Month: February 2007

This week with Taylor has been so much fun! We go through a lot of peaks and valleys, but this week has been so full of joy and fun and laughter. It makes me feel really fortunate that I get to share this time with her.

You can almost hear the “wheeeeee!”:

Somewhere along the line, T.J. has developed a very elaborate method of stalling her bedtime. Generally we follow a loose routine of reading a story, brushing teeth, sometimes singing a song and then off to bed (usually with nose rubs along the way). I’ve always allowed her to have a sippy cup of water in case she gets thirsty during the night. That worked okay for awhile – never perfectly, but well enough. Then Taylor started raising the stakes and asking for additional items (her baby doll, a book, a teddy bear…). Soon T.J.’s crib was being crowded out by books, toys, balls, purses and anything else she could convince us to give her to forestall the inevitable. We finally wised up to her and the laundry list of requests has diminished significantly.

Wearing a cup as a hat…why not?!

This week, we hunkered down at home to deal with a nasty bout of the croup. It started last Thursday night and didn’t seem too bad at first. Taylor wasn’t sleeping well, but otherwise she seemed perfectly fine. She didn’t really start to get bad until Saturday night, when everything unraveled. We spent the next several days in various states of flu-filled misery. Finally, on Thursday she seemed to be getting better. Taylor asked for a bagel, so we took a trip to Noah’s Bagels. She was in a great mood, practically dancing with happiness in Noah’s while I placed our order. Everything was going so well until she fell off of her chair onto the floor. I saw her approach the edge of the seat, but it happened so quickly that I couldn’t respond fast enough. She fell face first and when I picked her up she had a bloody nose. It was horrible – she looked so wounded and I thought she might have broken her nose. She had already gone through so much being sick and was just starting to get better, only to get broken again! She’s more resilient than I gave her credit for, though, because about 5 minutes after all of this happened, she was asking for more bagel. All I can say is – she bounced back a lot faster than I did!

Illness did not impede progress and Taylor spent her week learning how to say all kinds of new things. Most of them were two-word phrases like, “hold that” or “dropped it” or “nice doggy”. She’s saying so many more words and her pronunciation of the words she already knows has improved dramatically. Weird how it all seems to happen at once. A couple of my favorite words that she learned this week were “tasty” and “juicy”. I like them because she says them with such enthusiasm. I’m not sure where she picked them up, I guess we must have said them to her, but she’s put her own spin on them. She’ll be eating something and she smacks her lips and says, “mmmm…taaaaaaaaasty” or “juuuuicy”! It’s the very exaggerated way in which she says these things that just kills me.

Precious naptime:

Just posting pictures this week…enjoy!

Toby came to visit this weekend and the two kids played non-stop:

Taylor with her friend Meridian:

Taylor locked herself in the bathroom this week. We have only two rooms in our entire house that have actual doors on them, and we NEVER lock them, so it didn’t really occur to me that she would lock us out. When we realized that Taylor was locked in, we tried to pick the lock, but our doors are very old and the lock wasn’t budging. I thought that maybe since Taylor had been able to lock the door, that I could instruct her to unlock it. Here’s how that conversation went:
Me: “Taylor?”
Taylor: “Yes”
Me: “Can you reach up to the doorknob and turn the lock?”
This was followed by silence
Me: “Taylor?!”
Taylor: “Yes”
Me: “You locked the door and daddy and I can’t get in…can you reach up and UN-lock the door for me?”
Taylor: “Yes”
More silence

Moving on to Plan B…since we couldn’t get T.J. to unlock the door on her own, Zach had to take the doorknob off of the door. The problem was, while he was trying to get the doorknob and it’s related parts off of the door, Taylor was trying to be “helpful” by sticking things back through the opening that was created by doorknob. We could see her little hopeful face through the opening and then she would reach up and push the parts that Zach had disassembled back through. Finally we were able to get the doorknob off and Taylor was rescued (although I think she was perfectly happy to hang out in the bathroom all day). We went knobless for a day and now we’ve replaced the old hardware with a fresh, new doorknob complete with a key in the event of future lock-outs!