Reese and Julie: Crayons, Where Are You?

Sorry once again for the lapse in posts and pics, but we are all still recovering from Todd's eye surgery last Friday. Todd's recovering from having his eyes muscles messed with and I am still making up for the lack of sleep suffered from taking care of both girls (Todd, being the wonderfully nice husband that he is, usually gets up with Reese between 6:30 and 7:00am since Julie is a bit of a night owl).

Last week my dad and Jan visited for an evening to meet Julie. She slept the entire time. Well, not the ENTIRE time. She woke up to eat twice and then fell immediately back to sleep. Reese enjoyed their visit, especially going outside to play Frisbee with Todd and my dad. Todd’s parents also visited for a few days in order to help take Todd to Indy and back home for his surgery, bring us meals, meet Julie, and watch Reese over at her cousins’ house. She loved spending time there and has been begging to go back ever since.

Reese’s penchant for pretending has been rapidly developing. She likes to make us coffee (she prefers brewing Ethiopian and Sumatra coffee even though she won't drink them because she says they’re “too bitter”), hot chocolate, tea (usually Irish Breakfast Tea), and she makes me “carmy mochawakos” (caramel macchiatos). We have quite the pretend Starbucks running in our playroom. She has also taken to talking to her crayons. Maybe that isn’t so strange. What is really strange is that they’ve started talking back to her. She’s appeared to convince them to play hide-and-seek with her. Thus a conversation (all from Reese) that I heard the other day went something like this:
“1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 – Ready or not here I come! Crayons, where are you?”
“We’re over here!”
"Where?"
"We're hiding in the cushions!"
“ There you are."
Reese has also recently developed a love for telling us stories. This week we’ve learned a lot about her cousins and her friends at school. Incidentally, we’ve also been trying to work on distinguishing between being silly and telling lies. Earlier this week she told me that a lie keeping a blueberry in your mouth and not chewing it… Right... We’re having trouble with this. How do you explain a lie to a 3 year old? Especially a silly one whose sense of humor and fun you don’t want to ruin? She further challenged us last night by asking what the word “through” means. It is remarkably difficult to explain the word through, especially in 3 year old language. Try it. It’s hard.

Julie continues to grow and settle in to life outside the womb. She is starting to sleep in larger chunks of time (making it to 3 hours a few times now!) and is having more awake time. She is the spit-up queen, soaking her clothes (and ours) with great regularity. She is still sweet and rather quiet, not crying much unless she’s too tired, being changed, or (of course) pulling her own hair. This week she had her first bath in her little baby tub and, true to form, spit up in the bath water right away. Reese loved putting water on Julie’s belly a little too much. She’s such a good helper.

Ok, now after all of that, here’s what you’ve been waiting for – some pictures: