Potty Training

Wow, 2 posts in one day!

Anyway, I am super excited about potty training. Michael has been working with the potty for about a month now (really working, not just playing!).

Just a few minutes ago, he came up to me, holding the front of his pants, and said, "Mommy, pee-pee." So... we ran very fast to the potty, took off his pants/diaper, and he sat down. Five minutes later, he said, "Momma!!!" YES! There was pee-pee in the potty! Hooray! That's the first time he's asked to go and actually gone!

I knew that this would be how it happened. It's totally his personality to not do something until he can be successful at it. Now we'll see if this actually takes or if he's just teasing me!

ETA: AHHH, he did it again!!! Not 2 minutes after I posted this he came running in to tell me he pee-peed again!

Meredith's 6 Month Appt

Here are Meredith's 6 month stats.
15 lbs, 12 oz. - 25th %ile.
25 in. - 50th %ile
43.5 cm head circumference - 75th %ile!

Basically she's moderately long and skinny with a big head! I keep telling Chris it's because she's a girl and has a bigger brain! LOL :) Everything else is on track. Her next appt (and Michael's 2 yr appt) is in May, so I'll update again then.

I do notice that she "talks" a LOT more than Michael did, but she's not nearly so interested in moving as he was. Of course, this seems to be what everyone notices as one of the main differences at this age. We'll see how it goes. She really does want to crawl now though - yay!

Pictures

Hey, I'm actually getting these posted within my promised time-frame... Amazing! These are in no particular order and there are lots more on Picasa.


Meredith in the Poopersaucer, oops, I mean, Exersaucer.

Meredith's first cereal! Can you tell she loved it?!


Daddy sliding :) Fortunately there's no evidence of Mommy sliding!


Michael sliding... see a difference?


Michael and Daddy in the snow. Michael thought it was great until he couldn't get it off his clothes!


Michael's new bed set... Mommy totally caved to Elmo :(

Update Time!

Let's see... What happened this month?

Meredith got to start solids! She's so excited. Eating is one of her favorite activities. She has been trying to steal our food for about a month now, so on her 6 month birthday she got to eat some oatmeal. That was pretty successful and she has now tried peaches and pears in her oatmeal as well as some green beans.

Meredith is also working on sitting up by herself and creeping. She is pretty good at sitting up now and can balance without one/both of her arms on the floor. This is great because now she can grab toys and sit up! Creeping is the newest development. She will start out in one spot and when you turn around again she's halfway across the room. Somehow she manages to do this only when you aren't looking... sneaky!

Michael is really talking now. He completely understands what you say and can respond to most things. Not all of his words are clear, but they are consistent.

Some of his favorite activities are his Look & Find books (Grandma Hall got him one and Mom got him some more!), puzzles, coloring, and running! He is constantly on the move and is always looking for a new activity. He currently loves dinosaurs and Elmo. He's working on learning letters, numbers, and colors. He already knows most animals and their sounds.

I guess that's about it for now. I'll post some pictures tonight or tomorrow!

Read Books!

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. Well let's see.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own blog/FB so we can try and track down these people who've only read 6 and force books upon them.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Really? The COMPLETE works? Can’t claim that.)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis (Isn’t this redundant?)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Webb - E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 The Scarlet Pimpernel - Baroness Orczy
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Michael's Haircut

Michael got his first haircut in a "salon" last week. Usually Anne` cuts his hair, but we didn't have time to see her, so we just stopped in at a Great Clips (I think). Here are before and after shots so you can see just how badly he needed his hair cut. I'll have it cut shorter when it starts getting warm, but it's okay for now. Interestingly, I found pictures of him the the same outfit and even similar poses for an even better comparison. These shots were taken 16 days apart and he was eating in both of them. :)

Before



After

Okay, so I was bored...