September/October Update

The last few months have been very busy for the Ryan family. I started back to school part time at the end of August and have been busy ever since. My classes, thus far, are wonderful and we have already put out our first newspaper of the year as well as made some significant improvements to the online news website.

Working with two babies at home has been a bit of an adjustment. It seems nearly impossible to get all my grading done at home and do the dishes and the laundry in addition to watching two busy girls. Even though Kate is doing a much better job entertaining herself lately, Lily requires a significant amount of attention and either J or I spend a good amount of the evening holding her. The girls are back at our normal daycare and Lily seems to be settling into the baby fold nicely.

J's travel for work has increased over the last few months. He has been to Vegas a few times as well as Washington DC. I am very lucky to have family members who are willing to come over and help me when he is gone which has made a huge difference because I don't know that I have figured out the trick to watching two kids alone for any extended period of time without wanting to pull out my hair.

On to the highlights from the last few months:
We normally spend Memorial Day at the LA Greek festival, but since Lily was born over Memorial Day weekend last year, we did not get our yearly Greek fix. Fortunately, our local Greek church has a decent (but inferior) festival of its own. We stopped by and Kate surprised us by asking to go on the gigantic slide. I joined her to make sure that she made it down safely. She is usually pretty fearless but this request really surprised us.

Kate has been a bit feisty lately. A lot of our picture sessions go something like this.

She either runs away, pretends she can't hear us, or makes it impossible to see her face. Every time the flash pops up on the camera, she says "bright" and covers her eyes. She is also becoming quite familiar with time out. Kate definitely is our stubborn girl unlike Lily who seems to be setting herself up to be our drama queen. Though A at daycare has described her as one of the happiest babies she has ever watched, we get to see the yang to that happy yin and get the waterworks on a daily basis. Some of her biggest meltdowns have been over a sneeze or dog bark. I fully expect Lily to be our little emotional hurricane.

Despite her stubborn ways, most of the time we are thoroughly amused by Miss Kate's 2-year-old antics. Some of the things that come out of her mouth are so adorable that we can't help but laugh, even when we shouldn't. Some of our favorites lately are "why?" (with a shoulder shrug and two hands up), "silly (pronounced silsi) banana/MawMaw/Willow," and "right here" (as she directs us where to sit/stand/set things down).

Every so often she shocks us and puts something together that is totally unexpected. Last week I tried to explain as simply as possible that Willow, our medically-challenged dachshund, is blind. She didn't really seem to get it or to even be paying attention, but a few days later J saw her running after Willow with eyes from her Mrs. Potato Head yelling "new eyes, new eyes" as she tried to put the eyes on the dog.

The girls are getting along famously. Kate rarely seems jealous of Lily and showers her with hugs and kisses. She loves to help take care of Lily; she decided tonight that she needed to help me feed Lily dinner (more on Lily's meals later). I think we are on the right track to helping the girls become lifelong friends.

On to our little drama queen, Miss Lily. She is four months old and just had her four month doctor's appointment. She weighed in at 15 pounds 12 ounces and was 26.5 inches long. Kate had almost 4 pounds on Lily at her four month appointment but only half an inch: both girls are in the 90th plus percentile for height. I am working on accepting the fact that I am going to be the runt of the family. I have nightmares that this is going to be my fate.

(10 brownie points for the first person to identify the source of this pic)

Lily is a smiling machine. As I said before, she is an undeniably happy baby... when she wants to be. Looking back at our old blogs we only had one good pic of Kate smiling at this age. We have probably 75 or 100 of Lily's toothless grin. Most look something like this:

Lily is also a very noisy baby. We have jokingly referred to her as our pterodactyl. She coos, screams and squeals all day long. Don't know what she is saying, but she clearly wants us to know what's up. Kate was a pretty quiet little thing; it was one of my few many concerns. Since Kate is now a talking machine, I assume Lily will be even more chatty when the time comes.

We got the all-clear at her appointment to give Lily solids so we have been feeding her a little bit of rice cereal every night. My main hope is that it will help her sleep a little better. Though she has a good 8 hour span from about 6:30pm to 2:30am, she is still waking up one to two times a night- at least one of those times is to eat. Mommy is very tired; 4 hours sleep doesn't really cut it when you have to work with teenagers all day long. Lily seems to be enjoying the rice cereal and has a handle on the whole swallowing concept. I'll let you know when I get through an entire night without Lily's company.

We think she likes the new eating digs and Kate even tried to get in on the feeding session today.

Finally, we made our annual trek to Nate's Butt Farm Bates Nut Farm to pick out some pumpkins. Despite J's groaning at the thought of getting up early and heading out to the middle of nowhere, we had a great time and picked out a few perfect pumpkins for our porch. Kate enjoyed feeding the barnyard animals and bouncing in the bounce house.

Lily hasn't quite gotten the hang of taking pictures yet

We forced Kate to sit in this pile-o-pumpkins.
She was not amused but played along with a little bribery.

We are looking forward to the holiday season. As far as I'm concerned, it truly is the most wonderful time of the year. Check back soon for Halloween pics and notes on our holiday festivities. Hope you have a great October and Halloween. Trick-or-treat!