Schools Out for Summer

Ok..so now is the time that I love working for the school system...I love being home with Lydia. This is our weekly mommy and me photo to celebrate our time together! We went swimming at my parents pool the first nice day. This is my brother Mike playing around with her.
Uncle Mike must have played around more than I though b/c I found this picture when I was downloading stuff. I must have been inside doing something. Lydia Schmitt.
Here she is posing with her pool cover up.
Here is Braylon and his daddy. Andrew also is a teacher so I am sure we will be taking the kids to the pool often. Andrew was teaching him to swim.

Wanna be startin somethin??

Ok by request. We a better one on our regular video camera but I don't know how to get it on here. I will work on it. I took this one this afternoon. Of course all of you that have children...she did not dance like she normally does but you do get to see a little bit of the "move" maybe I listened to "Brush you shoulder off" by JayZ too much while I was preggers...I have no other idea of how she got this move...

Last night Mark had the cds on shuffle and she was all the way in the kitchen when she hear "her" song come on and she went RUNNING into the living room so she could dance. I love it.

Chicken Dance

We went to a birthday party this weekend. I was very nervous about taking Lydia with the way she has been acting lately but all went pretty well. She played pretty well with the other two girls until about three hours into the party. Then the screaming and stealing started and we almost had a bite but I grabbed her in time to avoid that. But no hitting so that was good. They found a Elmo that is dressed in a chicken suit and plays the Chicken Dance. So here are the girls dancing to it. The first girl was the birthday girl's cousin, she was three and did a good job playing with Lydia. Then there was Lydia and in the back was the Birthday Girl! Since "flapping her wings" is a "home sign" that my brother made up..she caught on pretty quickly on how to dance.

Speaking of dancing...oh lord, you all have to witness my daughter dancing to "Wanna be starting something" from the Thriller album. I put out her dance floor (my yoga mat) and she goes to town. She does this shoulder shrug butt shakin thing...it is too cute. I love it. Also her new thing is to say OK. You used to say "Lydia do you want some milk?" and she would sign and say "milk' now she will say "no" or "ok" too much folks...I wish I could just tape her all of the time to remember everything.

Day at the Park

Tuesday Daddy wanted to make sure that Lydia took a good nap so he took her to the park for the morning. He said that she made a little friend while she was there and the friend kept chasing her around on this play set thing...she loves to be chased.

Here she is driving..I swear we were just at this park a couple weeks ago during a warm spell and she could not even touch this thing.

I thought this was a really cute angle. I can tell she is getting longer but once again I think it is all in her legs. I just put a 12 month romper on her today and it fits fine.

and of course they had to hit the slide. I am sure daddy took her on the really tall one since mommy was not there to say no. I am just not going to ask.

Seeing these pictures reminds me of one of her favorite books right now. Jack and Lily at the Park. She calls it her Park book. At the end it shows all these pictures of different things that you can go back and look for in the book. It is amazing how many things that if I ask her "Where is the kite?" she can point to it! I am trying to step up the signing with her because I know there is much more she wants to say and cannot. But now that we have the basics, more, all done, milk, water, cracker, hurt, hot, up, down, etc...it is harder to getting her to sign the specific things and some of those things signs are much more difficult for her to do. I have been teaching here the colors thinking that if she could not say what it was that she wants she could maybe tell me the color of it at least..but those are kinda hard. She as mimiced blue and yellow...but the rest of the colors are pretty difficult for such little fingers. Also Lydia will now count to 10 only skipping the numbers one and seven. Sometimes she will say 12 instead of 7...??? I don' t think we will ever get her to say one. Anytime you say it she just will to right on to 2.

I had a great day with her yesterday. I hate to be happy to be off work when it means that so many folks homes has water damage...but I guess there is a silver lining in every cloud right! We even has 2 hour delay today which was great. Today is my day I have to be at work at 7:10. I do get out at 2:30 but Lord it is hard getting here soooo early. So I always pray for a delay on Thursdays. I hope everyone is safe and dry out in blogger land.

Party Dress/Week 10

Lydia loves to hide now. She will go hide somewhere then say "Lydia, where are you?" She will repeat it until one of us says it, then she will pop out and say "There she is"

Not sure what she is doing here..I hope she does not start pinching with those monkey toes!

She also likes to go "night-night" on anything soft. I hope soon she go back to going night night this easily.

She just looked too cute in the dress. She looks great in cool colors, light blue, light purple and such. I loved how this dress was cut...thanks again Kim.

Here was Lydia and I before I left for work yesterday. She was not in a picture taking mood but she was in a better mood than the last week. She slept through the night yesterday and last night so I think that has helped her mood. Mark took her to the park yesterday, I will post those tomorrow

Lucky

After reading Kim's post, it just reminded me how very lucky we are with our animals.

Thelma loves Lydia. She is so patient with her too. Lydia has pulled out clumps of fur, pulled her tail, used her as a pillow, tries to pick her up, poked her face and the biggie for Thelma, played with her paws...and Thelma has taken it with grace. Most of the time she does nothing, which I think helped Lydia not do those thing for very long..she did not get a reaction from Thelma. The most Thelma will do is just walk away from her. Thelma is at least 12 years old but could be older. Mark got her as an adult cat and had her for several years before I came into the picture. She is a super cool cat. We were hoping her personality would run off on the kitten we got but for those of you that have met Marian..that did not work. Now Marian is not mean..she just does not like other people too much. But she is getting better.

Anywho being a distinguished lady like Thelma is, she is not much of a player...but the one and only thing she will play with is string. So the balloon strings around our house right now is just too tempting for her. The funniest thing is when Lydia is hold the balloon and running around with it and Thelma is running after her playing with the ribbon attached to the balloon. We had to break up a "fight" between the two of them last night. Lydia kept yelling at Thelma because she could not pull the balloon and Thelma along! It was really cute.

The Good old days

Here was Lydia clowning around with Daddy. Here is a reminder of the kisses my precious daughter used to give me
This is all we see now....

I would like to report a missing personality...where has my daughter gone? The one who everyone commented how well behaved she was, how cute she was, they could not believe she was only 15 months old and talking the way she was...this past week I have comments such as, "See ya hellion" (sp?), "she has quite a temper", "she has some good lungs on her", "someone's not happy", "must be hitting her terrible twos" ARRRGGGG!! She is hitting, screaming NO, kicking and you all know about the pinching.

Now I do believe that some of this is coming from her NOT getting enough sleep and her nap time is crazy. I am very lucky that I have free babysitting through two family members and Mark gets to stay home with her some. But three different caretakers (not including mommy on the weekends), means different parenting styles, different food and different nap times! Her schedule the last two weeks has been crazy. So last night I put my foot down and decided she needed to go to bed earlier. She cried from 8:15 to 9:00pm. Both Mark and I tried to calm her and get her to sleep with no luck. She finally just passed out. I hate doing that because I feel she does not sleep as well than we she does down calmly and falls asleep on her own.

This has never really been a problem too much. She has gone through sleeping phases where she wakes up at night and stuff. But she normally is very easy to go down at night. So my hunch was right and she preceded to get up at 2, 5, and 6. (This 6am thing actually started earlier this week. She normal gets up at 7:30..but this past week she has been getting up at 5:30 and 6 and refusing to go back to sleep..even if we let her cuddle in bed with Mark and I). So this morning she got up at 2 screaming for me. (which leads to second part of the problem I think, I have not been spending enought time with her) Mark got up then after a while he gave up and put her in bed with us..meaning she climbed on top or me and finally fell asleep. When she got up at 5 we ignored her when she tried to tickle us and pretended to be asleep and she went back down till 6. At 6 Mark put her back to bed and after crying some she fell back asleep. Mark just emailed me as I was writing this and said she slept till 9am! So I hope she is in a better mood today and maybe we can get back on track and get her back to her normal self!