Toddling!

After much debate, we have decided to count Erin's 4-5 steps at a time as walking. She will stand up in the middle of the room and go as long as she can before falling over. We are so proud of her, and she is really proud of herself too! Look for more pictures and video coming soon.

We had a great Thanksgiving - Erin got to go to 2 parties, one at Aunt Maria's family's house and another one for Aunt Pam's baby shower. Of course, she also had Thanksgiving dinner, which was kind of a party as well. She also go to go to her cousins' favorite restaurant, Pizza Hut...and she liked it a lot too! The Mexican restaurant was less of a hit, at least with Erin. She got to see 3 of her 4 grandparents, 2 of her great-grandparents, and all of her aunts, uncles, and cousins! What a great week! She got caught up on sleep last night and is in full Christmas decorating and shopping mode. The tree will be lots of fun this year.

New Tricks

Erin is being her usual entertaining self these days...here are some of her newest tricks:

- Answering "no" or "yes" to most questions, though the answers don't really correlate to her feelings!
- Drinking from her sippy cups like a champ, usually one-handed. The bottles have been put away - they were just being used at daycare anyway. Now she is easily getting in all 20-24 oz. of milk a day, so she can also have some "juice" (watered down). Therefore, another new trick is:
- Wetting the bed at night...she soaks through her diapers. We got some special Huggies overnight diapers, and are 2 for 3 on those working so far this week.
- Lots of distinct babbles, but still just "da" for daddy and doggie.
- She will try a lot more food now, but her favorites are by far spaghetti and cheerios. We will still supplement with baby food if she doesn't get enough from real food - I hope that's not a bad thing.
- She will hand us her sippy cup from her high chair when she's not using it, because it cannot take up valuable real estate on her tray.
- She continues to be a big bookworm and is happy to bring us books all day long and throw them at us until we read them.
- Still not walking yet, but she will stand still for awhile before she falls over.

She and I had a great first week together without daycare. We stayed busy by going to library storytime, ran several errands, went on walks every day, went to the park, and also to Chick Fila with our neighbors. She had a blast in the play area! She's ready for a fun week ahead with her cousins and family from both sides. We're hoping attempt #2 at family pictures goes better tomorrow.

No?

One of Erin's favorite new skills is shaking her head no. She does it very emphatically when we ask her certain questions. I don't think she really knows what she's saying, because if she says "no" to something and we offer it to her anyway, she will take it. It's pretty funny though. We haven't seen any "yes"es yet. She is starting to condition for those Terrible Twos already!

Most mornings, she is already up, diaper changed, and downstairs drinking her milk and playing before Bob leaves for work at 6:30am (don't you wish you lived in our house?)...but he left a little early today because the girls started waking up at 5:30am, which of course woke us up. Anyway, once we got downstairs, Erin crawled into the kitchen, saying "Da?". I had to explain that he had already gone to work, but it was super cute.

She is spending a lot of time practicing her standing, and I did see her take 2 steps this morning - before she crashed into the couch! She's less wobbly on her feet, but is still pretty shaky. She looks so funny (and tall!) to be upright instead of crawling. Such a big girl!

Ear infection

Poor Erin has not been sleeping well all week. We blamed it first on the time change, then on her new big-girl teeth that are coming in, but last night she started having a fever and I noticed some yucky yellow stuff in one of her ears. So we called the pediatrician this morning and Bob got to take her in while I went to my OB appointment. Apparently one of the times she scratched her ears, it got infected, so she has middle ear infections in both ears, kind of like swimmer's ear. The doctor said it is painful, but her eardrums look good, which is a relief.

It's super sad - she does pretty well most of the time, just is more tired than normal because of not sleeping well. Oh, and we can't even think about going near her ears with fingers, washcloths, or bathwater! She even screamed when water ran down behind her ears when I washed her hair last night. She's got amoxicillin and antibiotic ear drops (ofloxacin), and they said to give her tylenol for pain and if her fever comes back.

Now I feel bad for trying to take her to get her pictures taken yesterday...no wonder it was a big disaster! We'll try again in a couple of weeks.

Here's a picture of her favorite new trick - walking on her knees!

Here we go again!

Well, if you haven't heard our big news (or if you haven't pieced it together with all the new car talk), here it is: we are having another baby! May 13th is the date, and we are so excited!

Let me go ahead and answer your questions for you and save you some trouble: YES - they will be a year and a half apart. NO - it wasn't a surprise. YES - we are staying in this house for now (we might be crazy for that). NO - we won't find out what it is, though Bob has started to waver in the past week. YES - we might be crazy for having them this close together, but we are both close in age to our siblings and have loved having it that way. NO - I haven't been too sick, just super tired (same as with Erin; I am very lucky that way...until the heartburn sets in!).

In related news, we have decided that it is best for us for me to stop working as a nurse...effective November 13th (next Friday!!!) and stay home with the kids. I plan to go back to work in 2-3 years, while keeping my license current in the meantime. I did look into working "as needed", but my unit doesn't need help on weekends, and I wasn't too excited about working weeknights and taking care of Erin + sibling during the day. Plus, I'd have to keep current with all the classes/meetings, and that would be difficult with no daytime childcare. A large portion of my check was going to daycare, and daycare was really rough on all of us...a LOT worse than we thought it would be. I figure we gave it a 9-month shot. We have debated this over and over and looked at lots of options for the past, oh, 9 months, and have lots and lots of reasons to go ahead with this now - since we are up here by ourselves, we figure why make things harder than they need to be?

So, that's the latest from us. We are very excited about everything, and are already nervous about trying to handle 2 kids!