Randomness

I have a bunch of little things I wanted to say, so I'll just bullet point them!

• Brooke is finally sleeping through the night. It's been a few weeks now, but I've been afraid to put anything in writing too soon. After her 6 month doctor appointment and her doctor stressing how important it is for her to be getting a full nights sleep, I bought the book Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child. After a few nights she was sleeping 10 hours!
• Paige is doing so well with spelling words. She knows the sounds of all her letters (thanks to Montessori and Leapster's Letter Factory game) and she can sound out the letters in words and has started writing them. She still has a little way to go on reading the words.
  
• Brooke has finally started getting into solid foods. We've been offering her food since 4 months, but it's really been the last week or so that she's been eating anything sizeable. Her favorites so far are yogurt, pancakes and carrots. I've been making everything fresh and then freezing.
  
• We've all received our H1N1 vaccinations. Paige and Brooke have to go back and get a second dose a month after their first. For Paige that will be this week, but for Brooke it's in January.
• Paige is really getting into Christmas this year. She's been too afraid to sit on Santa's lap, but she did write him a letter (kind of). And she loves to sing Christmas songs. Although, she got a little freaked out the other night when dad was singing "He sees when you are sleeping..." right before bed!
  

Paige School Picture

The same company did Paige's school picture that did Brooke's. However, for Paige's school we had to purchase the package we wanted before we saw the prints. It's a bit of a gamble, but the prices are a lot cheaper. They also will do retakes if you're not happy.

I half expected Paige to just outright refuse to sit for the photographer. She's going through a very defiant phase right now. At least I hope it's just a phase :)

I wish she was smiling, and I can just tell by the face that she's making that she's trying really hard NOT to smile. You just know 5 seconds after they snapped the photo she had a big grin on her face. But we decided not to do retakes, because there's a chance they could come out even worse. Looking back at this picture in several years from now will remind us of our strong-willed little girl at 3.5 years old.

Parent Night

Last night was parent night at Paige's school. Not to be confused with parent/teacher night which is on Monday. Parent night is for the kids to bring a parent to school and show us what all they work on. They asked that only one parent come with each child to keep it from getting too crowded in the classroom. Since Justin grew up in a Montessori school, I got to go so I could learn more about her work.

In the past few weeks Paige has really come out of her shell. I'm hoping her teachers will tell us the same on Monday night when we meet with them. She used to be shy and fairly reserved. Now she's a total chatterbox. She loved taking me around the classroom and showing me everything she works on and she wasn't intimidated at all by all the other people in the room. I snapped a few pictures with my phone as we worked on things together.

Bead Tree, Spindle Box, Sandpaper letters, broad stairs & pink tower:

Little Artist

Paige loves to draw. Every day when she comes home from school she usually brings home about 5 drawings that she has done. They usually look pretty similar, just lots of scribbles on white paper. The other day she told us she was going to draw a princess and the output actually looked a little like a person. Then today, while I was making my lunch I was flipping through the stack of papers she brought home yesterday and found this one:

See the yellow hair, eyes, mouth, legs and feet? I'm assuming that's green grass at the bottom and blue marks in the sky could be birds? Ok, the birds might be a stretch.

I added some colored pencils to her wishlist!

Pumpkin Patch

We went to the Valewood Farms pumpkin patch a few weeks ago.

Paige got to milk a cow:

Play in the corn:

Play in the hay maze:

 

Pose with pumpkins:

They have a really nice hayride too where they give a tour of the farms and their cows and the beautiful countryside. It's a great time of year to do this when all the leaves are turning.

Brooke had fun too :)

 

Happy Halloween!

Here are some pictures of the girls in their Halloween costumes. Paige was Sleeping Beauty and Brooke was a piggy.

Brooke is now sitting up all by herself unsupported!

Brooke School Pictures

These are the pictures Brooke had done at school on October 1st. Here's the class picture. Brooke is the second one in on the right.

This one is my favorite:

Proud big sister

I'm not sure if I've mentioned this on here before or not, but Paige is the best big sister that anyone could ever ask for. She LOVES her little sister so much, she really has exceeded our expectations. I kept waiting for the jealousy to start, but she has shown no signs of that. She just adores Brooke. We call her "our" baby and Paige likes to help out as much as she can. In the car the other day Brooke was fussing and Paige tells her "it's ok Brooke, I'm right here". It truly makes my heart melt the things she says. If Brooke is asleep in my arms she'll come over and give her "quiet kisses". I've been trying to capture these moments on video, but I'm usually holding Brooke or by the time I get to the camera I've missed it. Here's a good one of Paige going over to Brooke on her own and holding her hand:

View Video

Bathroom wallpaper

We started pulling down the badly peeling, ugly wallpaper in  the master bathroom a few months ago. It ended up being a bigger challenge than we initially thought and was put on the back burner while other projects like the family room remodel were completed.

I finally started devoting an hour here and there taking down small sections at a time which made it more manageable. We eventually still want to do a big remodel and update the fixtures, but I think this makes it a lot more liveable until then.

Here are some before and after pictures:


See the peeling paper above the shower? That's how it looked when we bought the house!



Work in progress...


AFTER - All wallpaper is GONE and we painted it light brown.:

4 month checkup

Sorry this is late, I forgot to post last week after Brooke's doctor appointment on 9/23.

She weighed in at 14 pounds 5 ounces (75th percentile). The doctor also found an ear infection, so we're treating her with antiobiotics for 10 days twice daily. We finally figured out a technique that helps her keep at least some of it down. If I stick my finger in my mouth for her to suck on and then put the medicine dropper further back into the side of her mouth I can slowly dispense it so that she hardly notices it and she'll swallow most of it down. The worse part of it for her is that it's refrigerated and she's not used to having anything cold. Especially first thing in the morning!

The doctor is really pushing us to get her to sleep longer at night. It's not like I want her waking up at 2am every morning to eat, but I feel if she is getting up to eat then I don't really want to deprive her of food. Since I'm still nursing, it's hard to know exactly how much she's eating so if she's still hungry in the middle of the night, I want her to be able to eat. Hopefully once she gets the hang of solids that might fill her up more and help her make it longer. Paige started sleeping through the night around 8 weeks old. But she we were also supplementing her with formula which takes longer to digest so that may have helped. Hopefully soon Brooke will start sleeping longer. In the meantime, don't mind the dark circles under our eyes.

Carnegie Museum of Natural History

A few weeks ago when Grampy and Grammy were in town we went to the dinosaur museum. Paige is still interested in dinosaurs, but I was afraid she might be a little afraid of the huge displays they have. But she wasn't...at all. She did confirm a few times that they weren't real though. The museum has an awesome exhibit for the dinosaurs and they have tons of other things to see, but we spent quite a bit of time just in the dinosaur part. They even had this nice kids area where the kids could dig for dinosaur bones.

First food

Yesterday was Brooke's 4 month birthday. Hard to believe she's 4 months old already. To celebrate her birthday, we gave her a taste of rice cereal. She didn't hate it, she really didn't know what to think of it. I put it in her mouth and she would just kind of stare at me not knowing what to do. Finally she swallowed some of it down and drooled some of it out. I definitely think she's ready, but just needs a little more practice.

Paige really surprised us yesterday as well. We had pork tenderloin and cheesy rice with broccoli for dinner. And she ate both! We always offer her what we're eating and usually she'll give it a try, but then sometimes we end up making something else for her or she'll eat a bigger bedtime snack if she didn't eat much for dinner.

Product Review - For the Kids CD

We got this CD awhile ago, but as of the last few months Paige has REALLY gotten into it.

Her favorite songs are "La La La La Lemon" by Barenaked Ladies, "Rainbow Connection" by Sarah McLachlan and "I've Got To Be Clean" by Guster. All of the songs are really enjoyable, even for us because they are by artists that we already enjoy listening too. Sometimes I find myself listening to the CD even when she's not in the car and singing along to it.

Just about every time we're in the car she'll ask for the La La La song. The CD player doesn't work in the CRV, so she'll usually be disappointed if we take that car on a road trip and will tell us that La La La, Rainbow song and Got to be Clean are in the green car. I should download them to my phone to have them available because she likes them that much! And I love that she's showing such an interest in music!

I'm putting this CD on Paige's Christmas list. It's a whole album of just Barenaked Ladies kids songs.

WSJ

Check out this article in the Wall Street Journal today! 

In case you didn't notice, Justin was published in the Wall Street Journal! That's a small little piece to a long post that he did on his baseball blog awhile back. The original piece analyzed factors such as ticket prices, food, parking, beer, etc and how they related to team performance to measure which teams offered the best overall value to their fans (hopefully I described that right, sorry Justin). But WSJ and others were really fascinated by the beer piece of it, so that's what they published. Hopefully now that they know who he is he'll get picked up more often and in other places too. Congrats Justin!

Fundraising!

Just a reminder: Deadline is Friday, 9/25/09 if you are interested in any magazines.

On Paige's 4th day of Preschool we were sent home with her first fundraiser!

This one is pretty easy though. There's no minimum requirement that we have to sell and we can get credit for online sales too. It's for magazines. We get credit for new orders and subscription renewals if you already subscribe to something and want to add on another year. Here's the important part:

Go to www.qsp.com and use this online code so her school gets credit: 425003358. Then make sure you enter Paige's name (MER1) so that she can get credit towards the prizes.

40% of the magazine purchases go directly to the school, so they can make a pretty nice profit if a lot of people participate.

Thanks so much to anyone that wants to participate, but don't feel like you have to. I'm sure there will be plenty of other opportunities that we'll hit you up with over the next 20 years!

PLEASE NOTE: In order for Paige to get credit for the sales made online, please enter QSP ID: MER1 during checkout.

New Layout

I had to change the layout of the blog because the old theme wasn't wide enough to display landscape pictures properly. I'll miss my PBJ sandwich, but I think I can probably make some more updates to this template when I have some time and it'll be nicer in the long run.

Preschool

Paige seemed to do very well yesterday at preschool. Here's their daily routine:

6:30 - 8:30 Kids arrive and breakfast is provided - they can just help themselves to food
8:30- 10am Activities. The kids can go around to the stations to do activities on their own and they'll also have group circle activities which include music, stories, spanish lesson, etc.
10am Snack
10:30 - 11:15 Outside play (weather permitting)
11:15 - 12 Activity time again
12 Lunch
1 - 3 Nap time
3-6 Daycare

Paige is in full day preschool which really is half day preschool and half day daycare as you can see by the schedule. Most of the other classrooms are just morning preschool, but they have her classroom for full-time working parents like us. We'll be dropping her off around 7:30 and picking her up about 5:30 every day.

Some of the things we really like about this school is there are no tv's! Also there are 3 bathrooms right inside the room so they can just go when they need to and not have to get the teacher to take them. We're responsible for packing her lunch every day, but the teachers do make sure they eat the main course of what we packed before the snack. The breakfast and morning snack are provided by the school and seem to be fairly healthy options. I think she's going to do really well in this environment!

First day of preschool

Today is Paige's first day of preschool at her new Montessori school! She was really excited to go. We went on Friday to meet her new teachers and after just a few minutes she really warmed up to them and even played with some of the activities. This morning we both took her in and she immediately went with the teacher to meet the one other little girl that was already there. Then the teacher asked her if she wanted to have some breakfast food or start an activity, and she chose the activity over food! She never turns down food at breakfast time! She came over and gave us both a quick hug and a goodbye then went back to playing. We were hoping it would be an easy transition for her, but wasn't expecting it to be this easy!

Here's a picture of Paige's and Brooke's matching dresses today!


This marks the 200th post! Yay!

Brooke's Baptism

Sunday was Brooke's Baptism. We had about 25 people come out from Cincinnati and Pittsburgh to celebrate.

Paige said to me in church: "I like Brooke's dress. Is she married? She's wearing a wedding dress."


The godparents. Paige refers to her Aunt Sara as her "fairy godmother".Here's our failed attempt at getting a nice picture of the cousins:
There's a lot more pictures here: http://picasaweb.google.com/paigeisone/BrookeSBaptism#

Family Room Project - Completed!

Last month, I posted about Phase 1 of the family room project. Since then, we have completed the drywall, painted, replaced the carpet and baseboards. Here is the finished product:




We also took the grids off the windows and it makes it feel a lot more open.

Phipps Conservatory

On August 3rd, Phipps Conservatory had a free admission day, so we took the girls, my parents and John & Liz to check it out. The girls thought it looked like a princess castle.

This was Dr. Merry's favorite part (after the butterfly garden):