Greta Boo is 10 months old!

Time is just flying with this one. She turned 10 months old a few days ago. She's had a little bit of a fever and seems to be in teething hell these days (read: she's waking up screaming 4-6 times a night, even AFTER some Tylenol, poor girl) but you'd never know it from the grins in these pictures!

She was a little sleepy though, so she's kickin' back and relaxing in the first couple. LOL

But you know she can't stay in one place for long, so she was quickly on the move again!

And just one more because I can't stand how adorable she is. Look at those dimples!

Grrr

So, I was playing around with my blog background and inadvertantly lost all my links to my friends' blogs. If you're reading and want me to link back to yours again, please let me know! I'll try to add back in the ones I can remember off the top of my head, but I know I had a bunch before. Sigh.

Another Ohana Mama giveaway - Sox!

So my friend Sarah at Ohana Mama (http://www.ohanamama.com/) is giving away a pair of Sox (http://soxy.myshopify.com/) this week! I went to check our their designs and got some great holiday gift ideas for someone I know.... LOL. Hope that doesn't ruin the surprise if you're reading this!

Check out the "Mommy and Me" ones called Hoopla. Wouldn't those be too cute on Greta and me in a few years? In the meantime, I could rock those Blue Zone ones for work!

And so it begins...

Our friend Jenn and her son Alex came over for dinner a few nights ago. Alex is about 17 months old and is old enough to follow Fin around and want to play with him but also young enough that Greta keeps his attention as well.

Perhaps too well. LOL.

We all went to their house a few weeks ago and Jenn got some cute pictures of Alex giving Greta kisses while they played. Now she's learning to give them back.

We've got trouble up ahead, huh?

Here's Greta on the prowl and Alex just soaking up the attention. And then I think he was trying to lean in to give her a kiss on the head, but he kept missing.

This one's going to keep us on our toes, isn't she?

Ohana Mama giveaways - PakNak charms and Mother Ink tattoos

A good friend of mine runs the Ohana Mama blog (at www.ohanamama.com) where she highlights products and ideas from mom-prenuers. She also offers giveaways on many of the cool things she features, which is always fun.

This week, she's giving away a set of PakNak charms (http://www.paknak.com/) which are a really fun and cute way to personalize your kiddo's things - backpack, lunch bag, etc. I think Fin would love the Donny dinosaur and Martin monkey ones.

She's also sponsoring a giveaway for Mother Ink temporary tattoos (www.motherink.com) - they're made with only vegetable-based dyes inks and come in some really cute designs. I think I need that "Peace" one for myself. ;)

Baby in a Basket - both of them!

I'm sure all parents of more than one kid do their best not to compare the kiddos to one another too much. I try to keep in mind that Fin and Greta will do their own things in pretty much their own time, but I have to admit, I love when I see Greta doing things and finding joy in the things that Fin also loved at this age.

For example - playing in baskets. How cute is this?





And just to compare - Fin discovered the joy of baskets at about the same age (though he doesn't look nearly as at ease with it as she does, now did he? Might be all the toys that got thrown in there with him.)

He was looking much happier about it around a month older than Greta is now:

Mmmm! Blueberries!

Greta's working on several more teeth right now (she's already up to SIX!) so I thought frozen blueberries would be a nice little treat for her this morning and feel good on those sore gums.

I think she liked them.



Cheerios are yummy, too!

Adventures with Baby Chewie, Take 2

Baby Chewie still gets a lot of love in our house. Greta has decided to steal him from Fin.

I don't know how long lasting this relationship will be, but she lights up when she sees Baby Chewie and will already drag him around the house for a while.

She doesn't quite have the skill to "care" for him the way Fin did yet (feeding, sharing drinks, dressing, etc.) but she has the chewing and hugging on him part down!




http://rhymeswithdana.blogspot.com/2007/03/photo-proof-of-fin-and-baby-chewie.html Here is Fin's affection for Baby Chewie at about 14 months old.

One from the mom memory archives - Fun with Honey!

Obviously some funny and sweet things happened with the kiddos during the time I was absent from the world of blogging. As I remember them and get a chance to add them here, I'll give updates from the archives of my mom-memory.

I was going to call it my "momory", but that sounds just a little bit too much like "mammary", now doesn't it?

Once upon a time (as all good tales should begin) in January of 2008...

Greta was almost 2 months old and was finally starting to wake up to the world. I swear, this girl slept for the first 6 weeks of her life, SO different from Fin! But I digress.

One evening Greta was getting a little fussy, so I took her into the bedroom to nurse her with fewer distractions. Dave came in to talk to me for a moment and after a few minutes, we realized the rest of the house was quiet. Too quiet.

I asked Dave if he knew what Fin was doing. He replied with a shrug, "Playing with something glass."

I thought he was kidding at first, but when I asked, "WHAT?" Dave explained that he'd heard something clink together that sounded like glass and asked if he should go check on Fin.

Yes, please! Absolutely! Why would we let a two year old play with glass things, much less ALONE?

A moment later, Dave simply yells across the house, "You were right."

Greta and I walk out to find the boys and are greeted by this sight:

A few days earlier, Haha had found a ceramic Winnie the Pooh honey pot at a garage sale and decided it needed to live on our kitchen table. With honey in it.

Of course, this was just too great a temptation for a two-year old.

He had discovered he could reach the middle of the table by standing on the chair, had a few quiet moments to himself and seized that opportunity! When he saw us standing there, amazement and horror on our faces, he looked up and sweetly grinned, saying, "Finny eat Pooh's honey all gone!"

He was so proud. There was no way we could get mad, we could only get the camera.

And yes, that honey was all over the place. That chair will never be the same again.

The Pooh honey pot was soon relocated to Haha's house and Fin got a serious bath before bedtime that night.

Greta Boo

The poor girl is pretty much missing entirely from this blog, so I just wanted to marvel at the wonderful creature that is my daughter. She just turned 9 months old and oh yeah, there are MORE teeth on the way. Eeeesh. (She has five already. At this age Fin was working on his first one.)

She's been on the go for a while now, but her latest favorite activity is standing up. She often holds on with only one hand, but still plops on her butt when she lets go. Luckily, this just makes her giggle (as long as she doesn't also fall back and bonk her head on something behind her on the way down...)

In fact, she loves standing so much, we will often hear her chattering to herself in the crib in the middle of the night and walk past the room (not IN the room! She'd see us and start wailing!) to glimpse her standing and having a conversation with herself. That's also how she wakes up in the morning. Standing, talking, singing - happy.

She definitely has a cheery disposition, but she tends to save the double dimple grin for her big brother Fin.

Her other favorite activity these days is playing "Kiss the Baby!" Fin likes to join her, too.

Sweet Baby Boo.

Story Telling

This needs a little background before the sharing of the cuteness.

A few months ago, Dave took Fin to see his first movie in a theater. It was WALL-E, so of course, there has been a lot of WALL-E and Eva pretend play around our house as of late.

This morning, Fin walks up to me and just starts telling me the following story:

"Once upon a time, there was a big brother and her name was Eva. And one day, she was as big as her little baby. And that's all I know!"

I was cracking up at how much of a "story" he was trying to tell. A while later, I was driving him up to Haha's house and he asked me to tell him a story, so I repeated exactly what he had told me this morning. When I was done he asked, "Can you tell me the rest of the story?"

I told him I didn't know the rest of it and needed him to tell me, so he replied, "Once upon a time, there was a girl named Eva and she went to the ZOO!"

Me: "What animal did she see there?"
Fin: "A lion!"
Me: "And what did the lion say to her?"
Fin: "ROAR!"
Me: "And what else did she see?"
Fin: "Trees!"
Me: "What did the trees say?"
Fin: "The trees didn't say anything!"

The story went on that Eva also saw some pants and they didn't say anything either. There were no other animals at the zoo that day, just the lion, trees and pants, and only the lion had anything to say.

This kid cracks me up. He's getting really good at telling stories and when he asks us to tell him a story, he always knows exactly what he wants to hear. Sometimes it's a recap of his favorite TV show Caillou (ugh) or a recap of something he's experienced, like the time he stepped in fire ants in Texas or the first time he met Baby Greta; other times it's aaaaaalll imagination and so, so cute.

Cute as a button!

Over the weekend Fin and I were playing a game where I held him behind my back (he was wrapped around my waist, but behind me) and I'd spin around until we were both dizzy and then drop him down on the couch.

Dave wanted to give it a shot, so he picked Fin up, spun around and around and then dropped Fin on the couch. But he was so dizzy himself he almost sat down on Fin as he put him down.

Fin was giggling and trying to crawl out from under Dave (while dizzy) and he looks at me and says:

"Daddy's not very good at this, but he's cute-as-a-button!"

We have NO idea where he heard this phrase, but he used it to describe both Dave and Greta all weekend long.

Bad, bad, mama

I fell off the blogwagon.

NewBaby is now Greta. And she's nine months old already. Fin is almost 3 and still so sweet and so funny. I want to be able to remember more of their sweet and cute and amusing things, so I have to stop putting off the blogging and just jump back in. I'll add things from the mom-memory archives as I remember them.

Here we go again!