Never Too Young

So, it's no secret...I'm a bit of a neat freak. I get small panic attacks when things aren't just so in my home. It's been a crazy ride since I had a child because I can no longer leave a room clean and expect it to look the same when I come back to it. My days consist of playing with Logan, putting her down for a nap, cleaning up Logan's mess, getting her up, playing with her toys some more, putting her down, cleaning up her mess....you get the picture. Anyway, I have to say, I believe it's never too young to teach your children the value in cleanliness, and my child seems to be picking up on it just by my example. This afternoon I locked the two of us in my bedroom and spent 2 1/2 hours doing a deep clean and purge. I finished dusting, gave Logan a paper towel (because she loves to tear them up into tiny pieces that are hard to pick up) and when I turned back around I found her doing this:

Oh yes, the child is dusting the dresser.

No, I absolutely did not prompt her to do this.

I have truly died and gone to heaven.

Mike and I got Logan a vacuum for Christmas to kind of help promote the cleanliness and she's in love with the thing. She loves to vacuum up her little messes and just giggles away while the vacuum cleaner and dust hose talk to each other.

I can't lie, it warms my heart to see my child pretending to clean.

Catch Up

With the recent addition of a "borrowed baby" during the day, thing here have been mighty hectic and I've been sorely neglecting my blog...but I'm going to try to be better with it. Anyway, what's been going on in our household the last week or so?

Well, Logan has really begun liking the soft seat that we got her for Christmas, for one! We were a little apprehensive at first because she just seemed to ignore it and get mildly irritated if we tried to sit her in it ourselves. However, this last week she's really gotten into it! I think she uses it mostly to climb other furniture and get to things that she wants but can't otherwise reach (see proof below):

But we're glad she's finally using it! She'll sit in it now with her sippy cup and watch her Playhouse Disney shows, too, so we're making progress. :)

As mentioned above, we took on another baby this week to help make some extra money while we're in seminary. I would say I took in the baby and am watching him, but Mike does a whole lot to help me out so I can't discredit him at all. Logan helps out a lot, too! I was a little worried with how she'd react but she's done fabulously. She loves to help bounce him when he's in the bouncey seat:

She also will sit next to it and just talk to him when he's fussing.

She's done really well with sharing her toys. She constantly goes back and forth from her toy box in the living room to wherever he is sitting and tries to give the toys to him. I left the room the other day to grab something in the kitchen and came back to find his chair filled with Logan's toys with just a little room left for him! I thanked her and kindly removed the toys so he could have some personal space back.

She's also helping out a whole lot with him. Like I said above, she bounces him in his bouncey seat. She also will rock his carseat when he's in it like she sees Mike and I doing to help get him to sleep. I was shocked the other day when I asked Mike to run and get me one of his diapers and she crawled to a pile of folded cloth diapers, grabbed one of hers and brought it to me. I would have never guessed that she'd understand me, but she surely did! She also likes to hand me things that I've dropped, like his bottle or his blankie. She's going to be a wonderful big sister one day!

Just a couple of days ago, she started to go sit outside of the door when she hears him wake up and cry. While she's sitting there she speaks quite loudly to get my attention after he's woken up to get me to come and get him out:
She's been such a happy, sweet, sweet girl the last week with him around. She only gets clingy once he's left and she's got us to herself again.
Another new (HUGE) development this week is that we've moved Logan's crib mattress onto the ground for her to sleep on. She's never been a fan of her crib and just screams bloody murder when she's in it, but she's starting to get a little big for her pack and play so we decided to give this a try. We're trying to save up money to get her a toddler bed but until then this works just fine. So far, so good, she slept an entire night in it last night and only woke up disoriented once! Now, I, on the other hand, was another story and was up most of the night making sure that she hadn't gotten up and crawled off somewhere...

New Year's Day=College Football

Our world seemingly stopped yesterday because both the Florida State bowl game and the Ohio State bowl game were played. Luckily, there was no conflict with the timing because about an hour after the Florida State game the OSU game was played. So, what's a baby to do when BOTH mommy and daddy's teams are playing? Bust out two outfits, of course!

Yes, she wore her little cheerleading outfit for half the day and then changed into her buckeye onesie for the other half.

We were so sad to watch Bobby's last game. I seriously was in tears when he planted the spear at the opening. I'm so excited to have gone to school during his time at Florida State and look forward to telling our kids about him the way that my dad talks about Bear Bryant when he was in school.

Then we flipped gears and switched her into her scarlet and grey so she could cheer on the Buckeyes with her daddy.
I promise, by the time she's two she's going to know the ins and outs of college football better than some men do with how her daddy talks to her during the games. He's already got her doing the touchdown sign when someone scores!

11 months old!

"Can't a baby text in peace?"

Well, at least this one isn't as late as last month's post! Let me tell those of you with newborns--enjoy them when they're THAT little and helpless because soon they become mobile little monsters (the cute kind) and the whole world turns upside down for you. Nothing will ever be the same. Nor would I want it to be! :) It's really not that bad, it just requires a whole lot more attention.

So, little miss Logan, you are 11 months old now, what have you been up to?!

- You are 22lbs, 24 inches and wearing size 4 diapers when you're not in cloth (which is rare theses days).

- You love to stand up holding on to things. You've mastered the one handed hold and I'm sure it's only a matter of time before you're standing completely on your own...then comes walking!

- You LOVE to smile. We know you must not be feeling well if you're not smiling because it seems to be just about your favorite thing in the world to do.

- You're pretty much doing half table foods/half baby foods right now. You'd be doing more table foods but with your teething you are refusing to eat much that isn't completely and totally watery puree.

- Speaking of the teething, you've cut one of your top teeth and the other one is close behind it!

- You love to say words. So far you've got: dada, mama, baby, bye bye (buh-buh), night night (nah-nah), yes (gyea--yes with a g), and no (nah!) down. You're also making noises at appropriate times ( like mmmmm when you're eating).

- You're sign language has been a heaven sent to us because you can tell us what you want! You can sign for: more, eat, thank you, no, all done, down and we're working on please now. You're also putting some of your signs together to let us know things, for example, you sign for no and more when you're done with something.

- You love other kiddos! Any time I take you in public and we see another little one your size you babble away at them like they know what you're talking about. Sometimes they talk back so maybe they do know. :)

- You're now on a great schedule, you nap two hour long naps during the day and sleep from about 8:00-8:00 give or take a few minutes. The other night you slept NINE straight hours and I thought I had died and gone to heaven when I woke up at 6:30 and you were still sound asleep. Hasn't happened again, but I'm hoping we're on a downhill slope with this sleep battle.

- You adore your daddy. You had been SUCH a mama's girl for the longest time and then all of the sudden you just have been craving his attention lately. It's so sweet for me to watch.

- We left you with your first non-family babysitter this month and you did great. They said you only fussed a little bit and then they took you to our wall of pictures and you just kept pointing to our pictures and smiling.

This is our last monthly update before you're a whole year old! We can't believe how fast it's gone, can you stop growing up for a little while, please?!

We tried desperately to get her to take her monthly update picture in her new chair but right now she prefers to climb onto it, slide right out of it and stand up against it. Sigh. She'll never do what we want her to again, will she?

We can't believe that we're almost at a year of parenthood! When we look at her making faces like the next one all we can do is thank God for such a blessing.

She's also needing to be enticed with props to take pictures for the monthly update now (as seen in last month's picture with the sunglasses):

Here's her comparison collage (click to enlarge):

And here she is at 1 month vs. 11 months:

A lot of change, isn't there? I love that she's giving pretty much the exact same expression in both pictures.

Merry Christmas (part 2)!

WARNING: THIS POST HAS A TON OF PICTURES.

As promised, here is part 2 of our baby's first Christmas adventures! I was going to do a part 3, but heaven help me, I have another post to make about my sweet little girl being 11 months old that's already almost 3 days late and so this post will have both parts 2 and 3 in it and then I'll hopefully get around to the other post. (was that a long sentence or what?)

SO, Christmas day rolled around and we headed to Dublin, OH to see the rest of Mike's family for Christmas. It was so much fun because four of us have had babies in the last year (though, we were missing Mike's twin sister, Lindsey, so only 3/4 baby producers were there) and so we had quite the baby fest. Madelyn is 15 months, then Logan was born 5 months later and is 11 months and Claire is 4 months and Benjamin (who wasn't there) is just a couple of weeks old. The three baby girls all got to meet and play. It was fun to see Logan interact with other kiddos since it's usually just her and I at home. Though, starting on Monday, we'll have another baby here with us full time--not our own :)

It wouldn't be a holiday without a mommy made outfit, would it? I'm a pretty (new) huge fan of Michael Miller fabric--particularly his Christmas line. It's funky, but doesn't toe the crazy edge that so many of the funky fabrics do.

Logan L-O-V-E-S her daddy so much. Lately she's just been craving his attention and loves being held and snuggled by him. It melts my heart!

Here's Logan with her cousin, baby Claire.

Whenever we go somewhere else that has toys, you'd think that we keep this child in isolation and that she's never seen a toy in her life (is that why she got so many toys for Christmas? do you all think that we don't have any at all? ha!) because she goes absolutely NUTSO over new toys!

Logan got to try turkey for the first time on Christmas day. She kind of liked it for a few bites and then decided she'd stick with some of her staple foods for now. Doesn't she look like a little girl (less baby) in the next picture?

I wanted to get a good picture of Logan and Madelyn together because they're so close in age but when one was interested, the other wasn't and visa versa so this was the best I got.

We did another family Christmas after we got home on the 27th. This next gift had been under our tree since before we left and Logan had slowly been working on getting it open. She was excited when we finally took it from behind the tree and let her have free reign on it.

It was an activity table from her Nana and Grandaddy! She adores this toy! She uses it all the time. As soon as we put her down in the morning she heads right for it and literally spends hours standing there banging on it until we finally turn it off to keep ourselves sane. (I mean you can only listen to, "one, uno. yellow, amarillo. cat, gato." so many times before you go crazy--yes it is a bilingual toy, it's brilliant.)

We got a ton of books this Christmas which warms my heart as a teacher. We love to read to Logan and it's nice to have more of a variety now.

I had to include this next one because I think it's SO FUN that Logan got a toy that I used as a child, not the exact one I used, but the same kind of toy.

And these next ones are probably my favorite of the bunch. They are electronic story books that are plastic. I can turn them on and she can sit and turn the pages and they'll read themselves to her AND she can drool and chew as much as she likes and do no damage. I mean, really? What will they think up next?

Uncle John and Aunt Lindsey got her this cute stuffed turtle that has a scarlet and grey shell--they must have known how much her daddy would appreciate it as an Ohio State fan.

She was really into tearing off wrapping paper towards the end of it all, I wonder if she'll remember this come January 28th with her birthday presents?

Our big present to Logan this year was her very own soft seat that we got in collaboration with my parents. I saw it in the store before she was born and decided that's what we needed to get her for Christmas. I think I love it more than she does.

And lastly, mom and Carolyn got Logan her very first Vera this Christmas. For those of you that think an 11 month old has no concept of what a purse is--you haven't met my daughter. This child knows exactly what to do with the thing and wants to hold onto it and stuff it all the time. In fact, we went shopping today and she whined for it (I left it in the car) until I re-opened the door and gave it to her. She proceeded to hold it (by the straps) the entire time we shopped.

Oh. My. What are the teenage years going to bring?