Hike and Last Day with Grandma

We went up to the Dreamy Draw mountain preserve with my mom, Hannah, Rachel, and "Friend Tim" the first week of January. Here are a few pictures from that evening adventure . . .

Josiah "fishing." 

Also, he knows this shirt says "Boy Genius" (or "Genius Boy," he's sometimes told me).

Josiah loves rocks and sticks, so we knew we wouldn't be moving very fast on this hike. Hannah, Tim, and Rach went ahead to do some real hiking. Jer and I had the girls on our backs in backpacks, and my mom helped Josiah make at least a little progress upwards. Apparently the fact that we were hiking in desert terrain didn't stop Josiah from pausing to "fish" from every promising rock he found. He carried a stick and cast off from each rock into little gullies or down slopes, sure he'd catch some water-loving creature! He roped Grandma into fishing with him, and they also threw lots of rocks together.

Something funny?

Here are some pictures from the "real" hikers--credit to Hannah for these:

 Tim meeting a Saguaro

 Phoenix looking beautiful

 Rachel seems to have an uncommonly long tongue

Aunt Hannah and "Friend Tim"

 

Phoenix at sunset

Just before we took Grandma, Aunt Hannah, Aunt Rach, and Friend Tim to the airport

 

Front Yard Fun

 A few weeks ago we took some pictures outside on a Sunday afternoon . . .

Lydia

Lydia with curly Abby in the background

Mama and the girls--Lydia ingesting grass on the left, and Abby looking horrified on the right

Lydia walking (and proud of it)!

 

Lydia and Daddy

 

Abby and Josiah

 

Big brother, littlest sister

 

All three sweet little heads

 

Attempt at a family picture. Lydia was mad.

 

Lydia and Grandma

 

Josiah and Pa

 Josiah loved enlisting Pa's help in all his outside jobs whilst Pa was here over Christmas. Here are a few pictures of them together . . .

Now that the slew of family visiting us is really over (and our fun weekend in Flagstaff is past), poor Josiah is a bit lonesome and cranky. He often wrinkles up his face into a sad look and says, "I want Pa, Grandma! I lose Pa, Grandma." (He calls both sets of grandparents "Pa and Grandma," so he's said this in reference to both in the past few weeks.) Sometimes he just starts with a heartbreaking comment: "I'm sad." When I ask him why, he says he misses Pa, Grandma, or one of his aunts or uncles. Today we said goodbye to Great-grandma, and he's been missing her and Dave all afternoon. Our poor social bud!

My Worker Guy

When playing outside or "helping" Daddy, Josiah often says to me, "I'm a worker guy!" He loves to be in the thick of whatever project Jeremy is currently tackling. A couple weekends ago, this meant helping take out dead and dying oleanders. Josiah outfitted himself with gloves, a mask (temporary, and thus not pictured in the photos below), and a PVC pipe. He followed everyone around, hauled a few branches, and pulled a bunch of sticks out of piles and out of the fence. He hates to be left out of any outdoor job. I'm glad he's such a willing helper!

Babies' First Christmas

11 Months Old!

These two cuties are 11 months old today! It's hard to believe I only have a month left till their first birthday.

Christmas Cookies

My family has lots of traditional Christmas cookie recipes: sour cream sugar cookies (the best!), date bars dusted with powdered sugar (Dad's favorite), pecan tassies, jam thumbprints (pretty, but not very popular with us as kids), oatmeal-date sandwich cookies (another for Dad), buckeyes (a more recent addition) . . . Jeremy loves peanut butter cookies with chocolate kisses squished into the centers, and he remembers his grandma baking these every Christmas. So we've added them to the list. I haven't kept up with all this Christmas baking each year, but with my family around this time, we made quite a few of them. Josiah got in on the fun of frosting and decorating the sugar cookies, so here are a few belated photos of him experiencing the wonder of Christmas baking . . . 

What good is decorating without tasting?

Let's just stick that whole knife-full in the mouth!

Abby at 10 Months

(I started this post a while ago, but I better get it finished before the title is no longer true! The girls will be 11 months old at the end of this week.)

Our little Abigail is still more pensive and cautious than her sister. It's been so fun to see their personalities develop (and retain traits we noticed right from the start!) as they grow older. Abby likes to observe people and situations--preferably from the safety of Mama or Daddy's arms--before jumping in and joining. She doesn't smile as readily as Lydia, but she's certainly a pleasant, happy, and smiley little girl around people she knows. She took a couple days to warm up to my dad when he came for Christmas, but once she decided she liked him, she preferred him to most of the rest of us!



In line with her more cautious nature, Abby took her first steps about a week and a half after Lydia--so just over 10 months old. She still doesn't launch across the room like Lydia does. Instead, she calculates the distance she intends to go and typically makes it from point A to point B with three or four steps. Seldom has she done as many as eight or ten. But she's gaining confidence! She does love to hang onto things and walk. She grabs hold of my legs, sticks her head between, and walks along with me wherever I go (usually impeding my cooking progress in the kitchen!). She likes to hang onto the back of the wagon outside and walk along with that. Earlier today Josiah loaded the wagon with all his outdoor worldly goods ("suitcases") and pulled it from his fort under one tree to his "house" (digging hole) under another. Abby loved traipsing around with him by hanging onto the back! I had to slow him down from time to time, but he did pretty well with this arrangement.

Abby is ahead of Lydia in the teeth department. Both girls have two incisors on the bottom, but Abby has her four front teeth on top coming in. No sign of Lydia's yet!

Both girls like music and bounce to a beat when I sing or turn on a CD. But Abby seems to be more attuned to particular tones and patterns of sounds. She often tries to imitate me when I sing two notes in an interval (usually a third or a fifth), and she hears and imitates the two notes, usually in the high-to-low or low-to-high pattern I did. She seems to make a wider variety of babbling sounds than Lydia, too--her babbling sounds more like an imitation of talking as she pairs letters in her sweet little voice. Here, too, she obviously seeks to imitate us: often when I say a short sentence, ask her a question, or ask her to say something, she clearly tries to replicate the sounds. Sometimes she gets pretty close--at least pretty close for a 10-month-old baby!

Abby isn't always quiet. She loves to growl back and forth with anyone, and her high-pitched talking can get pretty insistent sometimes! She says "Dada" for Daddy and sometimes "Mamamama" for me. She waves "hi" and "bye" and says "hi" quite well (occasionally she'll say "bye"). She signs "all done" and attempts the sign for "more" and "please." She understands lots of what I say and tends to push the limits less than her sister (at least for now).

Still our cuddle-bug and thumb-sucker, Abby is also still more than a pound lighter than Lydia--so she seems more the baby, even though she's only nine minutes younger than her big sister. Lydia mostly saves thumb-sucking for bedtime (or when she's getting tired), but Abby resorts to it often throughout the day--when assessing a new situation, sizing up a new person, cuddling with Mama after nap, pensively observing her siblings, perhaps feeling a bit bored, etc. That left thumb gets a lot of work!
 

Abby loves to be outside, just like her sister and brother. But she's more content than Lydia to stay in one spot and check out all the nearby leaves or watch Josiah. She still tries to eat grass and leaves occasionally, but she doesn't transgress as much as Lydia in this area. She's more interested in finding, holding, and looking at the leaves and other vegetation outdoors.