Sometimes the best pictures are the good old selfies.
I’m going to take a break from our travel adventures to give a regular old life update.
We have 16 days left in this lovely land and it seems we are all getting excited for the changes coming. We’ve been busy but due to an awesome, slow moving and slow leaving cold, we’ve been partially out of commission for three weeks. Our ward is starting to wonder where we’ve gone on holiday. The answer is no where (except for plenty of trips to the drug store for various survival supplies). But, after a full three weeks, we are now all running at around 95% efficiency.
Our energetic little girls keep me on my toes. Abby is now 16 months old and she couldn’t have more personality. She’s loads more physical that Katelyn is (even at 3 years). One of the words she has mastered without any question to what she’s trying to say is “up”. Up on the couch. Up on the bed. Up out of the stroller. Up out of her bed. Over the last month she mastered the small slide we bought for them. She spends hours every day going up and down that thing. Since she loves being physical she’s fond of busting a move to any music and even riding Katelyn’s scooter around the apartment. But by far her favorite thing is the few short minutes of naked time after a bath. She runs all over the apartment, squealing and giggling. It’s quite the chore to wrestle her down to get a diaper on.
Another thing she says with complete confidence is “ah duh,” translating to all done. During our daily fight with the toothbrush she will quickly jump to “ah duh” before we get the brush in her mouth. Such a booger she is.
On the wonderful upside of Abby’s firecrackerness is the fact that she is sleeping through the night. Oh, bliss. This has been the trial of my life (or so it seems). She didn’t start sleeping through the night (11-13 hours) until she was fully weaned from nursing. She wasn’t fully weaned until 14 months. She nursed until 14 months because she wouldn’t take cows’ milk and because she loved nursing. Dropping even one feeding with her was a major upset to her life. At one year she was still nursing four times a day. Four times! But once we took care of that she realized that there wasn’t any reason to wake up at night. It is so great to have my sleep back… Kind of…
And now we turn to Katelyn. Since Abby wasn’t sleeping, Katelyn slept in our room. We have an air mattress for her but more often than not, she’d end up in our bed. Long story short, Abby and Katelyn are now sharing a room and though she still sneaks into our room sometimes, we have made marked improvements with the sleeping habits in this family. Thank. Good. Ness.
In other news, it’s looking more and more like we’ll be homeless upon our return to the mainland. We’ve come close to securing a pad a few times but these silly landlords aren’t too keen on renting a place to people they haven’t met and who haven’t seen their property. I suppose I get that. It just sucks to be on our side of the situation. Luckily, we’ve had some great friends who have been so helpful in looking at places in our stead. Just cross your fingers for us.
Speaking of looking for places, I just have to mention a listing we saw on Craigslist last night. For the title of the listing it said, “horrific living space now…” We assume they were trying to come up with something appealing… Perhaps it really is horrific. Oh, people are so funny.