Big Talkers

Man, it’s been ages since I posted anything to the blog! I was really backed up at work for a while—several clients (and even project managers!) vying for my time, thus giving me a lot of much-needed overtime—and then of course we had the holidays. It’s been crazy, but I’m trying to get back on the horse, so to speak.

The title of this entry actually applies to both of my beautiful children, who have each been improving their conversation skills in leaps and bounds! Leah, for example, has begun speaking in complete sentences—e.g. “Is Mommy coming?” instead of “Mommy come?”—and has mastered the concept of maybe, e.g. Daddy responds to her request for an apple with, “We don’t have any apples, Sweetie,” and Leah responds, “Maybe an orange?” She’s also begun saying stuff like “Great idea, Daddy!” She’s such a sweetie!

David, for his part, is mostly working with single words, but he’s quite the little repeater, too. He knows Mama, Dada, Amen, baba (bottle), wawa (water, which he first said immediately after taking the Sacrament, yesterday), mo! (more), and this morning I swear he said “Dowstay!” as we were about to go downstairs. (Granted, we’d been talking about going downstairs, so it could have just been repetition, but still…!)

Anyway, the kids are just getting cuter and cuter, these days, so I’ll hopefully be making the time to blog, more often. I really want to have a record of this for us, if nothing else. (Not that you, dear reader, are chopped liver.) ☺

Happy Hallowe’en!

Last night, of course, was David’s first Hallowe’en. Mawmaw found him this cute little Spider-Man costume at Goodwill and fell in love with it, while Leah’s Little Red Riding Hood is a hand-me down from her cousin Norah. Both of them looked great, though.

We started off by taking them up and down the block, visiting maybe six or seven houses in one direction and two or three in the other. Of course, since many of the other parents were doing the same thing, quite a few houses were empty. (One kid even told us to come back later, that his parents weren’t giving out candy yet!) The reason for this brevity was simple, though: our Church had a tri-ward “trunk-or-treat” for the kids and scheduled it right on Hallowe’en night (unlike most ward we’ve been in, which schedule it on, say, the Friday before Hallowe’en so that kids can still trick-or-treat on Hallowe’en itself—a practice we greatly prefer, since it gives us a chance to meet more of our neighbors).

Shape Recognition

This entry is a really big deal, to Daddy. You may remember, a year or so ago, that Leah’s favorite computer game was a little piece of freeware called “Baby Banger”: the child hits any key and it pops up a shape and, optionally, announces the shape’s name and color. Well, now that we’re pretty much settled into the new house (that big box in front of her notwithstanding), Dory’s been hooked back up and Leah’s having a blast with her favorite game, again… only this time, it’s different.

First of all, Leah’s gotten really good at pressing only one key at a time, an action which keeps the computer from saying, as I previously blogged, “ ‘blu-gree-or-or-pur-yellow squa–-cy-re-magen-brown rectangle,’ as each shape interrupts the previous.”

Secondly, when Dory announces the color and shape, Leah almost always repeats it in that beautiful little voice of hers.

Finally, though—and this is most important part—she remembers! I can’t tell you how many times Daddy’s been working at the computer when Leah turns around in her seat, pointing frantically at the screen, saying, “Daddy! Daddy! Tringle, Daddy! Tringle!” (So she doesn’t quite pronounce it right. She knows what it is!)

It’s amazing how incredibly proud of her I am. ☺

(more pics)

First Tooth!

Well, it looks like David managed to one-up Leah on something: at only six months, four weeks, his first tooth has poked through! (Leah, for the record, took one day shy of eight months to accomplish the same feat.) I’m guessing it’ll be a little while before his little chomper will be visible in photos, but rest assured, the fitful nights have finally produced some fruit. Congratulations, Double-D!

Old Friends and New

Yes, the picture’s blurry. Sorry ’bout that; Daddy somehow misplaced the good camera before we left and had to make do with the cheap one. Wanna see more blurry pictures? Here ya go.

Anyway, a little background: when Daddy was in high school, he had a friend Maureen that lived down the street. While many years have passed, it turns out Maureen still lives down the street, only now she lives there with her husband, Mitch (another of Daddy’s high school friends); and daughter, Noelle. While we were out there, we decided to spend some time with their family and invited them over to Leah & David’s grandparents’ so they (and Noelle, of course) could go in the pool and the hot tub.

Bottom line: Noelle, though almost six years Leah’s senior, seems to enjoy our little Leah, and Leah certainly reciprocated her enthusiasm. We wound up getting together two or three times throughout the weekend and will hopefully be back in touch through e-mail. Ah, technology!

Patient David

Poor little David…. We’d only been at the Jersey shore for a day or two when we realized that he wasn’t feeling well. A trip to a local pediatrician confirmed our fears: he’d somehow picked up both an ear infection and pink eye. Although there wasn’t a Meijer (with its free antibiotics for kids!) within several hundred miles, at least there was a local Wal-Mart where we could get them for $4. Almost as importantly, I guess it’s a good thing Aunt Becca got him these cool sunglasses!

“Kiss [Her] Once for Me”

Almost twenty years ago, an artist named Michael McLean wrote a beautiful song called From God’s Arms to My Arms to Yours. The song is sung from the perspective of a birthmother preparing to place her little boy with his Eternal family. The song has always made Daddy cry, every single time, but now it’s even more poignant. Each time he hears it, he has in his mind’s eye our own little girl’s birthmother, with that beautiful voice of hers singing this incomparable song to us, the parents of the child she bore.

So anyway, this morning, little Leah was out in the driveway with her cousins Caleb and Sam, running around and playing. She was wearing a dress (which was our first mistake), so when she fell down, there was damage. Both knees were skinned and the tears came freely. As Daddy picked her up, immediately to his mind came a line from the bridge of the aforementioned song: “Now I know you don’t have to do this, but could you kiss him once for me / The first time that he ties his shoes or falls and skins his knee?” (Seriously, even just typing this, Daddy’s sobbing uncontrollably.)

So now, here it was: “the first time that [s]he … f[e]ll and skin[ned] her knee.” As Daddy held his daughter close, he gave her not two but three kisses through the tears: one from himself, one from Danny, and one from Auntie Kellie. It’s really the very least he could do for these wonderful angels, the people that gave us our little Leah. And as Michael states is the intent of the song, we hope and pray that Leah always knows—even across the miles—how much her birthparents really do love her.

Finally, as for us—we that have been entrusted with her care—we can only pray for the ability to “give this baby both [her] mothers’ love”—and both her fathers’, as well.

(Oh, the by the way…. If you check the Photos page, you’ll see that once we added Band-Aids to the boo-boos, Leah was good as new!) ☺