I wanted to correct one thing from what I said last time. I mentioned how Natalie now has her names for my mom and Brett (which they appreciate, since for the longest time Natalie would just see their house and say "Rahrah!" -Aunt Sarah- and no one else). Well, I got the Natalie-pronunciation wrong for her Grandpa Brett. It's not "papaw", it's "Pappoo". (She calls MY Grandpa Hedrick, her Great-Grandpa, "papaw", and Grandma Hedrick is "Mammoo".) When we went trick-or-treating a couple weeks ago, we went over to their neighborhood since my mom wanted to go with us for Natalie's first trick-or-treat. Before we got to their house to pick up "Mammy", we were coaching Natalie on how to ring the doorbell and then say "trick or treat!" - she got out "teet!", which was just fine. So we rang the doorbell at my mom's house, and when Brett opened up the door for her, instead of saying "teet!" she said "Pappoo!" It was really cute. Pappoo, of course, obliged by giving Natalie her first few treats in her pumpkin bucket. (It was my pumpkin growing up, by the way. I wanted to make sure Natalie got my beloved pumpkin and not my sister's, which was always bigger than mine but just NOT as nice. :-) ) Natalie was the cutest trick-or-treater out that night (no I'm not biased). Everyone said so, too. We didn't go far, just up mom's street which is pretty much the dead end of a big neighborhood, so typically no one but older teenagers make it down that far. Natalie was the only little kid out in that area so she won over a lot of people. Especially because she always waved and said "bye!" as we were leaving. Most of the time she did actually say "teet!" and then her version of thank you, which is "uunk uh" or something like that. A few times she even helped the homeowner close their doors behind them. I think she had a very fun first trick or treat. She didn't fully grasp what it was all about (except getting to "wok" out in the "dauk" and gleefully point out the moon and the barking dogs) until we got back to grammy's house, where we dumped out all of her candy around her and she realized what it was she had collected! For the first couple days we couldn't get her to stay away from her pumpkin stash, but now we let her pick out a candy about once a day and she is okay with that. Anyway, about the names Natalie has for everyone, yesterday we had an early Thanksgiving dinner with the family (we're all going different directions this year) and a couple times she went around the whole table and said everyone's name. The only one she had a little trouble with was Aunt Nanny, but she got that one figured out after awhile too. She calls her "Ninny".

Our cat, PB, spent the last week back in solitary confinement in a cage in our basement. We just let her out this morning before we went to church, so we'll see how she does this time. She spent a week "relearning" to use her litter box a couple months ago, and in the meantime I repainted the whole basement landing and surrounding walls (where she liked to go instead of in her litter box) and it seemed to work. Then about two weeks ago she decided to start peeing on the landing again, right on top of our new paint. So, back in the cage she went. I hope it worked this time because I just can't do that to her again. It is so hard to see her all caged up like that; she's a cat who is very attached to me, but I just can't have her continue to not use her litter box. She started doing this when I was pregnant with Natalie and began losing my lap. I don't know what else to do; we've tried everything else other than medication for her. (I had a cat on antidepressant drugs when I was in college, Little One, because she was doing the same thing, and it was expensive and didn't work anyway.) I miss her when she's stuck down there in the basement and she cries those pitiful meows all day and night long. It's funny, though, now both times that PB has been put into "solitary", our other cat Tabeal ("Beerrl", as Natalie calls her) suddenly loses her complete shyness and becomes a cuddle kitty.  Tabeal was very cuddly when she was a kitten, until we took her to get spayed. I still think they must not have treated her right when she was there because when I brought her home a couple days later she was not the same cat ever again. She hardly ever wants to sit with us or sit on our laps and always keeps her distance, especially when other people are here. This week, though, it's almost like she was back to her pre-spay kitty self. I really hope PB figured out her litter box this time, though I'm not too encouraged after last time.

One of Natalie's favorite things to do these days is to take every single one of her books off of her shelf and sit down right in the middle of all her books. She then reads one after another, and I think she probably does just about read every single one. That's usually when I escape into the kitchen to do some dishes or something! I usually get a good solid 15 or 20 minutes of her just sitting there reading to herself. This morning she was doing this again and she just made me smile several times. She picked up her Sesame Street alphabet books, specifically the D one and  the C one, and as she picked them up and opened them, said "D" and "C". When she got to the page (in the C book) where Cookie Montster's cookies are all gone, she raised her hands in the "all gone" sign, then pretended to eat the picture of the cookie. It was so cute. Then she read through her Dr. Seuss' Many Colored Days book and she pointed out some of the colors as she flipped the pages. She especially knows purple, but she also sometimes points out green, yellow ("lellow"), and blue ("boo"), and pink ("mink") correctly. The other day we were reading a book of various words together, and she pointed right to the picture of some boots and said "boot!" and then to the other boot in the pair and said "more!" I just don't know how she knew what a boot was; I don't remember ever teaching her that word. All I can think is that she maybe picked it up when we VERY briefly talked about getting her some boots when we were at Stride Rite. Something else very cute she's saying but strange in that I don't know where she picked it up is "umm" when she doesn't know what she wants or what something is. What was first "uhh!" and pointing and then "dat?" and pointing, has now become "umm, umm, umm?" when she is either pointing at something because she wants it and doesn't know the word, or when she's just undecided about what she wants to do but wants our attention anyway. I don't think we say "umm" all that often, but she apparently picked it up somewhere!

Boy, this was a long entry, but I knew I had a bunch of things I needed to catch up on after not writing for such a long time. This will be the last entry until next week, because we're planning on driving to Springfield Missouri this week for Thanksgiving, to see Phil's family. We are probably going to do what we did last year, which is leave on Thursday evening and drive through the night to get there. That seemed to work out pretty good last year, at least for Natalie, since she just ended up sleeping the whole 12 hours. She's a lot more active than she was this time last year though (she took her first full crawl on Thanksgiving day in Missouri) so we'll see how it goes. We're probably going to bring every single one of her books! 

November 19, 2003 - I'm going to to try to get an update in here about Little Bean. There are so many things I've been wanting to say so this entry might not flow really well; I'm going to try to remember everything I've been wanting to update about so it might have a real flow-of-thought feel!

One thing I've been wanting to make sure I get written down so that I didn't forget some years down the road, is a favorite game that Natalie has been playing for the last few months. Our child is very concerned about order (I think her favorite word is "uh oh", which just happens to have been Phil's first word by the way) so she always lets us know (with a point and an "uh oh!") if something has fallen out of place or is in any way out of the way it should be. She loves to go around the house and find a "peck" (a speck) of something on the floor and then she brings it to me. (Whether the "peck" she finds is real or imagined is irrelevant.) She then turns my hand palm side up and opens up my fingers and places the speck into my palm, and then carefully closes all my fingers so that my fist contains the offending speck. She then likes to go find more specks and repeat the game over again. It's really cute, especially since the carpet in our living room is perpetually spotted with juice spills and whatnot else, it keeps her really busy. 

This last weekend my mom ("Mammy" - oh and she now calls Grandpa Brett "papaw") got Natalie some new shoes at Stride Rite. (She's wearing size 7 now, by the way!!) They are the kind that light up when she walks, and she is finding them very amusing. We tried to videotape her stomping around the room and she did it a little, but of course she likes to turn shy when the camera or videocamera comes out. I did get one picture though when she wasn't looking. It is so cute; she stomps her foot and then watches the lights go:

She's been getting so big lately, she seems to be making leaps and bounds with all the words she knows and what she can accomplish on her own. I couldn't even begin to list all the words she says anymore, I just wish I could remember HOW she says all her words because it is so cute! She's starting to recognize some shapes and colors, too, mostly pink and purple. Always purple. She can always point out purple things, and she asks for purple socks every day. (Too bad for her, momma puts other colors on occasionally.) She still doesn't say many words in combinations but I think that she is really close. She'll say "Daddy...work" (with a little pause in between the words) but I know she means "Daddy is going to work", and other small phrases like that, so I'm sure full sentences aren't far behind. Most of the time I know what she is saying but sometimes I am pretty baffled. Yesterday I had made some banana bread in the early afternoon, which Natalie didn't want even a bite of earlier, and then yesterday evening, several hours after we had seen or mentioned the banana bread, she came up to me, put my face between both her cheeks, looked me straight in the eyes and said "mama" (that's her way of unequivocally getting my attention!) and then said something along the lines of "baa-bo". I had NO idea what she wanted, so I started going through the list of things she generally asks for: Juice? "No." Cracker? "No." Pretzel? "No." Cheese? "NO!" She took my face in her hands again and repeated her cryptic request, so I knew she was adamant! I said, okay, let's go into the kitchen and you can show me what you want. We went in there and she went right to the banana bread and pointed to it, and said "baa-bo" and gave me a look like "DUH, Mom!" I had honestly even forgotten that we had banana bread in the kitchen. Not Natalie! I gave her a slice and she took it happily and then went back into the living room, to read some books and eat her banana bread. 

One other thing I wanted to mention today and then I have to go to pick up Aunt Rahrah from school. A week before Jaime's wedding, Natalie did something really cute as I was trying to get her to go down for a nap in her room. On her windowsill is a picture frame containing Phil's and my baby pictures, and also a picture from our wedding. Natalie had been spending almost as much time with Jaime and her wedding plans as I had, so it was cute when she, like usual, pointed to the the baby pictures and said "babe-ah" at Phil and then "babe-ah" at me, and then pointed to me in my wedding dress and said, "May-mee" (Jaime). I told her, no, that's momma but she shook her head and said "May-mee". I couldn't get her to understand that momma could have a wedding dress on too. 

One final thing, in September (this is how far back I've been neglecting Natalie's journal!) Phil actually wrote an entry after he spent the day with Natalie up in Cleveland while I was attending one of Jaime's bridal showers. I've been meaning to post his comments for a long time. It would be terribly out of place here at the end of November's journal, so here is it's own link. 

November 13, 2003 - Yesterday I fell down a hole. An actual sinkhole in the front of my house. We were informed last week that, once again, like two years ago, we have a water main break (that's okay, we really don't have other things to spend a thousand bucks on anyway) but we didn't know where it was. Well, I think I found it. Yesterday afternoon, I decided it was high time to actually get the yard full of leaves raked up, which had all finished falling two weeks ago but with how busy I have been they had been ignored. So I went about raking all of our tree's leaves, which fall as much into our neighbor's yard as much as ours. Since it is our tree, I generally feel bad about their yard being covered so I rake their yard too. They still have a dirt patch in their yard where we had our water line replaced last time (we lovingly refer to it as The Graveyard, because we just can't get grass to grow on that patch of raised up dirt). For some reason, the way our lovely houses were thrown together (oh, I mean "built"), our water line actually runs through our neighbor's yard and not ours. Well, Natalie was happily playing in her sandbox in yesterday afternoon's unusual warmth, so I figured it was a good time to rake. I just kept peeking back over the fence at her every few minutes. I was raking to one side of the dirt patch, when suddenly the ground just opened up and I went down, to my knees, and I was continuing to sink. I caught myself with my arms and pulled myself out of the hole, but it was scary. It felt like I was in one of those cartoon quicksand scenes, because it was watery mud and I felt like I was being pulled downward. I'm just glad Natalie was playing in her sandbox and not out in the front yard where I was.  So I said all that as a way of an apology to my sister. Yesterday was her 30th birthday, and I had good intentions of calling her yesterday afternoon because I knew she'd probably be going out for dinner once it got to be evening. Falling into a watery, muddy hole really shook me up yesterday and I admit that I forgot all about calling her until last last night. I did call her today to tell her happy birthday, but I still feel bad because I know how important it is especially this being a biggie birthday. 

I'll write more this week. Natalie deserves a major update on this journal. Jaime and Ben's wedding was last Saturday so I've been sort of taking a few deep breaths this week. Jaime was very beautiful, by the way!

November 2, 2003 - Yes, I know. It's been a long, long time. I don't have time to get into all of the reasons why right now, because it's already 12:45 am and I want to get to bed, but in short it consists of lots of things keeping me extremely busy (Jaime's wedding is this upcoming Saturday, for one thing) and I also got a new (new to me, thanks Allie!!!!) computer a couple weeks ago and it's taken me a bit to get settled. I've been wanting to update for such a long time though, and there's a lot I'm wanting to say so tonight I just won't say anything at all except that I'm posting a new picture of Natalie, since everyone has been going through Natalie picture withdraw. (Understandably!)  I promise I'll be posting very soon with all the new things going on around here. I'm upset at myself for missing a whole month of things that Natalie has been doing but hopefully I won't forget too much. Just expect one of my marathon entries here pretty soon I guess!!