Aylin's rapidly expanding vocabulary…

I (Jeff) went outside with Aylin this afternoon (which makes me wonder, at what point does "unseasonably warm" become the new norm?). As she was toddling off to the edge of the yard, I was just sort of moseying along behind her. She stopped, turned around and jabbered something at me that I interpreted to mean, "Will ya hurry up already?"

So I said, "I'm coming!"

To which she replied, "I cummeem!"

For the most part, she's been learning to identify objects (though this weekend's marked a move into some different stuff, including the "I cummeem!"), and she remembers them later. Anyway, "I cummeem!" has been today's phrase of the day. It's stinkin' cute. I love seeing how hungry she is to learn, how quickly she learns and how sticky these new things are.

Yesterday's phrase of the day was, "I d'no! [I don't know]!" That came about after she dragged me into her room — "clay [play]?" — sat us down in the floor, and kind of flopped her hands on her lap. I said, "Whatcha doin'?"

"Doin'?", she repeats.

"I don't know!", I say.

"I d'no!". Repeat ad infinitum all day long — and not a few times today — with lots of variations in tone and inflection, shrugs and hand gestures, to boot.

Pretty amazing stuff. It also serves as a constant reminder to be careful of what I say and what she might hear. That's good for me.

I asked for cheese...

and got it! :D

The girls have been sick a few days…

Kristina's been saying for a week or more that she thought she was coming down with something. Aylin has been tossing her cookies off and on since Saturday. She went to daycare on Monday and Tuesday, ran a bit of a fever on Tuesday, then came home with 101° F temperature Wednesday at lunch. Kristina was really not feeling well Wednesday night, and they both stayed home all day today, fighting the stomach bug.

Aylin — unusually, if you know her at all — fell asleep on the living room floor about 6:45 tonight. Kristina put her to bed, and now she's in bed herself.

Fun times around here!

General Update

From This:
To this:

All in what seems, as a blink of the eye.

Wow, I love that kid. It's been such an amazing trip. Lots of laughter and tears. It's hard to believe she is now 19 months old... Going on 5 years. :D She now (finally) weighs around 22 lbs, and at her 18 month check up she was 31" tall! She's long and skinny. She has 12 teeth (4 top, 4 bottom, and 1 set of molars on each side.) She's too tall for 12 month clothes, but the 18 month are too wide. I have to find the jeans with the expandable button waist on the inside of the pants and cinch them all the way down. She eats all big people food now. She loves to be given a whole apple and just munch away at it. And she makes good progress on it too!! She also likes dried fruit of all kinds. Raisins, craisins, mixed dried fruit. She loves pretty much all fruit. She also likes plain sour cream... I was making dinner one night, and had the sour cream out. She wanted a "bite" so I gave her a little on a spoon just to see what she would do. Well, she loved it. So then I had to keep giving her more. Until I finally gave her a good dollop in a bowl and let her have at it. She finished it all, and was Num Num! the whole time she ate it.

She loves to climb on to things. She is now tall enough to climb on the kitchen chairs, so she'll push them to where she wants to be and get to the kitchen counter. She loves to help me cook. She gets her own bowl and spoon, or some kind of utensils and she plays while I cook. Usually with lots of Mmmm! involved, and I have to "taste" what she is stirring up. :D

I finally put away all of the little baby stuff (Swing / Jumperoo / Infant Car Seat). It's crazy to think of how quickly they grow out of those things. But I can't see how we ever would have gotten any sleep without that wonderful swing, and the Jumperoo was awesome right up until she could walk. She's such a busy little bee, that it was great when she wasn't able to be mobile and could keep herself occupied.

But now the little monkey is in to everything!

We think it may be time to start a little potty training. She is becoming aware, anyhow. For the last month or so every time I change a diaper I tell her pee pee (for wet diapers), and Poopy (for dirty diapers). Now she's started coming to her dad and I and grabbing her crotch and saying "Poo" when she makes a dirty diaper. And today she actually did it before / while she was making one... So she's getting the idea anyhow. We'll see what happens. We're going to go ahead and get a potty seat and see where it goes...

She still loves bath time, but washing her hair is a struggle. She hates the water in her eyes. But she refuses to tilt her head back, or to hold still for me to use the nice little soft sided water bucket to rinse her hair. I got one of the water bucket things at Walmart that has a soft / flexible side to it so you can put it up to the child's forehead and dump it down. But she just hates it so bad that when it comes to that time, she won't hold still. The best I can do it hold my hand up so that most of it is shielded away from her eyes, and I make the Brrr (motor boat) type noise so that she repeats me, and doesn't snort the water in. Sometimes it goes ok, other times we get hysterical after. Aside from the hair washing though, she loves her bath. And probably only twice in her life has fought even going in to the tub for a bath.

Her vocabulary is growing by the day. She no longer only says words that she has heard repeated over and over. Now she tries a new word after only hearing it once! And some of her constant words are becoming for defined. She calls me Mom-mom, Jeff is DA!, Bela is Na-lllla (somewhere along the way she changed, she did call her Be-da at one time), Angel is something I can't quite make out yet. But it's not at all like Angel. The cats are Kie! her Blankie is also Kie! Of course all food is "Bite", she does sometimes ask for a "sip" now, or a "dink", or even "Mook" for milk. She says "Ni-nite", and "bye-bye". Hiiii is said alot, many times followed up with "do-in?" or "sup" for what'cha doin? or what's up? She has all of the Pooh character's down, "Pooh", a funky noise for piglet and tigger, "Eeewwww" for Eeyore, "BaBAT!" for Rabbit, "Ooww" for Owl. and Bi-BI! is Big Bird. Those are the most common words, but there are so so so many more. She is quite the jabber box these days. She loves to communicate.

Aylin and I are going to get to take our first Air Plane ride together on the 23rd to go see Grama Jeanne (And My Grama Gracie!) in Charlotte, NC! I'm very excited about the vacation. But I hope the plane ride goes well. Anyone that has traveled with toddlers on a plan - PLEASE!!! - provide insight / thoughts / tips / tricks / watch out for / or definitely do not do... Any and all kinds of advise is welcome. Thankfully we will have a direct flight both there and back. From XNA to Charlotte, and it will only be a little over a 2 hour flight. So it should go well, but you never can tell... I am definitely a little nervous.

Crazy things have happened over the last several months. Our water heater quit on us (thanks Whirl Pool for making crappy water heaters). It was only 4 years old... Boo. That was a nice hit to the check book. Then just after we recovered from that fun mess, I hit a lovely Doe on my way to work a few weeks back. Turned out she was a $2,700.00 Doe. She was at a full run when she hit my front driver side quarter panel. Thankfully the car was drivable, because I was out in the boonies w. no cell coverage where it occurred. Also thanks to my brother-in-law Bradley for letting me borrow his Rover while my car was out of commission. The car is now back together again, and good as it was before. Thankfully we only had to cover $500.00 of the $2,700.00 bill.

I've been feeling pretty good lately, slowly but surely I'm getting the house re-organized. Which is really hard to do with a toddler around. But I've purged a lot of things, and and starting to feel better about the junk that we do have left... :) The house isn't feeling nearly as claustrophobic.

Work is slowly but surely starting to get better. I have been working longer hours than what I would like to, still. But I've been getting better support, and the problems that I had been having aren't happening as often. And (knock on wood) people seem to be learning from their mistakes so they aren't causing me as many problems. I'm also seeing better communication (which is half the problem), so I'm hoping over the next several months, things will continue to improve and maybe I'll finally get to a point where work doesn't make me so crazy.

Well, that's 'bout all I got for now. Lots going on, but I'm certain I didn't remember to include half of it. ;) Maybe it won't be another 3 months before I update again... But I wouldn't hold my breath. :D

Lucid dreaming, adoption and snark

So Teena asked me this morning, "What's this movie, Inception, that everyone's talking about?"

"I don't know. Don't care." I'm kinda snarky about what I perceive to be overly-hyped pop culture BS, as many of you will already know. Actually, I could just end that sentence after "snarky" and be just as accurate.

I told her that as far as I understood, it had something to do with lucid dreaming, the concepts of which we talked about briefly. That discussion led to us talking about a dream I had the other night, and how it never seemed to me that lucid dreaming is that big a deal, in that I've always interacted with my dreams. I always just figured everyone did. Judging by the response to "Inception", I guess I was wrong.

Anyway, Teena then told me she'd had an interesting dream last night, in which we adopted a 3-yr old red-headed Mennonite boy who'd been orphaned by a house fire…

That's an awful lot of detail, eh? The snark continued, of course, from there. But perhaps my response is best left offline.

The Grass is Always Greener on The Other Side

I love my girls. That's why I decided not to pursue the Antarctica gig any further. I couldn't imagine missing that much of Aylin's life — at any stage, really, but especially right now. And I don't think Kristina or I either one would deal very well with being away from one another for an extended period of time. We're just too good a team to risk it for an adventure…

That said, I got an interesting job opportunity in my email box today. I'll be applying, and we'll see where it goes. Here's a couple of pics:

Guesses about where this is?

JM

Our adventure continues...

I [Jeff] finally got a job locally, working for Marrs Electric at the Crystal Bridges Museum construction project. Marrs is a great company to work for, so I'm tickled about that. The Museum is going to be really neat, too, when they're finally done building it.

That said, my job search continues. Kristina would like to be able to be a full-time mom, and work in new construction will never provide the stability or income that we'll need to reach that goal, or many of the others we have -- retirement, paying for Aylin's college, etc. One of the avenues I'm pursuing diligently is federal employment. There are tons of jobs in the electrical field with various government agencies; pay is excellent, as are retirement and health benefits. I'm currently in the running for a pair of pretty cool jobs -- one in Washington, D.C., and one near Denver, CO. I've also just applied for a sweet job near a tiny little town in southern South Dakota, just a few miles from the Nebraska border (and not too far from Iowa and Minnesota). Another really cool job (pun intended) that I'm in the running for is a limited-duration contract posting in Antarctica. Yep, that Antarctica. Of course we don't know if any of these jobs will pan out, but it's exciting for us to have so many nifty possibilities in front of us after such a long dry spell.

I'll not get into a lot of detail about the jobs right now, since I don't have any offers yet. Even if I get an offer for the Antarctica job, we've not yet decided whether I'd go. Rest assured that more detail will be forthcoming should I get a job offer.

Stay or go, we've decided that our long-term goals don't include living in McDonald County, Missouri, so we're putting our place up for sale right away. We don't envision Aylin going to school here, for one thing. For another, our house needs a lot of work. Debt repayment is a much higher priority for us right now than is fixing up the house, and increasing the value of the home won't actually help it sell any quicker in Mac County. Our current income levels won't support rapidly paying off debt and giving the house the attention it needs. Besides all that, if I get a job elsewhere, we're either going to need to move pretty quickly or, if I'm going to Antarctica, Kristina won't be real comfortable out here by herself for that length of time (three months to a year, depending on "business needs"). So one way or another, there should be a For Sale sign out in front of "the old Carter place" pretty soon.

Just a short little update, but I thought y'all might like to know what was happening with the family.