Hayley and Kate Minter

Kate has been perpetually sick for the last month-plus.  It started out as a cold that both she and Hayley had, but Kate had a worse version of it.  We had to run the humidifier at night to help her breathe and during the day we were constantly wiping her nose.  Kate’s cold lasted about two weeks.  She was well for about one week, then got sick again.  The second time wasn’t quite as bad as the first but it was still unpleasant.  Hayley showed no cold symptoms this time around.

Last week, Hayley got the sniffles and this morning, Kate woke up with a runny nose again.  Argh.  Thank you public school system.

The only upside to Kate being sick so much now is that she probably won’t get sick as much when SHE goes to school.  For now, we’ll have to keep plenty of lotion tissues and chicken noodle soup on hand.

Hayley got a couple of free kids passes from school to the Alzafar Shrine Circus that is at the Freeman Coliseum in San Antonio this weekend.  So we decided to take the kids to their first circus.

It was a smaller-scale circus than, say, a Ringling Brothers circus but I think the girls enjoyed it just the same.  Before the actual circus commenced, they had pony and elephant rides, bounce houses, and other attractions, all available for a nominal fee of course.  We didn’t have time before the start of the circus to do any of the extra stuff, so we got the girls cotton candy and found our seats (Kate had been asking for cotton candy and popcorn for days, ever since we told her we were going to the circus).  We saw the standard circus acts–elephants, tigers, trapeeze artists, clowns, daredevils, etc.  I think we were all entertained.

Then during “half-time,” we went down to the floor to let the girls ride an elephant.  I had no idea I would have to ride it too!  Since Kate was so little, they made me sit behind her.  Um, I actually rode on an elephant probably twenty years ago but I didn’t remember how weird it feels.  There were about six or seven kids plus me on the back of this poor animal and I was on the very back, right above her hips, swaying from side to side as the elephant walked.  I’m not too keen on heights.  I’ve ridden a horse before too and I definitely prefer the horse.

We returned to our seats for the second half of the show.  Hayley covered her ears during the loud dirt-bikes-going-round-in-round-in-a-giant-metal-ball act, but she liked when “Cannonball” Smith was shot from his cannon.

When we were leaving after the show, Hayley said, “I’d never been to a circus before, but I think I’d like to go again.”

I never thought I’d be a grandma at 30, especially when my oldest daughter is only five.

But after more than two years of promising, we finally got Hayley the chihuahua she wanted yesterday and she wants to be its “Mama.”

The new member of our family is an 8-week-old male chihuahua, mostly white with brown markings.  He’s tiny and cute, and Hayley has named him Darwin (just like Aunt Jenny’s chihuahua).  Today was our first full day with him, and we spent a lot of it trying to make sure he peed and pooped on his potty pad and not on our carpet.  Darwin spent the majority of his day napping.  Rod-kitty seems as indifferent to Darwin as he is with everything else, which is better than Rod trying to eat him.  The girls have fought over Darwin a few times–”Kate, I’m holding him!” “No, me hold him!”–but mostly they’ve been good about sharing.

Check out pictures of our little guy on our Flickr page!

Hayley’s first week of school has passed and she seemed to adjust really well.  Daddy took her into school each morning (except the first day when we all went with her) and she rode the bus home each afternoon.  Before school, she seemed excited about riding the bus, but once she actually rode it, she realized it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.  It’s hot and noisy, and Hayley said she kept getting thrown into the seat in front of her (good thing they’re padded!).  “They don’t have any seatbelts!  Well, they have ONE seatbelt for the driver, but that’s it!”  She took her lunch each day and every day brought home at least one picture she had colored in class.  She’s already talking about some of the kids in her class, especially the ones who misbehave.  She is proud of the fact that she hasn’t gotten into trouble yet but some of the other kids (usually boys) get in trouble, even having to sit outside the classroom on occasion.  Hayley has been good, but she DOES talk about acting silly sometimes to make the other kids laugh.  Hmmm…that one sounds a lot like her father.

School is closed this Monday for Labor Day but it’s back to normal on Tuesday.  Kate and I are going to try to eat lunch with Hayley about once a month and Tuesday will be our first time.  Daddy is also going to start letting Hayley enter the school by herself after Tuesday.  Fortunately, they have a lot of fifth graders and some adults who serve as crossing guards every morning so Hayley should be safe if she has to cross the parking lot.  Still, it’s hard to think of her as big enough to walk into school all by herself…

First of all, Kate pooped in her potty for the first time today!  I didn’t even know anything about it until she came running to me and said, “I poo-poo in potty!”  I thought she meant she had peed because sometimes she says poo for pee.  (I let her run around without a diaper at some point most days because she likes being naked and because it allows her to practice with the potty.)  When I followed her into the bathroom, sure enough, there was Number 2 in her potty.  I quickly checked the place she had been playing and didn’t see any signs of early release, so I assume she felt the urge to go and just went.  What a big girl!

And then, there’s Hayley.  Hayley always has to pee first thing when she comes home from school, which is understandable and perfectly fine.  Unfortunately, I accidentally locked us out of the house yesterday when I went to meet her at the bus stop.  The poor child had to go and didn’t have a toilet to go in.  I told her that we’d go into our (fenced-in) backyard and she could just pee on the ground (hey, when you gotta go, you gotta go).  She headed toward the front yard–and, I thought, toward the gate to the backyard–while I unbuckled Kate from her stroller in the garage.  However, as I carried Kate toward the front yard, I got a shock.  There, standing bare-butt naked with her pants around her ankles, was Hayley, squatting in front of the big tree in our FRONT yard.  “Hayley!  What are you doing?!  I said the BACKyard!”  Fortunately, she hadn’t actually started peeing yet, so I urgently told her to pull her pants up and run to the backyard.  I just really hope none of the senior citizens who live around us was looking out their windows at the moment Hayley’s butt was exposed…

After struggling with Kate to take a nap this afternoon–and failing–I was a bit worn out myself.  I lay down on the sofa for a minute to take a break and Hayley didn’t even bother to beg me to get her something to eat.  She went into the kitchen and I heard her rattling around in the pantry, Kate close at her heels.

I wasn’t in there to see what was going on, but I could tell by the noises and conversation pretty much what was going on:

Hayley got a bowl out of her cabinet and began to pour herself some cereal.  Hayley asked Kate if she wanted cereal but Kate was merely thirsty.  Kate grabbed a cup out of the cabinet and held it out to Hayley.  Hayley said, “No, Kate.”  Kate put that cup back and got another one, again handing it to Hayley.  In a resigned voice Hayley said, “It’s not the cup Kate, it’s the liquid.  I can’t pour it by myself!”

I nearly fell off the sofa when I heard her say that.  I’m still laughing about it…”it’s the liquid.”

After wiggling around in her mouth for nearly a month, Hayley lost her first tooth this morning!

I asked her at breakfast to see her tooth, and she let me wiggle it around. I saw that the back of the tooth had completely detached, so I pushed her tooth backward with a mild amount of force, and out it popped!

Hayley looked a little shocked for a second, and seemed like she might cry, but after Holly and I started gushing over what a big girl she was and how neat this was, she started grinning. She spent quite a bit of time playing with the new hole in her smile.

I took her downtown for a celebratory lunch at Casa Rio, then with her to improv practice, and she wasn’t shy about telling everyone in either place about how she’d lost her first tooth. Then, at bedtime, we tucked her tooth into the pocket of the special Tooth Fairy Pillow that Holly made for her while in Virginia. So we’ll see what the Tooth Fairy brings our big girl tonight.

Now, we’ll see if it takes a month for her second loose tooth to pop out as well.

So, we’re back from our nearly 3-week vacation in Virginia.  We tried to see all of our immediate family at some point during the trip.  Things didn’t go exactly as planned, but few things in life ever do.  The girls had fun seeing grandparents and cousins, aunts and uncles, swimming, playing with animals, fishing, catching bugs, going to a county fair, and just hanging out and coloring or watching tv.  Both girls were good while traveling–I really feel fortunate that my kids travel so well, especially when I see other parents struggling with screaming kids.  Kate even slept for about 40 minutes on the last leg of our journey from Atlanta to San Antonio.

Speaking of Kate–that girl is a trip herself.  Not only can she say hundreds of words (she can pretty much repeat, or try her best to repeat, anything we say), but she can “sing” now too.  She knows “Hey, Diddle Diddle,” “One, Two, Buckle My Shoe,” and “Rock-A-Bye Baby,” and parts of some other songs.  It’s funny to hear the pitch of her voice change as she sings.  And today when we were in the car, a song came on the radio that had a lyric that ended in the word “good-bye” being drawn out to four syllables.  The song ended, and I heard Kate in the back singing “Good-bye-eye-eye.”  She was repeating what she had just heard!

Kate is also fearless and VERY independent.  Her most popular phrases are “Me do!” and “Do by mine self!”  If she wants to do something and you do it for her, she gets very upset.  She likes to brush her own teeth (and actually does a pretty good job), climb up into the van by herself, walk almost everywhere herself (she doesn’t like to be carried for long), wipe herself when her diaper is being changed, buckle her own belt in her booster seat, take off her shoes, socks, clothes, diaper, and pretty much anything else she is capable of doing on her own.  She wants to be just like Hayley and doesn’t always understand why she can’t do everything that Hayley does.

For example, when we went to the Powhatan, Virginia, county fair on Sunday, there was a “ride” that was like a small obstacle course.  Hayley went through it with no problem, but Kate was really too small to go through it.  That didn’t stop her, though.  She pushed her way through the hanging punching bags, dove into the ball pit (at one point, she was so deep in it, all you could see were her little red pigtails sticking up over the top of the balls), climbed up the rope ladder (she struggled a bit here, but she didn’t give up!), crossed the bridge, and slid down the tube slide.  She had so much fun, she wanted to do it again and again.  She went through it three times in all and would have gone more if we had let her.  Grandma Estes said she might be a future Olympian, the way she was pushing herself.

Hayley’s tooth hasn’t come out yet, but she has a second one loose now.  She’s having a little trouble eating now–tonight we had pizza and I had to cut it up for her, poor baby.  I don’t know how long it will take for the tooth to come out, but she will probably lose it before she starts school on Aug. 25.  Aaahhh!  I can’t believe my baby will be in Kindergarten!  We registered her today but the reality of her going hasn’t set in yet.  I’m sure I’ll be a blubbering mess on that first day.

We have not posted here in nearly two months, but those of you who are close to us probably know why.  We have made the decision to move to San Antonio, so we have spent a large portion of the past weeks getting our house ready for market.  We also celebrated Hayley’s 5th birthday and Holly’s 30th birthday.

We decided not to try to put Hayley into another preschool, especially with all the unknowns regarding our upcoming move.  I have been trying to help her at home with her reading, writing, and math, and she is doing well.  I just wish I had more time for her.  I regret that she may be behind some of the other kids when she enters Kindergarten, but I know she’s a smart girl and that she’ll catch up quickly.  We go to the library almost every week for new books to read and for story times, and Hayley just finished a mini day camp last week at a local park.  She learned about all the different kinds of weather.  Next month the camp is about amphibians (she should love that one because of her lifelong obsession with frogs).

Our little Kate just keeps getting bigger, if not in size definitely in development.  She is 16 1/2 months old now and does not like to be told “no.”  She has gotten pretty good at squeezing out those crocodile tears when she doesn’t get her way.  A few times in the past couple of weeks, she has said two words “together.”  For instance, when we were in the grocery store one day there was another baby crying somewhere and she said, “Baby…cry.”  And then she proceeded to repeat it over and over.  But today, she surprised me when she went into the loft and said, “Ball popper.”  I was in my bedroom and she and Hayley were in the loft.  I heard her say this and then Hayley said, “You want the ball popper?”  She must have nodded because Hayley brought the popper toy into my room and Kate followed and began playing with it.  She said “ball popper” several more times, which was very cute.  It struck me at that moment as I watched her play and talk that she is growing up faster than I realize.  I say all the time that when you’re living in the moment, day to day, sometimes the time seems to drag by and you think, When will these kids ever grow up?  But when you have a chance to stop and take in just how much time has passed since these little people were born, you understand that the days and months and years really do fly by, and they just keep getting bigger and older and more independent.  I mean, Hayley will be in Kindergarten this fall!  Unbelievable.

Just a little update on the girls…

Due to reasons I won’t go into here, we have decided to take Hayley out of preschool for the remainder of the year. It is something we didn’t want to do because we have seen she’s been learning a lot this year, but I’m hoping I can keep her mind stimulated enough to prevent a lapse in her learning until she begins Kindergarten (then it’s the teacher’s job!).

Hayley made her first purchase at a store tonight. My mom sent Hayley some money to buy herself a movie for her birthday. We went to Target and at the register, she gave the money to the cashier and accepted the change and the receipt. What a big girl!

As for our “baby,” she’s not a baby anymore. Kate is so determined to be as big as everyone else that she’s not afraid of anything (which can be a little scary at times) and she talks really well. I haven’t written down all the words she says, but I would guess it’s well over one hundred. She also makes quite a few animal sounds. If you ask her, “What does the cat say?” she says, “Maaioooow.” She does sounds for cow, sheep, goat, horse, dog, duck, monkey, and elephant. Kate also says a lot of two-syllable words, though she hasn’t yet put two words together that we can tell. Of course, she still screams a lot, but her language skills keep getting better, and we can tell she understands a lot more than she can say. Her cutest words are probably, “Uh oh,” and “No,” which she says as she shakes her head for emphasis. I heard her say a new one this evening when she and Hayley were hiding under a blanket. Kate wanted me to hide with them, so she lifted up part of the blanket and said, “Hie.” I asked, “You want me to hide?” just to make sure I understood, and she nodded yes. Adorable.

Our big girl turns 5 soon, so we’ll be writing about that in a couple weeks!