Tidbits and Piper at 4 months

Piper is growing up! Here is a shot of her from yesterday, a few days after turning 4 months old. Her hair has gotten a lot longer and a lot lighter...and some days I tame it with a hair clip, other days it decides to lay flat itself. She's a lot of fun when she is awake...quite content, smiley, chatty. Her eyes are usually wide, and like Rowan when she was a baby, it's hard to even catch her blinking. She giggles, she follows her sister's movement wherever she goes, she grabs for things. She's rolled over front to back and sort of back to front (with the assistance of a bit of an incline on the front lawn!)

We're back to a newborn schedule when it comes to sleep. What gives? She had a few weeks there of 8 and even some 10 hour stretches. The last 2 weeks...it's been up at 1:00, 3:00, 5:30, argghh. Last night I had to change her diaper because she was so wet at 3:30, and she thought that was a nice time to be awake for awhile...until after 5:00! Hopefully the sleep will even out, then this whole baby thing will be a breeze!

A few funny Rowan stories:
A few days ago Rowan was tearing up paper into little pieces and throwing them in the air. She says to me, joyfully, "look at my party-fetti, mom!" I could hardly bear to correct her.

Rowan has been really into rhyming things the last half year or so. She fully understands what rhyming entails, and really enjoys rhyming just about anything. She also gets that some rhymes are real words, and that sometimes it is fun to make up words that rhyme. So the other day I was getting the girls ready to go, and the car seats were in the truck...but I was taking the mini-van. I asked if Joe would stay with the girls so I could go and switch the car seats.

Rowan, in a sing-song, sort of sassy (coincidentally) voice, says "she's gonna switch, bitch." Now of course, being seasoned parents, we knew not to react. We knew that in her mind, it was a made-up word. Meant nothing. Wouldn't be repeated again.

Joe and I made eye-contact sidelong. Our eyes widened. Maybe our lips turned up ever so slightly. But we didn't say a thing. Ignored it. I was pretty sure she didn't even look at us after saying it.

Apparently, you can't get much passed a 4 year old. She repeated herself, "gonna switch, bitch"....and watched more closely for our response. I suppose there is a possibility that she has heard this word somewhere, and was testing it out....but I quite doubt it. I really think it was a random rhyme...and that she just very perceptibly picked up on the non-verbal information that told her it was a different kind of word. She repeated it a handful more times, we continued to ignore it with increasing success.

So much for seasoned parents.

I should have learned my lesson about a year ago when Rowan randomly put up her middle-finger. For some reason I decided (obviously hadn't thought about it much) to tell her that she shouldn't do that, that it meant something bad. I kept it vague, but she kept imploring.."but mommy, WHAT does it mean?" I never told her exactly, just told her several versions of it's not kind, it's not nice, it is very mean. Oh yeah, and don't do it.

She did it...to her grandparents, when they asked her what signs she remembered from when she was a baby. To her unsuspecting aunt. We finally had to threaten a time-out if she did it again, and that took care of it.

Speaking of rhyming, this is a story from a few months ago. She loves doing that naming song, "Rowan bowan, bo-bowan, banana.." and does it quite well with any name. She and my dad were talking about a card he had received with a bunch of different names for God on it...Wonderful Counselor, Prince of Peace, etc. So he was explaining to Rowan that God has many names. Rowan's eyes lit up, and she contributed her names for God with gusto: "God, God, bo-bod, banana-fanana fo-fod, me my mo-mod, Gooo---oood!"

Here's a parting shot of my lovely ladies. I'll have some more pictures up for Flickr soon.