I went to bed last night at 11. Alanna had gone down to sleep somewhere between 9 and 10, I believe. She woke just after 1 am. And stayed awake. It was a lovely cheerful awake! But oh, I was tired. She nursed, she played. At just after 5 am I woke up selenite and pleaded for help - he took her over and sent me to another room to sleep, and got Maggie on the bus. Bless him.

One of the heart-stoppingly sweet things she was doing was that several times she reached up, got a hand behind my neck, and pulled me down to her, gave me a big kiss, and said "ah wah wu!" I'm taking that as I love you.

This morning after breakfast - I made blueberry muffins for the younger two - she found a towel and wrapped it around herself, came up to me and said "Ba? Ba?" I said "Bath?" and made the sign, and she signed and said BA! So we went upstairs for baths.

She's doing very well at drinking from straws these days. She always wants my drink. She has a sound that's sorta a daaaa! on a rising pitch that is her approximation of drink, and she'll reach her hand towards it - and when I start giving it to her, she says "yeah yeah YEAH!"

And her favorite song these days is Head Shoulders Knees and Toes. She'll even try starting it while she's nursing.

For other WoW addicts or those amused by them - a WoW Insider report on a fun activity I took part in.( Read more... )

I just want to make a note of this for the future - since LJ sorta serves as the kids' baby books.

At this point I'm sure when Alanna is saying "mama" that she does mean me by it. She's been saying it for a while, but you know, I usually discount a lot on proud parent overestimating. Nah, at 14 months I'm sure she's saying it to mean me and to get my attention specifically.

Also the other day she said something that REALLY sounded like "I love you" - again, I'd been thinking maybe she was saying it, now I'm sure.

Alanna can correctly answer by pointing at the body parts for toes, nose, eyes, and ears. And when I asked her "where's your mouth?" she crawled over to me and kissed me - then pointed at her mouth, to make sure I got that she knew, I guess. Awww, so sweet! She'll also put her hands on her head when I ask her where that is. So she can identify six body parts.

One of my guildmates made me an awesome World of Warcraft forums siggy:

WoW silliness last night in Quel'Danas: ( Read more... )

So I spent a large chunk of today in the ER with a fellow World of Warcraft player. And they had a TV screen with a movie channel showing. The 3rd movie we sat through was The Wizard of Oz.

Now, I'd gone off for some dinner, and came back in about an hour into it. So they were just meeting the Cowardly Lion. I was noticing the clearly defined road, and the wilderness to either side of it, and commenting it looked like a WoW zone. We decided it was Stranglethorn Vale.

Then there was the poppies scene. Clearly they were crossing a zone boundary - and then, look, they went off the road, and encountered an AoE debuff. Clearly a stacking moving debuff, they didn't move quick enough through it. Only affects humanoids and beasts.

And they didn't have the key to Heroic Emerald City, we could see that.

As they went down the hall towards the wizard, I was commenting "I think I've been in this instance."

So the Cowardly Lion is the druid, and he's doing a quest to pick up an anti-Fear trinket. The Tin Man is the tank, and we think he's getting into the RP/character concept thing, as he's looking for a chestpiece with a Spirit bonus, despite that not being very useful for tanks. But look at what pains he's taken to get the matched set of armor, and he's using a one-handed ax despite having no shield - clearly optimum stats are not his priority. Dorothy is a hunter, as she can't go anywhere without her pet, and she needs a new hearthstone. I guess the Scarecrow wants to be a mage, but needs an intelligence boost first - and he really needs a better fire resist set.

Um. Yeah, we're geeks. Although this is better than the WoW-related silly train of thought I went off on during church...

Recently Maggie has taken up photography. She sweet-talks me into loaning her my digital camera, and goes off to take pictures. (There was a plan to put a new data card into the old camera and just give it to her - we really need to find it and put this together and do this. Family, help me and remind me?)

So here is a selection of her pictures. For the most part, without commentary, since they're her shots. Anything that was an obvious blurry failure I took out, as with the times she decided to take a picture of the TV screen while watching a video.

Some of these are silly. Some are kinda good. Her baby sister is definitely her favorite subject for photography.

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Because I am a sucker for purple things, what can I say. If you click it for me, we'll see what happens.

I'm waiting for Karl's computer to finish scanning, so he can play with me some more.

I have photos I need to put up - but it's late. Somebody nudge me if I haven't done it tomorrow.

We've just spent a pleasant time on Teddybear Beach this evening.

You see, since high school I've had a fuzzy brown blanket with a big teddybear design on it. Usually these days it's folded in quarters and laid down on one side of the living room as Alanna's nap space. But Maggie and Jamie have been playing with it lately. They had it all opened up and spread out in the middle of the living room, and it was Teddybear Beach. They invited us adults to join them on the beach, and we did. They had everything imagined out. The rest of the carpet was the water, the light and fan was the sun, and we could see the patterns in the clouds of the ceiling. Hear the seagulls? And the two kid-sized green beanbags that were given to Maggie as a birthday present several years ago were their boats, that they could climb into and paddle around as they scootched them along the carpet. Alanna was just wandering around, climbing in and out of "boats" and flinging herself at adults for hugs.

We had a lovely time on Teddybear Beach. There was dangling legs into the water, scrunching toes into the sand, and several marauding hand-crabs, bent on tickling innocent feet and ribs. Jamie got Brave and first was stomping crabs, then retrieved a pretend rifle from a boat and was shooting them. Since we've been working on getting Jamie braver and less fearful, this got lots of congratulations.

I love my creative imaginative kids.