A new laugh

This has been Ashley's new sound the past week. She uses it when she is happy but there is also a version of this when she is mad and crying.

Dancing Queen

Anytime Ashley hears something that sounds like music (i.e. Logan hitting the washing machine) she starts dancing. She loves it when we pick her up and dance with her.

It won't be long

Operation Anti-Escape

Within the last week or two, Logan has learned how to open the front door and get out. It is not that he just opens the screen door and goes out. First, we tried just locking the screen door and he figured that out. Next, we just shut the front door and he figured out how to open that up. Then, we tried locking the front door (both the dead bolt and the door knob) and the screen door. Guess what he figured out how to unlock everything and get out but it took him a little longer to do it. Finally after he took his big dump truck out in his underwear and ran down the sidewalk with it and me chasing after him, I decided to get out the other baby gate. As you can tell from the picture, he can open the door but he can't get out. Problem solved. Now we just have to do this everyday until he decides to listen to us when we tell him he can't go out by himself.

Logan update

I am always posting on what Ashley has been up to so here is what Logan has been up to.

This year for Christmas Logan really got into the whole Santa concept because we would watch movies and shows that had Santa in them. Christmas lasted over a month for us since we had family come visit and bring presents for the kids to open and we did some webcaming to open presents. Today Logan asked me "open presents" and I told him Santa was done with presents for this year. Now we will just have to see if he lets Ashley open her birthday presents by herself.

We have been working on potty training with Logan since the end of September. The first couple months were pretty rough and there were times that I wanted to quit. Right around Christmas Logan started telling us when he needed to go and we started to have fewer accidents. Now we are at the point where he just needs pull-ups at nap time and bedtime. Sometimes we get really lucky and he will wake up dry.

Logan's vocabulary keeps growing all the time. Sometimes he has trouble saying all the words that are running through his head because he starts to stutter and mix up the order. But for the most part we know what he is saying. There are times he tells me things and it makes me laugh because of how he is explaining what is happening (usually bodily functions).

A hard concept for a 2 year old is sharing. Logan does a pretty good job of sharing when he wants to. Something that we have been working on is that if Ashley is playing with a toy and he wants to play with that toy, he should give her a different toy to play with. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn't because Ashley doesn't always want to give up the toy or Logan doesn't give her a comparable toy to play with. Another thing Logan has learned is that if he doesn't want Ashley to play with his cars, then they have to be somewhere where Ashley can't reach them (usually the dining room table). Now we just need to get him to interact with other kids his age more often.

Ashley is 9 months

It is hard to believe how much Ashley has grown and changed over the last few months. At Ashley's 9 month check up she weighed in at 16.5 lbs and was 28 1/4 inches long. I knew that she was going to be a little low with her weight because the week before she had the stomach flu and was not quite eating like she used to. But now she is pretty much eating like she used to but has started to let us know her likes and dislikes for food. When we feed her she likes to shake her head no while she is eating. Sometimes she is just being playful about but other times she is trying to tell us that she does not want what we are trying to feed her. The other night Tim was feeding her some roast beef (she only ate 1/2 the jar) and it was taking a while. Then, he switched to squash and she gobbled up the whole jar in less time than it took to eat the roast beef.

Ashley has become more mobile since the last post. Just before she turned 8 months old she started crawling. Shortly after she started crawling she began to pull herself up and walk along the furniture. Now her favorite thing to do is to hold on to our fingers and walk to where she wants to go. If she only has to go a short distance she will just hold on to one of our hands to walk. She doesn't quite trust the walking toy that we have, but she has used it to walk a short distance on her own. It would not surprise me if she is walking on her own in the next month or two. Logan started walking by himself at 11 months and Ashley has been right on Logan's heels for every milestone.

Some other things that Ashley has been working on are putting sounds together. She will start to say a sound and if you repeat the sound back to her she will say the sound again. A commonly heard sound is ma or mamama. When she wakes up from her naps or in the middle of the night, it almost sounds like she is calling for me because she is crying mamamamama.

Ashley now has two teeth so beware if you stick your fingers in her mouth. She got her first tooth on New Year's Eve and the second one about two weeks later. Since she has gotten her teeth, she has started to like the idea of putting solid food in her mouth. She now likes to eat puffs and cereal. Every now and then we will find a leaf, or twig or some grass in her mouth because she still likes to put anything and everything in her mouth.

Ashley loves to look out the window and see the world around her. She enjoys going for walks in the stroller. The other day we went to the zoo and I would get her out every once in a while so that she could see the bigger animals moving around. We also took her to the playground and she got to go down some slides by herself (one parent at the top of the slide and the other at the bottom of the slide). She seemed a little shocked by what was happening but enjoyed it. She is starting to become a big girl and we get to have more fun with her as she grows.