When you walk into R's room in the morning to get her out of her bed, she doesn't even bother to say hi or "good morning." She starts frantically pointing at things and naming them:
"Cat!"
"Shoe!"
"Outside?" (always with an inflection)
"Pants!"
"Hand!"
"Toe!"
"Ear!"
As you are lifting her out of her bed, she's still rattling words off like a machine gun. Even while you're changing her out of her pajamas, she's still jabbering. It's not until you get her into the kitchen and she settles in on "Bite? Bite?! Bite?!?" in a frantic almost-scream.
Often we won't go get her out of her bed until we have something already ready for her to eat. Oatmeal. An egg. Anything to stem the frantic onslaught of "Bite?! Bite?! Bite?!"
We still love her, though. Even if we occasionally have to fish out some ear plugs because, wow, does that kid have a set of lungs. I'm pretty sure there are certain higher frequencies in which both A and I have lost some hearing.
On the plus side, her vocabulary is expanding so fast that it's not easy to keep up!
January was weird. It was predominately very warm. I even sat outside and worked from the patio some days.
Then on other days, we got enough snow to go sledding.
On one day I made the mistake of riding the bike to work without checking the weather. By the time I got to the office, I was slip-sliding around on an inch of snow. I had random people cheering me from the sidewalk.
My dad came to visit and helped me work on the girls' playhouse. I had put up the poles, but ran into some issues getting it all square (I'm a nerd, this is not really my thing). He helped me get it sorted out and we got the walls framed out. I decided to build a custom door since an 8' tall building on 4' poles seemed a bit overmuch for a playhouse.
J got herself a harp and started taking lessons. She took right to it. Piano is still the primary focus, but she has been pretty consistent about wanting to play a harp for a long time and we found a good tutor in the area.
I shared this conversation on 'gram, but I took C out for coffee during one of J's dance lessons and we had the following conversation:
"Dad, I want some fancy shoes."
"Your shoes glitter! They seem pretty fancy to me."
"No, I mean like hers," and she points at a girl in high heeled boots. "I want the kind that makes noise when you walk."
She has expressed this a couple of times since. More recently we were at church when she watched a woman walk down the hallway with "fancy shoes" and she pointed them out to me. "That's what I'm talking about! Like those!"
My youngest brother came to visit. I asked him if I could pay him for drawings of the girls and he agreed to. He did a great job with C's picture, but he wasn't happy enough with it and wanted to redo it. I sometimes forget how much energy the girls have and how overwhelming it might be for someone who is unused to all of the attention, but he was a pretty good sport about it.
We played a lot of games in January, which seems appropriate given how early it gets dark. C has gotten pretty good at checkers, and J is pretty good at chess. I even bought a full-size, tournament-weighted chess set because I got really frustrated with the tiny, cheap plastic set we were using. We have also been playing Tsuro, and most recently added Qwirkle and Spot It! to the rotation. It's a lot more fun now that two of them are old enough to play group games together.
And, lastly, I can't post anything without the obligatory shot from Shelby Bottoms.
