I just remembered something Lanie said the other day that really made me laugh. We went to her doctor for a visit and they wanted to collect a urine sample. Since getting her to pee in a cup isn’t really possible, they put a urine collection bag on her and we sat there waiting to see if she would produce a sample. She wasn’t really happy about it and kept asking me, “Why is there a bandaid on my butt!?!” I could not keep from laughing!
Lately the posts I have made have just been things happening at the moment and I haven’t really kept up with things we have been doing, so I thought I would do one post to catch up the past several months.
October 2006 – Lanie went to the Texas State Fair this year with Mommy, Papa King, and Mormor. Daddy had to work and couldn’t make it this year. Later in the month, we went to visit a local pumpkin patch with our friends, the Harrells (Cherly, Chris and Rachel). Lanie had a blast seeing all of the pumpkins and riding in the wagon. At the end of the month, we had a visit from Papa Pat, and celebrated Halloween with him here. Lanie was the Little Mermaid for Halloween, and she went trick or treating with her friend Rachel, who was Cinderella. A lot of candy was received and quickly hidden and is still being rationed out now in February!
November 2006 – This was a pretty quiet month for us. We celebrated Thanksgiving in our new home with Mormor, Papa, and Kikishell.
December 2006 – Always a busy time with the holidays, this month was no different. Early in the month we had a brief but wonderful visit with our friends Rylee and Cassy who were visiting from Kuwait. It was nice to see them again, even if for just a short time. We celebrated Christmas Eve and Christmas morning in our new home. Lanie was on major sensory overload when she was opening presents on Christmas Eve, so we held some over to be opened on Christmas Day along with all of the presents she got from Santa! If you look at the pictures, you can see that Lanie had a very bountiful Christmas!
January 2007 – We took a fun family trip with the Harrells to Taos New Mexico. We had a great time snowmobiling and playing in the snow. Lanie loved the snow and still asks if she can go play in the snow. There are some great pictures from the trip, including some of Lanie asleep on the snowmobile! Later in the month, I took Lanie to the Stock Show with the Harrells. She went on her first pony ride! She loved it, and loved seeing the animals and riding the rides. We will definitely have to make visits to the snow and stock show annual events!
February 2007 – As you can tell from the previous post, much of this month has been spent dealing with Lanie being sick. Hopefully, she will get through it soon and we can get back to doing all kinds of fun things with her!
That’s at least a brief overview of what we have been up to, and I will be working on getting the rest of the pictures up so you can see it all too!
Lanie has been under the weather the past couple weeks. Two weeks ago, she was running fever and coughing, then last week she was diagnosed with ear infections, and then this past weekend has had a bad stomach virus. So we have had two visits to her doctor and two visits to Urgent Care in the past two weeks. Right now, she seems to be doing better and, hopefully, will be fever free today and well enough to go to Sarah’s tomorrow. There is nothing worse than when Lanie is sick and I feel so powerless to help her feel better.
Last night, Lanie brought in a movie and told me she wanted to watch it. I told her that it was “Mulan.” Then, Lanie told us,”I want to watch ‘Mow the Lawn!” Kids really do say the darndest things. The whole way home tonight Lanie was telling me she wanted to watch “Mow the Lawn.” So, if Lanie ever asks you to watch you do yardwork, you know what she is really asking.
A couple of weeks ago my computer went on the blink. I was afraid I might have lost all of my photos, especially after what had happened with the laptop on New Year’s Eve. Well, David was able to back-up all of my pictures and other important things, but we still cannot get my computer to boot up properly. So, when we finally figure out what is going on and get it up and running, I will definitely post recent photos, including some of Lanie swimming. It really is a sight to see!
Other than the computer issues, things are going fairly well here. David made it through another round of lay-offs at his company, but is now in a different position. He really liked the position he was in, so we will have to see how things go. I am actually enjoying my new job a lot more than I thought I would and seriously considering continuing in this position beyond this school year. I think I may be much more suited to this than either of my prior teaching positions.
And as for Lanie, the one you all come here to read about, she is doing great! She continues to amaze us on a daily basis with the things she says and does. She is definitely two, and makes sure we know that every day. There is a lot of saying “NO” and “It’s not fair!”, which are probably her two favorit things to say right now. We are still dealing with her crawling into bed with us every night in the middle of the night. Neither one of us wants to get out of bed to put her back in hers, and I think we both kind of like her being there to tell you the truth. We’ve tried to start potty training, but Lanie really isn’t interested yet, so we will just give it time. I guess since she seems to be doing everything else ahead of what is expected, we can let her slide on this one thing for a while!
I will try to post more later and hopefully my computer will be up and running soon so I can post those pictures!
Well, when we decided to get a swimming pool, I was a bit apprehensive just because of the safety issues with Lanie. So, I made sure I put her in swim lessons this summer to at least get her started on skills to stay safe in the water. Well, now we have a little mermaid on our hands. She would love to LIVE in the water. Of course, Little Mermaid and Little Mermaid II are her favorite movies and for halloween she is going to be, yes, you guessed it, a mermaid! She amazes me with how well she can swim and how fearless she is in the water. She will dive in from the side and swim across the the other side. Now, she still hasn’t figured out how to get her head out of the water while she is swimming, so she can only go as far as she can hold her breath! SHe swims with her eyes open underwater, and can change direction and maneuver around pretty well. One of the tricks she likes to do is to sit on the beach entry with her back to the water, and then lean back to “fall” into the pool backwards. She gets herself all turned around and pulls herself out of the water. It is quite a sight to see her in the pool.
Most mornings when she wakes up, one of the first things she will say is “I’m going to go in the swimming pool?” And, she has been in the pool several times each week since it was finished. Now, I wonder what we are going to do with her when it gets to cold to be in the pool! She is NOT going to like that!
Lately, there has been very little sleep being gotten in this house. The main reason being that Lanie is having a hard time sleeping through the night and staying in her room. A few weeks ago she discovered that she could climb out of her crib (she actually had done it a few times about a year ago, but I guess didn’t feel confident enough to do it consistently). She started doing this and coming out of her room so we put a gate up at her door. Then she found various ways to climb over the gate, first using various items from her room as stairs, and then just figuring a way to climb over it all by herself. She is very creative and is using it to her advantage! We did convert her crib to a toddler bed because we were worried she would hurt herself and because it was just time to do it. We have abandoned the gate on her door as it just doesn’t seem to help, but use it on the stairs as a precautionary measure. So now it is very easy for Lanie to crawl out of bed in the middle of the night, usually several times, to come into our bedroom and want to sleep with us. I try to stand firm and just return her to her bed, but sometimes I am just too tired! Especially after usually having to go through 30 minutes to an hour of putting her back in her bed just to get her to sleep in the first place. ANd she knows all the tricks… wanting me to rock with her… wanting me to read to her…. telling me she missed me…. the list goes on and on. I am afraid, very afraid, of how intelligent and manipulative she can be! I’m hoping once we get back on a regular schedule during the day things will calm down at night, but right now I just need some sleep!
Tell me this is just a phase…. please…..
Well, so much for keeping up with the blog over the summer! I can’t believe there are only two and a half more weeks until I have to go back to school and not be with Lanie all day! I have really enjoyed spending so much time with her and we have had a lot of fun. We haven’t done nearly as many things as I had hoped or planned, but you know all those things about best laid plans! I’ll try and catch everyone up on a bit of what we have done this summer.
The first few weeks of the summer we had our friends Cassy and Rylee staying with us before they left for Kuwait. It was nice to get to spend time with them before they left. Lanie enjoyed having someone around to play with, even if it did seem that they fought and got on each others nerves a lot! We spent a lot of time at the community pool and took the girls to their first Texas Rangers baseball game! It was sad to say goodbye to them at the end of June, but we will get to seem them sometime around Christmas, so we tried to say see you later instead of goodbye!
Lanie started learning to swim this summer! She took two weeks of swim lessons at the community pool, and her instructor has been doing some private lessons with her in our pool this past week. Yes, our pool finally did open the weekend before the 4th of July and we have spent a LOT of time in it! Lanie loves the water and is doing very well in her lessons. She will put her head underwater on her own, and “swims” underwater (being directed but kicking herself toward the edge). We are very proud of her!
We are still working on getting settled in to the new house and there are still a lot of boxes around. I hurt my foot at the beginning of the summer and that hasn’t helped matters. It’s still hurting quite a bit and I finally broke down and went to a podiatrist this week. One of the most exciting things for me personally this summer was that I had LASIK surgery last Friday, and it is truly amazing. I can see as well now as I ever have in contacts! I am so glad that I finally went ahead and did it!
As for the rest of the summer, it will be packed with things to do. We are hoping to get a lot more done around the house so we can have a get together here for David’s birthday. Lanie and I are going to visit family in Sacramento next week, and are very excited about that. Then it will only be one more week after that until I return to work. I am still not exactly sure what school I will be at (long story), but I hope they are able to place me somewhere that I will be as happy as I was this past year!
I have started updating Lanie’s pictures, but still have a bit to do, and am not making any promises as to when it will get done! Keep checking back and I will get them up as fast as I can!
I know I have been really bad about posting on Lanie’s blog here in the past few months, but hopefully there will be a lot of new posts over the summer while I am home for summer vacation! YEAH! This has to be the absolute best part about being a teacher: getting to spend this hole chunk of time with Lanie!
So much has gone on in the last couple of months but I will try to give you all the short version to catch you up. Lanie turned 2 in April and had a butterfly themed birthday party with just a few close friends and family. We had a good time and I have some great pictures of David beating the pinata that refused to die! I took Lanie to have her two year pictures the day after her birthday, and am posting those in the gallery. She is getting so big and looking more and more like a little girl instead of a baby.
Lanie’s vocabulary has been growing rapidly and she amazes us every day with the things she can say. She will hear you say something and at some point in the future will pull it out, generally in an appropriate context, which is just amazing to me! She knows a lot of her colors, can count almost to 20, and sings the ABC song with very few mistakes! Since moving into the new house, she has learned to go up and down the stairs with ease.
Speaking of the new house, we moved in the 1st weekend in April and are still unpacking lots of boxes. We have a contract (and a backup if the first falls through) on the old house finally, so it should close by the end of this month. They are working on the swimming pool as I type, and hopefully it will also be done by the end of this month, considering it was supposed to be done by June 12!
Anyway, that is the short version of things going on around here, and I will try to be better about posting more during the summer and getting her pictures up to date!
We have had a good and very busy Spring Break. I have had to do a lot of things in preparation for the upcoming closing and move into our new house, along with still trying to get our current house sold. We had a contract on it earlier this week, but the people flaked and withdrew their contract. So, still waiting for the right people to buy this house.
It has been so nice this week to be home with Lanie. She is so much fun to be around. Right now, she loves for you to sing to her so she can sing along. I am trying to get video clips of her doing it, but she gets camera shy! The cutest thing is listening to her sing “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.” She knows most of the words and it is just adorable. I wish everyone could be here to see it. She is also making longer sentences. Earlier this week she said a five word sentence: “Look at Lanie wearing boots.” It was very cute. Lately, all she wants to wear on her feet are her boots! We got to spend some time with some of her friends this week, we went to the park and had fun, and just got to spend some quality time together. I know I will miss it when I go back to work on Monday. I just have to remember that we only have about 10 more weeks of school until summer vacation!
I have posted the October, November, and December pictures and right now am loading a folder with all of the video clips. For some reason when I posted November they loaded just fine, btu then with December the video clips didn’t upload at all. So I decided just to create a separate album just for those. I hope you all are enjoying those as much as I do. Hoepfully I will get January and February pictures loaded before I go back to school on Monday.