The kids

Molly: 9 months already!  Like most 9-month-olds, she's doing all kinds of cute and silly things.  I love this stage so much.  She is crawling all over the place, exploring things and saying "deh deh deh" everywhere she goes.  She has learned to shake her head when she hears one of us say the word "no."  The other day she kept trying to grab a toy out of Drew's hand (she will go right up to whatever the boys are doing and try playing right along with them) and he said "no, Molly!" and she just started shaking her head back and forth.  It's so cute because her whole body moves side to side when she does it.

 She has started to enjoy her books and looks intently at the pictures.  She chirps at the babies and animals, and wants to touch every picture (I don't think the boys were like this).  Then she puts up quite a fuss when it's time to go to sleep.  Even though I've learned my lesson with every child, and with each new baby I've said that I'm going to sleep train them early, I just can't do it.  It just never feels right to lay my one-month-old or four-month-old down awake in the crib and just leave the room.  So my kids get nursed to sleep, which is fine until they're about this age and they don't always fall asleep while nursing anymore!  Molly screams and squirms when I try to rock her, so I really have no choice but to lay her in her crib and pat her back.   Hopefully she will learn quickly how to put herself to sleep.

 She is actually very independent when she plays.  Poor thing is carted around everywhere (we go out almost every morning.....I would go insane if I didn't!), so when we get home, she just takes off and plays like crazy.  She grabs toys and smashes them together, and thankfully she doesn't put anything in her mouth yet.  I can just see her first tooth starting to poke out a tiny bit today, so maybe now she'll start chewing on everything.  Or maybe she takes after her daddy and intuitively knows that things on the floor are disgusting and not worth putting in her mouth!

 

Drew: will be 3 in two months.  He is still my little sweetie....that's the best way to describe him.  He is almost past the terrible twos and you really wouldn't have even known it until just the past few weeks, when he's learned how to talk back a little ("no me WANT to!" is something we hear a lot now).  Remember his old blanky/brownie/ah-yah?  Actually, he had two of them.  They were velvet on one side and satin on the other.  Well, they are wonderful blankets until they start disintegrating.....they literally just start falling apart after so many washings.  So Drew just started tearing off pieces of the velvet (he doesn't really care about the satin) and carrying around those "tiny ah-yahs" with him.  He'd roll some of them up into tubes (see pictures below) if they were big enough.  People made the funniest comments about them in public.  When he's tired, he rubs his ah-yahs on his upper lip and I guess it relaxes him!  Seriously, though, the biggest ah-yahs we have left now are about 2 square inches.  Can you imagine how hard it is to find a 2-square-inch piece of fabric when he loses it?  Madness!

Grant: ah, Grant.  He is 4 and a half and definitely still the most difficult of the three (isn't the oldest supposed to be the helpful one?).  We are still having serious issues with his defiance, so that is a constant struggle.  But of course he has his great moments too.  He is big-time into anything related to Star Wars or Legos right now (or both, preferably!). He is constantly role-playing like he's one of the characters, talking to the other characters and "fighting" with his light sabers.  He has never been patient or calm enough to sit down and do anything art-related, but just recently I've gotten him to draw pictures of himself (drawing his self-portrait was the only part of his preschool evaluation last year that he earned a "progressing" score instead of "mastered," which did not surprise me at all.....I've never gotten him to draw anything for me except a few squiggley lines).  So here are a couple pictures Grant drew of himself, holding his "light savers."  I was so proud of him!