Jen's Blog

cleaning house

We're cleaning the house! Gary and I filled up 7 grocery bags and a box with books we don't need or want anymore. (I added more books to the bags after I took the picture, too!)

peaches

Elliot and I have been having the same conversation for the past several days:

Elliot: Mama!
Me: Yes Elliot?
E: Please Mama, pleeease!
Me: Please what, Elliot?
E: I wants some moneys please.
Me: Money? What do you want money for? What are you going to buy?
E: I's buy peaches!

rice and bananas

Lexi's been showing signs of wanting to eat solid food for a couple of weeks now. At dinner she sits in a highchair across from Elliot, and she enjoys watching him. Lately she's been making "Mmmm" noises while we eat, and acting frustrated that she wasn't part of the action.

I started Lexi on rice cereal last week, which she still seems to like. It is basically fortified rice flour that I mix with a little breast milk. It looks like paste, but she doesn't know any better. This morning she had bananas for the first time. Avocados will be next, if Elliot doesn't eat them all in the next couple of days. While she wasn't excited by the banana, she didn't reject it outright, so I think that's good.

What's up?

Up until today, Lexi has been pretty steadfast in not rolling over. Sometimes she made some attempts, but nothing serious. This afternoon she rolled over about 6 times in about an hour! Go Lexi! She's also doing better at night; Gary and I are working on a bedtime routine so she can fall asleep in her crib (still in our room), and it seems to be working. She still wakes up 3 or 4 times at night, but at least we have a few kid-free hours in the evening.

Lexi now has 2 teeth on the bottom, and nursing has been okay (although she does bite me sometimes, especially when she's tired). We started her on rice cereal last week, which she really likes. I plan to give her banana or avocado later this week.

We still have the baby monitor in Elliot's room, so we can hear when he wakes up in the morning. This morning he started the day by singing Happy Birthday to himself. On Sunday he said "rutabaga" over and over again, laughing. He questions everything, and wants to know the tiniest details about objects and people. A trip out to the mailbox can take several minutes because he stops and looks at everything, asking, "What's this?" Even things he already knows he asks about. Sometimes I'll tell him, sometimes I'll ask him what he thinks it is (and he usually knows. When he doesn't know, he says, "Yes?") All objects are still purple, and he often says he is 4 years old. Gary is getting him a laptop for Christmas, maybe Elliot will stop asking to use his.

I have been working on Lexi's Christmas stocking, which I finished this afternoon while watching her roll over. I'm not completely thrilled with the foot, but I was almost out of yarn, so I made it shorter than I would have liked. 4 or 5 years ago I knit stockings for me and Gary; 2 years ago I knit one for Elliot with the same yarn. Lexi's used up the last of the yarn.

We all went geocaching again this weekend. We found some nice playgrounds in the area for Elliot while we were at it. Last week I found a geocoin, so I moved it to another cache for someone else to pick up. Some geocoins, and other trackable items, have goals (I also picked up one from a Canadian Girl Guide, who wants it to visit the four World Centers of the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts). This particular geocoin just wants to travel around. Here are pictures I took of it before dropping it off.

Laughing Lexi

(40 seconds of Lexi laughing)

My Little Revolutionaries

East Coast photos

Just a few pictures from our trip out East last month. I do have lots of pictures of Lexi, but she looks like a devil-baby (i.e. red eyed) in almost all of them, so they need some work.

Elliot and Gary next to Niagara Falls (American side)

Jen and Lexi

Preventing a meltdown during the wedding photo session

Jen and Elliot taking in the view before Melinda's wedding

"After a long day of trading, there's nothing I like more than a martini and a bowl of peanuts!"

Lunch at Nick Tahou's (clockwise Elliot, Alice, Diana, Jessica, Ralph, John, Gary)

"Yum, this Garbage Plate sure is good!"

Geocaching

We went geocaching this afternoon at Ardenwood Park. Geocaching is a game played outside with a GPS. People hide caches and post the coordinates on a website; the goal is to find the cache and log it. Caches often contain small prizes or trinkets. We found 5 caches today, using Gary's very old GPS. Except for the first they were all pretty similar; they consisted of a small plastic container, each with a log book (so we could record our name and the date we found it) and some small trinkets (e.g. kiddie tattoos, guitar picks, a whistle, etc). The first one, in addition to the usual log book and trinkets, also had a smalled stuffed unicorn attached to a Travel Bug, which is a tag with a numerical identifier so it can be tracked on the internet. The idea is to take the Travel Bug with you to another cache so it can travel around the country (or world). Since we are new to this we did not take the Travel Bug with us.

The park where we geocached, Ardenwood, is close to our house, and we'd been there before several times. But, I had no idea there was stuff hidden around there, and we also got to see parts of the park that we'd never been to before (and probably wouldn't have were we not looking for caches). It sounds trivial to type in some coordinates into a GPS, go to that location, and find a cache, but it was a bit challenging. First of all, civilian GPS units are only accurate to within 20-30 feet, so you never know exactly where the cache will be. Secondly, the cache is often hidden from plain view (we found one in a bush, a few in trees, and one in a stump) and camouflaged. I must have walked past the first one we found dozens of times in previous visits to the park, but never suspected there was anything hidden. There are still several caches left to find there, but Elliot got tired and Gary and I got hungry, so we are leaving them for another weekend.

new tooth

Gary discovered Lexi's second tooth this morning, right next to the first one. We can only see two little spots of white on each side of the tooth, but the rest should poke out in the next couple of days.

Halloween pics

Elliot trick-or-treating at daycare

Taking a break

Gary, Elliot, and Lexi after a long evening of partying and trick-or-treating