March

Lexi has turned 9 months!

check up stats:
Height: 17th percentile
Weight: 30th percentile
Head circumference: 79th percentile.

We have discovered that after 2 months of fruitless struggling to get Lexi to eat anything other than her bottle, we gave her table food, and all was right in her world. She loves it all, fruit, veggies, scrambled eggs, Italian marinated chicken. Meat and strawberries are her favorite, but she still will gobble down anything so long as she can feed herself. No one else can place food in her mouth, on or off a spoon.

She's been cruising furniture for a few weeks now and will occasionally let go and see how long she can balance before landing on her tush. If she is holding onto our fingers she will walk all around the house. She loves to follow her sisters and is particularly talented at getting into mischief and destroying lego castles. Although she doesn't complain, her sisters pull her by her pants to wherever it is they want her to go, either with them on an adventure in their room, or away from cords or their doll house. She is often referred to by her sisters as "our kitty cat!".

We think she waves hello, both of her arms go up and down excitedly when she sees someone, or when she gets really excited, so we're not completely sure if it counts as a salutation wave. After some coaxing we got her to say "MaMa", although she is always babbling "DaDa". She has 8 teeth and uses them to bit toes as she is crawling around on the floor. She's earned herself a new song by doing that.

As calm as she was a baby, she is now the wiggliest wiggler. She refuses to be held unless she's bonked her head, eating a bottle or being rocked to sleep. Otherwise, she is on the floor. Sometimes she will let me hold her, as long as I'm walking around so she has things to look at, but it usually doesn't last for long.


Lucy

Lucy got her third set of ear tubes! And for the first time in months, her ears don't hurt anymore! Her last ones just stopped working a few months before they fell out. It takes so long to get into the ENT that she was just in pain for that time while we waited. She sucked her finger a lot more than usual, but other than that, she was pretty brave about the whole thing. She went in for surgery around 7 and was home and jumping around by 7:45. We went to the park that day since it was spring break and 70 degrees outside and frozen yogurt. She is a brave little toaster.

She has started to come out of her shell and talks to everyone. She loves to tell them her name (now that she can actually say her real name instead of just Kitty Cat or Goose), that she is a big sister AND a little sister, and that she is not in nursery girl anymore. Those seem like basic things to say, but her big expression and vocal intonations are hilarious. Last week in primary she came up to me and said, "My name is Lucy!". Her primary teacher, Sister Pendleton, said that everything Lucy says is a great one liner that needs to be written down. She's not afraid of anything, she even squashed a bug with her own two little fingers. She does sometimes pretend to be afraid of the dark so she can snuggle with Lily at bedtime. I've said it before, but it is as if her personality is just too big to fit into her little body.

One Friday, after running 5 different errands with 3 children, we all returned home, exhausted and frazzled. Lily and Lucy sought solace in quiet time looking/"reading" their Books of Mormon. Lucy kept asking me, "Mom, am I getting taller?", "Mom, is this where it talks about where Jesus dies?", "Am I growing right now?". I, perpelxed, but with no brain power at that moment to try to understand 3 year old logic, said 3 "yeses" in succession. It wasn't until later that night while Jordan and I were in the temple did I remember our FHE lesson the previous Monday where we planted seeds and talked about faith and what we need to do to grow our faith, reading scriptures being one of them. I had a difficult time not laughing out loud when I connected that Lucy really thought that reading the scriptures would make her physically grow, not her faith. I guess she really is listening, even when I think she isn't.

She is still doing gymnastics which she loves, we switched gymnasiums and is learning a lot, although she is really looking forward to swimming lessons this spring/summer.

Lily

Sweet Lily. She loves to sit and chat, telling me, "mom, let's sit on the sofa and have a conversation." Our special thing that we are doing together is reading lessons, and she is coming along fabulously. She is still on basic phonics sounding out words but works hard and will be soon reading real books. Last week we were reading books when I saw herself look a little confused, ball her hand in a fist and hit her thigh. When I asked if she was upset about the story line of the book we were reading she responded by, "No, sometimes I just like to make sure I'm awake and not dreaming." - I couldn't help but laugh a little bit to which she was genuinely confused as to how that was funny.

Lily really wants to be a good kid and her sweet prayers always floor me. She tries to teach her sisters the gospel in the mornings - not that she doesn't also loose her patience with them sometimes too. But, overall, the 3 of them play so well together.