generator around a few houses so we had power to our fridge twice a day for a few hours to keep the food good. Martha and Rick fed us warm dinners, and Becky and Chris let us hang out warmly in their house during the day. It was "an experience". (See William's blog posts for more words: http://fairly-accurate.livejournal.com/28755.html and http://fairly-accurate.livejournal.com/28992.html.) I love having underground power lines in general, as it looks nicer, and we don't lose power as often as people with their power lines up in the wind/tree/ice zone, but boy, when underground power lines go down, its takes a long time to get the power back up.

Iain spent several evenings directing us in taking photos in front of the fire (after Ria was in bed). Here's Iain's and my favorites.


On Monday at 4:30 pm I just about lost it, I was DONE with the experience, but as I dialed the number of the local hotel on the phone, I was call waited by PGE saying there were crews on the way. Just under 5 hours later, we were finally back on!

I'm putting "get furnace rewired to allow us to plug it into a gas generator" on my list of projects to do for the house.

Happy New Popsicle Year!

Happy New Year!

Ria had her 1st popsicle ever....a lovely tangy lemon one that Iain and William made up from a recipe they found on line.

We had friends over for a rollicking game of Don't Break The Ice.

And Iain and Ria snuggled in their blankets and worked in the pantry, respectively. (Iain particularly likes this photo, hence its inclusion.)

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!

Quack.

Sometimes I get this image in my mind that in 15 years Ria will still be quacking. Quacking, and screaming a piercing "NA NA" every time she sees someone who is not her eat a banana.

(The quacking is acutally rather cute, the piercing screeches for bananas aren't.)

Changes.....a new room for Iain.

We're finally getting Ria's crib out of our room...almost. We were ready to get her out a month or 2 ago, but the work required to get the room ready keeps on mushrooming! Finally, her room (the old guest room) was getting towards ready, but now instead it's Iain's new room ;-). HER new room won't be ready until mid- to late-December (after Grandmother's visit is over).

So, here's Iain in his new kingdom! (pardon the high-ISO nature of the images, but he was reading before bedtime and I didn't want to get him revved up with a proper photo shoot).

The new art corner:
Part and parcel of getting the guest room ready for child inhabitation has been moving the server downstairs. This has snowballed as we try to reduce our number of computers by 1, experience a hard drive failure, and find that the current server HW won't support the SW needed to run the raid arry (which is replacing the old PC's function as land of backups). Here are Iain and William hard at work mucking in the innards of the server:

Kids playing together!!!

Lately, Iain has been being "Toddler Iain." We've been talking about how Ria's new behaviours are due to her becoming a toddler (despite the fact that she doesn't walk....she still has the new attitude). So, Iain is a toddler too. In some ways this is annoying (as are all coping mechanisms of young children), but it has a LOVELY feature that the two "toddlers" are playing together a lot. Which means Mommy gets more time to drink her tea in peace ;-).

Playing "diaper kids" (diapers diapers everywhere. diapers diapers in your HAIR!) and "toss the binkies out of the crib" in Ria's crib:

Watching the washing machine spin:

And, "diaper kids" in the laundry baskets.:

Happy kids, sleep, and catching up

Whee!
I can't believe it! After 2 months of catch-up, I'm finally up to date with the photos on the blog!

Here's some happy kids playing together...Iain is showing Ria how the tree works.

Ria's been doing the evil "wake at 5:30 am" thing ever since the time change. We resorted to the sleep books, and have started putting her to bed earlier at night. The books say that an overtired child who goes to bed too late will wake too early, strangely enough. So, we've been giving an earlier bed time a try for a few days now.....and, strange or not, it works! 6:30 am and 6:45 am for the 2 test mornings! A dramatic improvement over 5:30 am. Its a bit annoying to have to start her dinner early and put her to bed at 6 or 6:15, but I'll take a minor annoyance any day over a 5:30 am wake up time!

Halloween and yummy dirt

Happy Halloween!

This year Iain again wanted to be a Tomtebobarn, and I didn't even have to buy a new grey sweatsuit since last years sweatsuit was so big last year. All I had to do was re-glue on some spots. How easy can it be? He LOVES his toadstool hat, and he looked so innocent and sweet at school among all the power rangers. Here he is with his cool teacher, Teacher Monica. (She was a gingerbread cookie.)

Lots of excitement just before Ria went to bed and Iain and Daddy went out to do some trick or treating!

Our pumpkin:
and, just to make sure Ria's cool spider shirt (I can't recall if Mormor picked this one out, or if it was one of her big cousins, Tor and Björn) gets some air time, here's Ria in the back yard checking out the taste of our dirt.

Teeth and Coyote Point Museum

Ria is now up to 8 teeth! 2 in the last 2 days. Next, its on to the molars. They're feeling pretty lumpy in there, but not pointy.

Here's Iain blowing kisses at Ria (while sitting on Daddy's lap playing computer games):


....and here's Ria enjoying her reading. Yep, she's ours!


Here's Ria, Iain and I looking up at the ceiling where there is a cloudscape to view:


Then Daddy joined us looking at the clouds, and for a silly picture ;-)

Standing and (not) sleeping

On Friday (10/19), Ria finally figured out how to pull to standing! A few days later she even tried a bit of "cruising" (pseudo-walking along furniture). Whee!

Here she is, vehemently standing while watching her brother curl up on top of a (nice toasty) heat vent:
Immediately upon figuring out this lovely trick, Ria decided to spend every morning nap standing, rather than sleeping.....so we're a one-nap household now! Rather more convenient, actually.

Mormor visits!

Mormor visited for Ria's 1st birthday!
Coffee in hand, she's ready to go:
Mormor, Iain, Ria, and Mommy do the Google "we just had a yummy lunch" dance!

Iain works with some new colored pencils, placing them in Mormor's old colored pencil box from Sweden.
Ria shoves her butt in the air, but still won't do a proper crawl:
And, finally, 2 kids in the Chariot bike trailer! Ria is really not very sure about this crazy thing, but I'm sure she'll warm up to it!

1 year stats

Here's the Little Miss's official 1 year picture, check out the toes!

Height: 31" (95%, 78.75cm)
Weight: 21#4oz (~55%, 9.7kg)
Head Circumference: 46cm (~75%)

6 teeth
enjoys standing, but doesn't pull up on her own
"crawls" like a wounded soldier, dragging herself along.
sits just fine, and puts herself in a sitting position on her own.
2 naps

Words: Mama, Dada, Buh-buh (brother), ki (kitty), T-th (teeth), na-na (banana), Kaaaaak (quack).
"Kaaaaaak" is one of her favorite words, in fact. She will happily quack away for minutes at a time, MANY minutes if you quack back at her!

Games: 'stick your tongue out', 'where's Ria', 'shake your head NO', 'eat your book to little bits' (which we only allow for board books), and 'IN'. (Games like "in" are what we call, in our house, the Prepositional Phase, where items are place in prepositional positions, "in", "on", "under", etc. Its a fun baby phase. ;-)

Ria Turns 1!!!

Happy Birthday Ria!

Here's Ria and Iain opening Ria's gifts...Iain read her books and played with her toys, while Ria played with the packages ;-). We even dressed Ria in a dress...

So, the Friday night before Ria's birthday (and party, and Mormor coming into town), our digital camera finally gave up the ghost, after 4.5 years of heavy service. This left Saturday to research and obtain a new camera. Eep! We ended up with a Canon PowerShot A650. It has a ridiculous 12 Mega pixels, when we had wanted only something more like 6 or 7 (which, coming from 4, seemed ridiculous enough!). However, we like the Canons, we wanted the 4 battery version so the flash would be quicker, and we wanted the image stabilization feature, which left us with one option, at the silly 12 Mpixels. Luckily, it looks like Blogger reduces the resolution so we aren't sucking up 3-4 MB per picture on my Blogger account! The 640x480 / 60Hz videos are just SEXY!, but blogger makes them a more reasonable resolution, so you'll have to wait until I do something on our home server to see the lovely things properly.

The new camera, and the resultant backlog of pictures (a million test pictures, and maybe 40 "real" pictures), is my new excuse for being so behind on the blog. Anything to avoid ME being at fault, of course.

In any case, here's just a very few of the many pictures of Ria's day.

Daddy with happy kids:
Kids under the couch:
Daddy walks in the cake:The resulting carnage!

Post scrubbing of said child, all looked clean again!

Unexpected Weaning

2 days before Ria's 1st birthday, and we're officially weaned.

I hadn't expected to stop quite yet, but the ear infection did us in. It really is great fun to have your child view your exposed breasts with screaming horror, expecting excruciating pain to rip through her ears if she tries to nurse. Piercing screams, in fact. *sigh*

However, she takes her sippy cup just fine, and deals well with cows milk, so we're done, and my body is mine again! whee! shame about the loss of my waist.... ;-)

I'm cute!

Ria just being cute (she loves hanging out on her side like this, I think of it as her calendar pinup pose).

Warning! Back-dated posts!

Playing catch-up with photos, and have stuck 2 posts "behind" the "Croup Sucks" post....so scroll further down if you haven't seen the camping and Picton wedding photos....

Croup

yuk.
Croup sucks.
...and the follow-on ear infection sucks too.

On the other hand, Amoxicillin and Prednisolone (Prelone) are lovely things, they make little girls MUCH happier, in just 2 hours after 1st dose.