How We Get Our Excercise

by pushing this girl around! She is obsessed with this tote. Today she sat in it for a long time and looked at books, then she had to play with blocks while sitting in it. What a goof!

Make an on-line slide show at www.OneTrueMedia.com

I'm Lost

Does anybody know what's going on? I just keep getting more confused every week!

Why Bother Buying Toys

when all she wants to play with is this

Our town has city wide rummage sales every year on the last weekend in June. We have a ton of stuff we want to get rid of, and so does my sister. So she's going to come that weekend and we'll hopefully get rid of lots of stuff. Yesterday I bought this tote so I could get a start at going through closets. I guess that will have to wait, Isabella's having way too much fun with it!

Signs on the Go

Photo and video editing at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Finally! After a whole month of videos not uploading, I found another way to do it. I think I messed something up because some of my templates I've had have not been directly from blogger. This one is, but who knows what the problem is, and blogger help hasn't been too helpful. Anyway, here is a half hearted attempt at some of her signs, she wouldn't sit still to do them. She's been doing them for quite a while, so far she does all done, change me, hungry, thirsty, and more. She got them all down on the first day I showed her. However, she's not as fast at picking up help me and thank you, which I have been trying to teach her for a while. It's working great for us, especially hungry. Instead of her getting whiny because I don't know what she wants, she just does the sign and I know immediately. Whoever invented baby sign language is a GENIOUS!

Not Again!

Are you sick of me changing my blog template yet? :) Hopefully this will be the last time for a while. There were some things I couldn't do with the old template, like upload videos. So we'll see if this works.

Edit: All that work and I still can't upload videos! Grrrr. I keep getting the error message - could not connect to blogger.com everytime I try a video. I've tried several different ones, even really short ones. Anybody have any suggestions?

Getting into Mischief

Yesterday morning I realized Isabella had disappeared somewhere in the house, and it was eerily quiet (which is usually not a good thing). Just when I was going to go look for her, she came running out of her room, saying oooh, with the biggest smile on her face, and the proudest look. She was holding her treasure to give to me. What was it you ask - a dirty diaper!! She figured out a way to get into her diaper pail, and I didn't have the heart to tell her no (at least not that time) because she was so darn proud of herself for bringing me a "present".

Adventures in Babysitting

I'm so glad I could go to my sister's to take care of my niece this past week. I was just sure Isabella would come down with the "yuck" that Monte and I had experienced, but somehow she escaped it. My sister was so good about coming out once a month to babysit Isabella when I was working, and now I am more than glad to return the favor. She and I are somewhat different in that all I have ever wanted to do is be a mommy, she wanted a career, and made quite the career for herself as a CPA, working insanely long hours! But as the saying goes, everything changes when you have a baby. She gave up her job to stay home for most of the year, and now only works during tax season (January - April) and I know she would like to give that up too. They found a nice, older lady who doesn't watch any other kids to babysit my niece, but she was unavailable last week. So that's where I come in, and I plan on going out once more in March as well to help out.

Don't let the picture in my last post fool you, the cousins weren't always so chummy with each other! :) They have totally opposite personalities. Rachel is very outgoing and rambunctious, Isabella is shy and reserved. So Rachel's constant "affection" towards Isabella was a little unwanted. For example, within minutes of us getting there Rachel ran up to Isabella to give her a hug which sent Isabella toppling over into the cupboards and hitting her head pretty bad. It was one of those times where you can see it in slow motion while it's happening but you just can't do anything about it! Needless to say, after so many "hugs" like that, Isabella wasn't exactly too keen on having her cousin get near her. There were definitely good times too, they did play together pretty nice, and were very into sharing toys. They would just sit on the floor handing a toy back and forth to each other, it was cute to watch. And my goodness, I thought Isabella slept a lot, always having slept from 7:00 to 7:00. But one night Rachel slept from 8:30 until 10:40 the next morning!! That's just crazy, plus at almost 18 months Rachel still takes two long naps a day. That would be nice!

There was one catastrophe while I was there, Rachel somehow got her hands on a glass pitcher and it shattered all over the kitchen floor! I put each of the girls in their cribs so I could clean up the glass without them around. I, of course, had surround sound screaming coming from both their rooms while I was mopping the floor. I'm sure they wondered what they had done to deserve that.

It was a good week, I miss my little niece, but it's good to be home. Between going to my in-laws and going to my sister's, Isabella and I have been gone for most of the past two weeks. I don't like being away from Monte for that long, and I don't like taking Isabella away from him. I wish my sister and I lived closer, so I could help out more.

Matching slippers

Going shopping at the "store", aka pantry.

This is great, all I get to play in at home is a drawer!

Rachel's version of combing Isabella's hair - banging her head with the other side of the brush.