Dinnertime

Tonight I learned that neither of my children like asparagus.
I think I ate a pound of it all by myself (with just a little help from Mike).

Actually, Aliah doesn't seem to like any sort of cooked vegetables. This makes it kind of difficult to feed her safely, since she only has three molars so far. This means I must resort to giving her tomatoes and avocados, and teeny tiny chunks of cucumber and squash, if we have them. And I let her gnaw on baby carrots too.

Hannah is a carboholic like me. She would be happy eating cereal for breakfast, pb bread for lunch, and mac-n-cheese or pasta for dinner every day. As you can imagine, our meals are pretty boring. I am terrible at planning ahead of time and no good at putting meals together.... my gosh, I am really lazy about food.

family drama

Got home from Maryland tonight. It was a good trip.
Hannah and Aliah had so much fun playing with my family.

Family drama: 22 yo brother has a new gf. Not surprised. The interesting thing is that she comes with some baggage. She is divorced and has two kids, ages 3 and 2. The story is that she got married straight out of high school, at age 17, to her long-time bf (who was a friend of my brother's), who was enlisted in the military. She immediately got "accidentally" pregnant. The second child was born 12 months later (ok, that was most certainly an accident). Soon after that, the husband kind of floated out of the picture.... cheating? abuse? Not sure about that part. But she is a 20-year-old divorced, single mom. Wow. And my completely self-centered, irresponsible, perpetually unemployed brother is totally head-over-heels for her. This is major stuff, people! Maybe it will do both of them some good. Who knows. Although I REALLY cannot see my brother as a father-figure kind of role model for her kids right now.... He definitely has learned some manners in the last year or two, but he is still unemployed, mooching off mommy and daddy, and seems to have absolutely no ambition to get a job or move out on his own. I wonder where New GF lives? With her parents? Im not sure.

Now it is 9:45 and I am so exhausted that Im going to crawl into bed and try to stay there for a very, very long time. Mike is working the night shift this week, so we wont get much time with him until Saturday :(

Sharing oatmeal cookies. Spring is almost here.

After five days, Hannah's mystery fever is now gone and she's as good as new.
This afternoon I sat on the couch eating oatmeal-raisin cookies with my two girls. Aliah kept offering me her cookie, allowing me to get within a quarter-inch of it, then grabbing it away and laughing at me. She's such a little character.... and then she has a big sister to teach her all kinds of tricks, both good and bad.

I love that it is almost springtime! The nicer weather is allowing us to play outside more and get some exercise, which I desperately need - Im growing out of my pants!!! I have gained a good 10 or 15 extra pounds within the last 3 months. Not proud of that. (Last night, Hannah saw my belly and she actually asked me if I was having another baby! Eeeeek!)

I wish I was better at making posts here. Everyday there are things that I should write down but I rarely get the chance to record them before they fly out of my head. I think that is why I love pictures so much, because they can capture 1000 words with one click. They help me to remember what my holey, forgetful, falliable human brain cannot.

I am the mom of a five year old.

At Hannah's five year old check-up, she weighed 37.5 lbs (up from only 31 pounds last year!) and was 42.5 inches tall. This means that she is still tall and skinny for her age, just as she's always been. (But apparently she actually IS eating enough food to gain weight appropriately, which kind of surprised me.) We had a beach-themed birthday party for her last weekend. We made pink cupcakes for all of our friends, just like in the book "pinkalicious", which is her new favorite. ((Big thanks to Uncle Matt & Aunt Courtney, who gave us "Pinkalicious" for her birthday!))

As for Aliah, she is getting bigger and eating plenty, I assure you. She started walking confidently at the end of January, and hasn't slowed down since then. She is beginning to say things that resemble real words, instead of just baby-babble. She can say duck, dog, ball, Mama, Dada, "go", "no no no no", "what that/what this?", and a few other things. She also uses a little bit of sign language (like for "eat", "drink", "More", and "All Done"), but then resorts to grunting, grabbing and pointing most of the time if we aren't quick enough to give her what she wants.

If you havent yet, you can now befriend me on Facebook. My username is nchummel.
Sadly, I update my facebook status and the pictures there more often that the blog these days.