Daddy's got my hair up like a schoolmarm
Mommy chasing me with the camera is pretty funny!	Mommy told me to stay, so I stayed (this was after being changed)

And just because I suppose it’s customary, here is a Mother’s Day shot:

We’ve been tackling our lawn as our major summer project.  When they built the house, they just threw down some seed on a bed of clay and gravel and since we can’t afford sod, we’re having to coax our lawn to life, one small bit at a time.

In the meantime, Kira loves going outside.  You have to be careful to say the words “go”, “walk”, or “outside”, because she’ll run to the door and cry if she doesn’t get taken out immediately.

Riding my old-fashioned (and probably dangerous) horse	Picking flowers
I have to pick every single dandelion I come across	I'm pretty sure I can lift this rock
I guess these rocks will have to do instead

Where did my pretty baby go???

Here is Kira having a blast walking around, jabbering, and holding her two new dollies – courtesy of Walmart for $1 each.

Who says treasure has to be expensive?

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Kira had already eaten her breakfast before we went, so she just snacked on bits of everyone else’s food.  The owners asked if they could give her a cookie and brought her a huge fresh chocolate chip cookie.  Needless to say, she had one bite and the rest of us finished off that yummy cookie.  However, Kira managed to make a serious mess with just one small bit of that cookie.

Note to self:  Toddlers and chocolate = mess

I set her up with no clothes and non-staining food and let her go at it.  She did surprisingly well.  She did eat a lot with her fingers, but she gave the spoon the old college try.  I was really pleasantly surprised at how little mess she made, although she did require a dip in the tub afterwards.  We’ll try lesson #2 next weekend.

We got somewhere around 18″ of snow on Tuesday/Wednesday.  Since Kira hasn’t been out in the snow yet and we went through the trouble to buy her boots, we decided to bundle her up and get a few shots.  She was fine with it as long as we stayed close by.  She was probably out for all of 5 minutes though; it was really cold and windy.

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Well, now it’s here.  Now she’s 13 1/2 months and she definitely is holding her head steady and grins and giggles all the time.  She thinks she’s pretty funny actually.  She interacts with us, talks to us, roars at us, chatters about 97% of the time.  She walks all over the place, says about a dozen “words”, understands basic things like “sit down”, “go get”, and “where is”.  She can point to her tummy and feet. 

She’s recently taken to closing doors, which is a bit of a danger not only of pinched fingers, but that she’ll go into a room somewhere and close the door and we won’t know it.  Aside from the worries of these two things, it’s also just annoying.  Every time we walk into a room, she follows behind and shuts the door.  I suppose next is opening doors, which means we need to get a lock on the door leading to the basement ASAP!

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I was intending to get one of the “mini-trees” that you see at all the craft stores, but when I went to Walmart, I found this little 8″ tree, pre-lit!  Well, you can’t pass up the opportunity to never have to string lights.  I set it all up in her room and when I took her in there for bed the first night and she just grinned and grinned at “pretty”.  Now when you put her to bed, even for naps, she looks over at the tree, waiting for it to be lit up.  Normally she sleeps in pitch black, so I’m astonished that she sleeps just fine with the rather bright light from this little tree.

Kira just celebrated her 11 month birthday (which I don’t yet have official pics for) and her first Thanksgiving.  We went over to my mom & dad’s about 4:00 for the traditional turkey feast.  Last year Kira was just a few weeks away from being born; this was her first time in person.  We commemorated with the official family “My first Thanksgiving” bib (complements of Grandma).  She ate her share of sweet potatoes, turkey, mashed potatoes, and baked beans…and the highlight, an ice cream cone provided by Grandma for dessert.  I couldn’t believe she ate the whole thing.  (Note to all who might think I’m a horrible mother:  there was only about a tablespoon of vanilla ice cream, the rest was just that flaky cone).

Today is the traditional Black Friday Christmas shopping frenzy … that I normally do not participate in.  Most of my BF shopping consists of looking through all the online deals to see if any are left.  However, today I’m going to take the baby after her second nap and head in to buy a few things (bath towels, shower curtains, and hopefully winter coats for me and Kira).  By early evening most of the crowds are fast asleep (since they start the night before with the waiting in line!  Ugh)

Kira is crawling all over the place now, standing on her own without holding on, and cruising around on foot while holding onto things.  She’s THIS CLOSE to walking.  I’d be surprised if by her first birthday she hasn’t at least taken her first step.  She’s also suddenly developing a bit of a temper.  The other night she was crying & mad because she couldn’t climb into her toy bin.  Today I had turned off her little musical table so that she didn’t wake Joseph.  She discovered when she pressed buttons nothing happened, and she just flew into a rage, pounding it with her little hands and yelling.  I had to cover my mouth so she didn’t see me laughing before I told her to stop.  It was pretty funny.

We’re really hoping to be in the new house by her birthday (12/19) and it looks pretty sure that we will be.  After all the run-around from the credit union on our mortgage, I finally called a  manager and escalated things and finally we should have a closing date by December 1st.  Hopefully we can close by the 11th.  We’re just waiting at this point, although we haven’t done an ounce of packing.  I’m not sure what we’re waiting for.  We did buy a dining room set, which is just waiting at the store to be delivered.  Appliances (refrigerator & stove) come next, and then a living room set.

Our new dining room set (marble tabletop with leather chairs)