Still a Deadbeat Blogger

Wow.

I haven't blogged in 4 months! I am a total deadbeat!

So what has happened in the last 4 months? Well, there was Hurricane Ike, for one. That struck in September, right before Anna's 7th birthday, which meant we had to cancel her birthday party (again -- we had to cancel for Hurricane Rita 3 years ago) and head to points north so that we could live in a place with electricity. We spent several days with my parents, and then we went and stayed with Jimmy's parents for a little while. Being a refugee is difficult, even if it's only for a short time. I have a lot of sympathy for anyone who has to do it for longer!

Anna started the first grade and has been excelling. Her teacher is wonderful, and she usually comes home with great stories. She also got to go to Disney World with Nanny and Paw-Paw for her birthday, which was great for her. It was weird not being with her (Mommy, Daddy, and Little Sister were NOT invited on the Disney trip!), but it was a great chance for her to spend time with my parents and have a lot of fun!

We spent Thanksgiving with Jimmy's family and then visited my folks on the way back home. Caroline teased all of us while we were at Grandma and Grandpa's house because she kept acting like she was going to walk, and she never did. Instead, she waited until the first night we were at Nanny and Paw-Paw's house. Jimmy figured out that if he tied a sharpie marker to a string and let her walk holding onto that, he could let some slack into the string, and she would essentially be walking on her own. After a while, she got to the point where she would walk on her own, but only if she was holding the sharpie. It was like Dumbo's magic feather! Eventually, she got confident enough to do it on her own, and she's been walking ever since!

Today, we had Caroline's 15-month check up (a month late, since she turned 16 months today!), and she's doing great. We've been keeping track of her words over the last month or so, and even though she's nowhere near as verbal as Anna was at this age, she's still way ahead of "average" on speech. According to the doctor, she should be saying about 3-5 words other than Mama and Dada, but she's saying more like 30-35. She's also using sign language proficiently, and she can put together fairly complex sentences with her signs (ex: more eat please, here) and has started making up her own signs for things she is interested in (ex: when she wants to play "this little piggy", she points to her toes and then to her tummy). She weighs 25 pounds, which puts her in the 75th percentile for weight, and she's 30ish inches, which is 90th percentile for height. Her head is 95th percentile (I forget how many inches it is!).

Caroline's personality has really started developing by leaps and bounds over the last few months. She loves to play peek-a-boo, she giggles uncontrollably when she's tickled, and she has a great sense of humor and tends to laugh heartily at silly faces or noises. She is getting more independent in some ways, but she's still very much a Mama's girl in other ways. The more confident she gets with the walking, the more independent she gets, so I think things will get easier over the next few months.

We had some Christmas portraits done last week, so here are a few of those pictures. We temporarily misplaced our digital camera (I recently found it in a suitcase, so I guess we must have taken it when we traveled once), so I don't have many snapshots to share at this point. Notice that, once again, we got a shot of Caroline sticking her tongue out, so I had to buy it! It's become a tradition!

Enjoy!