Playing with Goo

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Don't be alarmed - there is no slime involved in this post. "Goo" is the name that Olivia has given my momma, and so when she came up to visit for a day, we all got our Goo fix.

Hooray!

Elsie is rocking back and forth all over the place, and I imagine she'll be crawling for real by next week. Which means I need to re-baby-proof. Which means I get to crawl around the house looking for things I can get into if I were a baby.


Here is Goo with Elsie. Apparently, she is ready to skip crawling and get to walking. Her latest trick is becoming so stiff that there is no bending her in the middle. Which is rather inconvenient for carseats...


Here is Goo with Olivia - standing, but the other way 'round.

Visits from mommas are always fun, especially when you are someone else's mama. I keep thinking ahead to what things will be like when I go to visit my girls when they are older... But I'm not quite ready to go there yet.

Teething Biscuits

Elsie now has three-and-a-half teeth. The half is visible, but you can't quite feel the sharpness of it, so we are designating it thus until it hurts. : )

It's a messy business, growing teeth for the first time, and painful, too, although mostly for the fingers, faces, and random appendages of those unfortunate souls who stray too close to Miss Elsie's vise-grip jaws.

So, to the relief of all involved, we've adopted teething biscuits. We get Healthy Times Maple Teething Biscuits, which are wheat-free and have no cane sugar. The only drawback is the gooey mess and the general smell of maple that attaches itself to Elsie, but believe me, I'll take that against chomping fingers any day.

Olivia's Haircut, and Golden Sandals

Miss Olivia hates to get her hair brushed. Hates it. I know that's a strong word, but, frankly, it may not be strong enough to do justice to the intense dislike she feels towards any detangling apparatus...

The Davis family has a tradition of not cutting a child's hair until after the second birthday. Dutifully, I plaited and pigtailed Olivia's hair until she was almost three, but by then, she had had it with my wily ways and was determined to outrun or out-cry my combing tactics.

The solution? Haircut.

In general, Olivia's hair mimics my own, with all of it's amazing lifelessness (not really, it's just determinedly straight). However, she's got a few bits of daddy's curls, and there is a particular portion on the back of her head that is the master tangler section, and I blame Nathan. Mostly because I don't want to believe that any of my genes would purposely torment me by being so obstinate (a point at which my mother would laugh mercilessly and mention something about "payback"), but also because it's got more texture than the rest, which lends it to tangling. But I'm not certain it doesn't do it on purpose...

So here's the fruit of our "salon" visit - which entailed about 30 minutes in front of the hallway mirror, with Olivia sitting on a stool with a towel wrapped around herself, me with a pair of kitchen scissors (our general sharps broke recently after a nasty run-in with a coffee can - don't ask), and Elsie trying her hardest to roll, scoot, and crawl away:



Oh, and Olivia asked me to share this photo, too.

Water baby

For a while, I was worried that Elsie didn't like water - and, frankly, she didn't - until she met the kiddie pool in Rockford, while visiting Nathan's family.

Here's a record of the meeting:




Elsie spent the majority of her time severely splashing the water - she apparently sees it as her duty to sternly rebuke it past grievances.

Still Life

No, we aren't slowing down, but here's Olivia's first still life photo:

Mmm... feta & grape tomatoes. A girl after me own heart!