Well Celia has decided to let go and walk more. She can now also turn herself around while walking, so she is no longer restricted to the options of sit or go when you stand her up to walk. She has gone about 4 ft maximum walking now, but she can’t get herself off the floor to standing yet without something to pull on.

Josie has started to sort things. By color, by shape. She had never seemed to notice before. Makes an over-organized mom proud.

Celia’s 5th tooth came in overnight. I miss sleep.

We’ve had a rough couple of days here. Wednesday morning Josie went to her first dentist appointment ever. Our insurance is doing weird things and decided they weren’t covering her, so we’re trying to work out the payment stuff while they’re trying to get us in for cleaning. Josie has been preparing well for this day, lots of book reading and play acting. She was happy to look at the tools and would sit on the chair in my lap. She sat with her mouth open the entire time. Every time someone new came in, she opened her mouth. If anyone looked at her, she opened her mouth. Without being asked. I could physically feel and hear her taking many deep breaths to calm herself down throughout the whole thing. So even though it was clearly tough, she did great. The most painful part being where they took me in the back room and told me to pay the bill because of the insurance mess-up.

Later that afternoon Josie completely fell apart for no apparent reason. She seemed a little hot to me, but that often happens because she just runs warm. She got home and continued to be a total stress ball, didn’t want to do anything but be held, I figured maybe it was steam from the dentist appointment blowing off. She decided to go into her room and get her blanket right before dinner, and before I knew it, she was asleep. She slept for an hour and woke up crying. Wouldn’t eat any dinner so we put her back to bed and she woke up a lot at night crying until she could finally tell Jordi that her ears hurt. The poor girl just kept asking him to ‘solve the problem’. Some motrin solved it for a while and in the morning we called the doc and got an appointment to confirm her double ear infection.

She spent the morning hanging onto me and then napping on me when Celia took her nap. She woke up from her nap and immediately called for me, which was pretty funny considering I was underneath her. We got her medicine and the day went better.

This morning I continued with her antibiotic. I had a podiatrist appointment for my messed up foot and I took the girls and my mom who also had an appointment for her messed up foot. Celia was napping in the car with my mom so I took Josie in with me, and went into the lobby. Looked at the chart to see where the office was, turned back to Josie and a big pile of pink food on the ground. Then she threw up, again, and again, and again.

I managed not to toss my own cookies thankfully too as I am prone to do. I cleaned her up a little and rushed up to the office upstairs, told the bank on the first floor about the mess and cleaned Josie up in the bathroom. Josie got to wear Celia’s shirt because I didn’t have any tops for her. Somehow she fit right into the 12 month onesie, guess they have the same chest size pretty much. It was probably car sickness from the long ride combined with her ears being blocked. Thankfully she seemed better and she did great at the doctors office watching me get an X-ray and such. Turns out I have a bone spur on my heal and will be getting orthodics.

Right now, Josie’s sleeping. She did fine the rest of the day. After the appointments we went to my old childhood bakery, Rosenfelds and bought 3 dozen bagels (to be enjoyed over time from my large freezer) and some challah and babka. I highly recommend it all, I’ve enjoying eating far too much of all of the stuff today.

Tuesday Josie and I made a batch of homemade chocolate syrup together. I’m trying to get the HFCS out of our diet and work towards whole foods as much as I can and the hersheys has the HFCS, and nestle has lots of dye’s so we made our home made stuff out of good quality Penzey’s cocoa. It’s a hit! (served from our supposed-to-be-a-mustard-squirter-so-it’s-yellow-but-who-cares squeeze bottle)

Josie has picked up some funny mannerisms. One recent one is starting sentences with ‘did you know…’ and then introducing a new ‘fact’. I should have written them down because now I can’t remember any of them. I will come back and update when I hear another. But generally her facts in these sentences aren’t quite legit, like ‘did you know that sometimes green lights mean stop?’

I just thought this photo happened to be kinda neat, even with the random expressions.

It’s time for the promised word problem about the girls heights as measured at their last doctors appointments.

The difference between their heights is considered an unlucky number for hotel floors, it’s generally skipped. In fact, if you took that number twice and added 3/4 to it, it would be Celia’s height, and tripled it and added 3/4 you get Josies height back again.

Three variables, three equations, that should satisfy the complaints about the lack of constraints (other than the whole constraint of reality) on the last one.

Celia got her 4th tooth in on Thursday this past week! Her sleep improved for a few days and now I think we’re hitting another development leap either in speech or mobility, she’s getting so much closer to walking, she’ll take a few steps now when forced to.

Celia likes to pull herself up and balance on everything. Including Josie and her clothes. I tell Celia that ‘Josie isn’t stable.’ Now I find Josie telling Celia ‘I’m not a table!’ Took me a bit to figure out why she’d say that.

We left for our cruise on a Friday to give us lots of breathing room for a ship that left on Saturday afternoon.The girls did pretty well on the flight down there although we flew Spirit (aka nickel and dime air) and the infant seat could not fit in-between their seats even though we had tons of empty seats in which to put it. Had we actually bought a seat, they would have had to bump the people in the bulkhead seats for us to make us fit. Celia is not quite as good a flier as Josie was, she was more agitated but still did ok, just wore us out some more. We flew directly to Fort Lauderdale and stayed on the Sheraton on the beach (a nice splurge for us!) so we’d have easy access to fun play time in the sand and surf.

We got a room right next to the beach and we headed out for some play in the sand and surf. Josie had just about no interest in the water at all and Jordi declared the water to be cold (in May, in Fort Lauderdale). You can guess how much he likes the water here in new england in the summer! I got in the water a little, Celia hung out on the blanket and played with the towels and sand. We played in the pool too and got some food.

We got a reminder never to turn out backs on the kids near the pool because Josie just completely ignored the steps in the pool and dropped in over her head and I got to pull her out, thankfully I was only two steps away. I tried not to show how scary that was for me. It was an infinity pool and so we had to pull her back from the edge repeatedly too.

That night after dinner the sun was setting wonderfully and I dragged the girls outside for a quick photoshoot for 5 minutes and I liked some of the shots I got, even if she wasn’t terribly cooperative. In the morning we went back out onto the beach, played on the nearby playground, and checked out the lifeguard towers. Then we showered, packed up and headed to the cruiseport!