Here Comes the Sun, and Isabelle's post

Longer days, more sun, healthy kids...things are looking up in our neck of the woods. We had a really great weekend, just being out and about with the girls. It's always so fun to get out as a family and it's getting easier and easier to do, since the girls can rally for a long stretch in the morning before they start to hit the "I need a nap" meltdown button. We took advantage of this and on Saturday, took them to this great environmental center/working farm for a morning of playing and learning about animals in the winter. Sunday, we met up with my sister-in-law and her two boys for some cross-country skiing.

Skiing was amazing. In our pre-kid life, B and I spent a lot of our free time outside...hiking, biking, canoeing, skiing, snowboarding, camping...and since having the girls, we've obviously scaled way down on this and both miss it terribly. Now that they're getting older and more mobile, we're excited to start easing our way back in, only in a new and slightly (well, maybe a little more than slightly) adjusted way.

Being out with them Sunday, even if it was only for about an hour, showed us that this new way of doing the outdoor thing is really, really fun. We carried them in their backpacks which was a little hard, adjusting to the different center of gravity and added weight. Plus we're both totally out of shape. But the girls loved gliding with us on the snow (they kept calling it "skee-ting") and it felt amazing to be outside, in the fresh crisp air, doing something physical.


I think the fresh air did wonders for all of us: we're back on a regular sleeping routine again (I probably shouldn't even write that; I'm sure I'm cursing myself) and Hannah is getting stronger and stronger. She's getting up on her knees again, doing some really nice side-stepping and cruising, and last night she stood up by herself with only the small of her back leaning against the crib rails. Then today, she did it again only this time it was downstairs in front of the fridge . I'm so proud of her!



So I realized that I haven't shared much lately about Isabelle, who has a lot going on also. So I thought I'd dedicate some of this post to her.

Isabelle's vocabulary astounds us and she can now speak in pretty complex, grammatically correct sentences. Today she told her teddy, after she threw him on the ground and then picked him up again, "I'm sorry Teddy, I didn't mean to do that." This from a kid who only a year ago was just pointing at things and saying, "Baby, baby." She's also not only very big into doing everything herself, but has also started to want to help ME all the time, with dishes, laundry, cooking, getting myself dressed, you name it. This morning she wanted to help me put on my belt.

Isabelle's personality is really different from Hannah's. While they're both very expressive, Isabelle is much more of an extrovert. She's the life of the party; she's a total ham and can often be found marching around the house singing different combinations of songs that she knows


("Old MacDonald had a farm, and Daddy's gonna buy you a mockingbird") She loves words, the funnier sounding the better, and will crack herself up repeating them over and over again. "Flopped" was a word in a book we read the other night and she got a real kick out of that one as she marched around for the next five minutes yelling, "FLOPPED!" while she and Hannah both got hysterical.

Isabelle is also really good at amusing herself for long periods of time. She has great concentration and a sense of purpose or industry. Whether she's setting up her stuffed animals for a tea party or getting out her tool bench so she can work on a project with B, she will vanish into her own world for a long stretch of time without ever looking up to ask for me. This is something that in hindsight was definitely evident even as an infant. While Hannah needed to be constantly held and jiggled and bounced, Isabelle would just sit quietly in her bouncy seat staring out at the world and taking it all in. We called her the buddha baby. Of course now, if you interrupt her flow while she's in the middle of some really intense play, look out! There's definitely nothing budhha-like about her temper tantrums.

Anyway, the girls are both doing great and things are pretty sunny in the Galliringo house these days.