Riley and Avery

I keep forgetting to blog this: Avery has some new words. First, and cutest, she pointed at the Father's Day card that Amy, Scott, and Abby got Rudi (which has a toddler cheerleader on the front) and said "Riley". It was cute. It sounds like "Ry-way". Now every girl is Riley. She also says "up" "off" "no" and some more, I'm sure, but it's getting late and my brain is fried. Riley sometimes gets mad that Avery mispronounces her name ("My name's not 'Ry-way'! Say 'Ry-wah-wee'!") but Riley can't even pronounce her name correctly...Avery says "VeeVee" for her own name, but she doesn't say it often.

She also says "me me me me" about a hundred times a day. She wants to do everything herself. Dress, undress, get her own dishes, take her diaper off, buckle her carseat. Today she opened the dishwasher, stood on the open door, pulled out the top rack and got herself a bowl for her watermelon. Kind of cute for now, but Riley didn't hit this stage until she was a little older, and I'm sure it'll wear thin really soon. And can I tell you, this kid can climb like no one's business. She can climb onto the dining room chair, which is a rather tall chair (we have the high table and chairs) and play with the computer (yikes!). She may be little, but she's nimble.

Oh, one more thing, I was at a fabric store and carrying Avery in the mei tai and the woman working there asked me about it. This woman was of Chinese discent, and said that when she was in China she saw women working in the field wearing babies on their backs (never their fronts) in something very similar. She also said that she used to work for Indian Health Services and one of her close friends was a Pueblo Indian. She said that this woman trained her children to simply cling to her like little monkeys (no offense at the comparison, none other fits). She said that they would grip onto her hipbones with their little toes and just hang on. No carrying and no carrier. From birth. How amazing (and a little scary) is that?

Just thought I'd post more pictures of Denver Children's Museum since I have so many. I'll probably post even more later.

Avery shopping in the miniature store. You can tell that she really loves corn on the cob!

Riley ringing up the purchases in the store.

Riley operating the washing machine.

Avery examining the enormous flowers.

So Riley and Avery have been sick and wre'll all going stir-crazy. We haven't been out of the house since Saturday. Riley's sounding a little better todaday, and Avery was just mildly ill to begin with (the joy of extended breastfeeding). I don't think they'll be well enough to go to playgroup tomorrow, but we can hope.

So we've had all of the windows open since it's been so hot. I was trying to get the girls down for a nap yesterday afternoon and we start hearing a chainsaw in our front yard. Our bedroom window overlooks the front yard, so Riley goes to the window to see what's happening (I already knew) and saw her beloved tree being chopped to the ground. The tree was really damaged by the blizzards this winter. Of course, she starts crying hysterically, saying that it was her favorite tree that she loved to climb. It was heartbreaking. Then we go downstairs and she sits on the front step with Rudi and cried. Made the poor men chopping down the tree feel really bad. They tried to make her feel better. They said that we'll be getting a baby tree today. I told Riley that she can help take care of the baby tree and watch it grow. Of course, we get up today and the men are at a loss at how to get the stump out of the ground. A whole lot of chopping and sawing hasn't yeilded any results. So we may have to wait for our baby tree.


Riley's been saying "Our yard doesn't look like itself!"

Nothing much else has been going on since we've pretty much been staying in. At least the girls aren't feverish anymore. Rudi is the medicine-pusher. He says that they kids need medicine for the tiniest things. It drives me crazy. That and he insists that I take the girls to the doctor. For a cold? I'd just be wasting my time. Plus, I've put off finding a new doctor. Rudi liked our old doctor until he found out that she's a NP. Funny thing, his doctor at the VA is a NP. He liked her a lot (not knowing that she was a NP), but she left the VA and I told him that she was a NP. Then she comes back to the practice and he's reassigned to her and he doesn't like her anymore (just because she's a NP). Ugh. Our NP gives great physicals, better than any of the MDs we've seen before, but I'm tired of the unsolicited parenting advice. She obviously didn't like me breastfeeding Riley when she turned three, and really urged me to get them their own beds. Like, did I ask?

Oop, my pictures have downloaded! I can stop gabbing now...

A lady from West Side Moms just sent me this link (Mom, click on "link"!). We are in the video, a close-up of Avery nursing, and the still beneath the TV-thing is also Avery (obviously!). That's pretty darn cool!

I know I haven't been blogging much lately, but both girls are sick, both with coughs and feverish when they sleep. I'll be back at it soon!

I just had to blog this before I forgot all about it. So I joined West Side Moms about a month or two ago, that's just a preface...So I was going through some picture CDs because I have the really bad habit of not labeling them, so I thought I'd organize. So I happen upon our pictures from our trip to the Dinosaur Resource Center on 10/6/06 (remember, waaaaaay before I joined West Side Moms or knew any of the ladies there). And this picture catches my eye....


because that is Zander in the picture with Riley! Zander is the son of the woman (Maida) who founded West Side Moms. So I bring this to her attention as like a really really odd finding, and she looks at her pictures and finds this one...

with Riley in the background! How freaky is that?

I've always wondered about being in the background of other people's family pictures. It's funny because Riley really really likes Zander.

Ugh, I have so much to blog about and so many pictures to upload, I doubt I'll get it all done in one sitting. We'll see...

So we did make it to the nurse-in at Elitch Gardens (Six Flags). There were only about a dozen mothers there, but what are you going to do with less than 24 hours notice? No one stayed really long, since it was really hot and many of us were with preschoolers outside of an amusement park (duh, what older child doesn't want to go in after seeing all of the slides and rides?) Here's the article in the Denver Post. If you enlarge the picture you can see Avery standing in my lap. The reporter made it sound like only four mothers were there, when in reality perhaps only four were actually nursing at the time. Dope.

So after the nurse-in, we headed on a whim over to the Denver Childrens Museum and stayed there for four hours. Oh, that place is so cool!! I could see staying there from open to close. Just so cool. They had absolutely everything that a kid could possibly want. Riley and Avery both had a blast. They had a fire engine, a child-sized house, a child-sized grocery store, and art area, a train room with thousands and thousands of wooden tracks and trains for the kids to set up, a woodland area where they could pretend to be animals, and so much more. So we left for Denver at 9:30am and didn't get back until 6:30pm. I was so pooped. It was also the longest stretch of babywearing that I've done ever, I think.



So today, Avery is feverish. I had to give her a double dose of Tylenol to bring it down. I think she's cooler now. She's finally sleeping. She just hung out in a daze in the mei tai for hours, so still and limp I thought she was sleeping. Poor thing. I hope she's better by tomorrow so that we can go to our playgroup. She seems to get these short-lived fevers frequently. I wonder what's up with that?

I'll have to post more later...

So Avery has been sitting on the potty lately. Not doing much, mostly wiping with toiletpaper, but she's been asking to sit, so I have let her. Her butt is so small she can easily fall in even with the potty seat. Ignore the marker on her (Mom) it's her favorite thing to do and she's due for a bath today anyway...

I just found out that LLL is having a Mile High Breastfeeding Celebration on 6/24 in Denver. They will have vendors, music, food, etc. and will attempt to beat the world record for women breastfeeding at one time. Sounds like fun, and I'm going. Yeah! Now just to figure out how to get both girls to Denver by myself without sacrificing my sanity...Oh, this just in: we'll be going to Denver tomorrow for a nurse-in at Elitch Gardens. It seems a mother was seriously harassed there, threatened with arrest and so forth.

And I got a call from my best friend Sarah because she was planning on going to Maryland and wanted to know if I was going this summer too. And, yes, we'll be there at the same time! How cool is that? I haven't seen her in so long. Pretty much her wedding over four years ago, although we met briefly once when Riley was two months old. Oh, this is so cool.
We went to West Side Moms playgroup yesterday and stayed for a whopping 3.5 hours. The girls had a lot of fun. Riley made friends with a boy named Zander. They actually ran off far away from the group, hiding behind trees. I told Zander's mother, Maida, that in a few years I won't let her son take Riley behind a tree! We saw the morbidly obese girl there again. She was very nice, brought several buckets and shovels and handed them out to the kids in the sandbox. I was glad that Riley played with her without making any comments. She's been noticing larger people lately. I had a blast with the mothers there. It's nice finally meeting people. One motehr there has a three year old and 8 mo old twin girls. Her husband is a green beret, and comes to playdates as well. She was telling us how much he loves babywearing. She said that she was on the phone with a friend in the UK, ordering a Connecta (aparently a really hot, really expensive carrier hard to get here in the US) and her husband is in the background saying "Order two! ORDER TWO!!" I think it's cute seeing such a "manly man" with a baby tied on. Also, the fathers in this group are taking their children camping for father's day, without the mothers! What? Rudi would never...One father is taking a three year old son and just-turned-one daughter! I'm so jealous!
We had a NINO meeting today, which turned out mostly to be a West Side Moms playgroup since there were only four mothers there, and all of us were proficient babywearers. So we just socialized. That was fun too.

Well, all of this socializing in the past few days has been hard on the girls naptimes. Yesterday Riley passed out in the car after playgoup and I couldn't wake her. So she napped until 6. Today was the same, napping until 6. It just doesn't work when that happens. So she'll be up late tonight again. Maybe I'll take her to the store with me after Avery goes to bed, to buy lunch items for tomorrow's nurse-in. Hopefully that will tire her out. We can always hope...

I was all excited yesterday. America The Beautiful park (still not diggin' the name) has a farmers market and live musice every Wednesday through the summer. And they have a cool playground there. It was supposed to be big band music and I was all excited to go. We get there and the wind was so strong that they cancelled the music and there were only three produce tables there. Radishes and salad greens were blowing away in the wind. Totally sucks. We braved the strong wind for nearly two hours and played on the playground anyway. Hopefully next week will be better.


We had our playgroup today. They used to be on Wednesdays, but moved to Thursdays for the summer. Oh, so much fun as always. Riley is playing more and more interactively with other children. The other mothers noted how she was flirting with a cute blonde-haired blue-eyed freckle-faced boy named Elijah on the slide. Her little flirty fake laugh. I really like this playgroup, more than NINO and LLL. All of the mothers happen to babywear and breastfeed and a lot cloth diaper, so we can talk about so many things and not be restricted to one topic. I don't know what's happening to our NINO meetings. The South meeting is kind of on hold since the host's infant daughter keeps having seizures and stops breathing, so no one wants to stress her out by having her host. Then the North meeting, the last time I went it was me, the host, one of the leaders, and another mother. The time before that it was just me. The time before that there were at least a dozen mothers. Who knows? They are trying to rearrange the days, times, and locations to better accomodate everyone.

I think Avery has entered the stage of taking interest in the potty. She is able to hold her bladder more and floods her diapers. Today, she came to me, sticking her but out and waddling, saying "uh-oh poo poo.) Sure enough, she'd pooped. I don't really want to start potty training until she's two, but I can at least get her used to the idea. It's funny how aware you can be of all of this when they wear cloth diapers.

Riley told me yesterday that she had a new word, so I asked her what it was and she said "distinguished." I asked her what it means and she said "very, very beautiful." So sweet.

Avery was doing some naked artwork on the kitchen floor. I looked down and Avery was gone and the water dish had been spilled. So I just push a dishtowel that was already on the floor from the last spill over it and then I see Avery running over with a bath towel dragging behind her, prepared to clean up her spill. Way to take initiative! It was adorable, so intent on performing her clean-up task.

Avery is getting two more teeth. The upper and lower canines on her left side. No wonder she's been a pill the past few days.

Oh, another thing: one of the mothers at the playgroup has a three year old and a three month old and her husband is deployed in Iraq for the second time. She was telling me that not only is their tour being extended, they won't even tell them when they are coming home. She knows he's coming home between September 2007 and March 2008. Is that any way to treat the military members and their families? Arg, this war sucks...

Oh, we had so much fun at the sheep shearing at Rock Legde Ranch. The ranch is just outside of the Garden of the Gods, so it is absolutely beautiful there. We spent about four hours there, mostly because we got caught in a rain/hail storm and had to go into the homesteading house. That gave us a chance to really examine everything in there. We were the only ones in there other than the lady that "lived" there. Riley learned about rag rug weaving and how the settlers used everything they had and never threw anything away. We examined the construction of the house, the clay used to seal the gaps in the lumber, and the wool used to stuff the cracks in the door for waterproofing and warmth. And Riley really had a ball with the horses. She was disappointed that they weren't for riding, but loved them anyway. Avery wouldn't go near the horses until they left the fence and then she was brave enough to take a look. We toured a beautiful turn-of-the-century home and Riley didn't want to leave the house. I thought that she'd be bored of the tour, but no. It was a Maryland-like day, weatherwise. Hot and rainy. It's like we could have gotten a sunburn during the rain. On the bright side, Colorado is lush and green like never before. Anyway, Riley was really interested in all the things that she could learn. Very engrossed. It was funny, for the days before we went, whenever I mentioned going to the ranch, Riley would ask if there would be chickens there. The kid's nervous around chickens. They did have fenced-in chickens, and Riley noted that the chickens were too busy to peck her. Avery absolutley adored the chickens.


I think we are staying home today. I really need to reinstitute naps for Riley. We've just been so busy lately, we need to take a day and veg. Riley really still needs a nap, but if she doesn't take one by one o'clock, life is terrible. And there are days when Avery will take a cat nap in the car and that's it. All 18 mo-olds need naps, so I'll try and get her back into the habit of taking one. She's a pill otherwise.


So I've been online forever waiting for these pictures to upload. I should disconnect now and go clean. Yay!

Oh, what a crazy past few days. First, on Tuesday Rudi turned off the alarm clock without waking us and we missed Riley's last day of school. So I called the school and asked if she could come on Wednesday, and they said okay. So we went to her last day of school on Wednesday and it was so sad, getting all of her stuff together and such. Then we had the West Side Moms playgroup right after school. We didn't get home until three o'clock. Then Riley took a late nap and was up forever. On Thursday we had the potluck picnic for her school. That was a lot of fun. Riley played mostly with Lorelai. She has another friend, Joan, who's mother is asian, and her father is something else, I can't quite pin it. But I was hoping that she could play with Joan one last time, but the asian families totally segregated themselves. I mean, they weren't even in the pavilion with everyone else. They got a blanket and sat off by themselves. Kind of weird. Oh, well.

We were outside playing the other day and Avery was stooped over an ant hill. Riley and Avery are really interested in ants, so I thought nothing of it, until Avery comes running over to me with her tongue hanging out, dirt all over it. I wonder what she was thinking when she decided to lick the ant hill. Especially dainty little Avery. I wish I had gotten a picture of it.

It seems like everything I want to do is happening this Saturday. I had originally planned on going to the sheep shearing at Rock Ledge Ranch here in town, but now I hear that they are having a yard sale at one of the cooperative preschools here, and I could probably score some really cool stuff. Then they have a wildflower hike for toddlers at Bear Creek Nature Center. Decisions. I guess the yard sale wouldn't be really fun for the kids, nor would the wildflower hike if they're not allowed to pick the flowers (I imagine they're not, but I don't know) so I think it'll be the sheep shearing. And trying to do any two of the above in one day would be asking a lot, so sheep shearing it is. Maybe they'll have yarn for sale or something. We can always go to Bear Creek Nature Center and go on our own flower walk and pick flowers when no one's looking (insert evil laughter).

Riley has really been struggling with the nap thing lately. We had pretty much eradicated naps, but now that spring has hit hard, we are so super busy that she is getting tired out. And I've gotten used to not having to be home for naptime, so we usually get home too late for her to take a nap. We got home from our NINO meeting today at nearly four o'clock, and around 4:30 she threw an absolute tantrum because she didn't get to have a nap. She was screaming "I didn't get a nap! I want a nap! NAAAAAAAAAAAP! But I'm tired! Why are you so mean to me? Why won't you let me take a nap!!!" Because I don't want to be up with you until two in the morning if you take a nap this late, kiddo! I guess we have to make more of a concerted effort to get out of the house early enough that we can be home in time for a nap if she needs one. I'm just no good in the morning. Never have been. The other day Riley and Avery actually took a three hour nap. They went down at 2 (the absolute latest that I let Riley begin a nap) and Avery woke at 3:30. I thought that I could get another half hour out of her and score a short nap myself, so I lay down to nurse her and let myself fall asleep. We all wake up at 5, grumpy and disoriented. I think the sheep shearing starts at 10am, so we should probably aim to be there early. Although it's still cold in the mornings here, so ugh...

Rudi's new shift at work is the pits. It's like being a single mother. From when the kids get up in the morning until they go to bed, I'm the only one taking care of them. It used to be that after dinner, he would watch the kids for a little bit while I got some Amy time, whether it was just a few minutes to run and get coffee, or longer to run errands. Now he's home too late for me to do anything. I think that on his days off, he'll have to watch the kids for a few hours while I try to regain my sanity. I have a list of things in my head that I want to do and places I want to go, by myself.

I should probably get off my duff and start getting ready for tomorrow...oh, Avery wakes, which means that I'll probably fall asleep and get nothing prepared. I can feel it...