The other day, after Natalie's paint-with-baby food session, she had it smushed so much all over her that I just decided to take her outside and hose her off. She LOVED it. We don't have a sprinkler, just a plain garden hose, but she played with that thing for probably close to 45 minutes straight. I just had both of our shoes off, and let her have at it. She was so cute. She even "watered" my plant holder that is just filled with dirt (because I haven't gone to get flowers yet this year).  She especially liked washing down the sidewalks and her slide. I wouldn't let her open her sand box turtle to wash the inside of that though! Then, before long, she started trying to take a drink out of the hose. It kept splashing up into her face and she would look up at me with her cheeks and eyelashes all soaked.

It's been a difficult past few days because, it seems that Natalie's night schedule may be changing.  She's waking up between 6:30 and 7:30 am. That's good for us because we're able to get a lot more done during the day. It's also a plus because she's been falling asleep at night at around 10:30 instead of after midnight, but I'm still not used to going to bed that early, so it's hard to fall asleep and then still get up bright and early in the morning. Unfortunately, Natalie still isn't taking naps during the day. I would hope that with a more normal kid sleep schedule she'd also take at least one solid nap during the day, but not Miss Natalie. Ten to 15 minutes is still all she needs and then she's up and back at it again! 

I just still can't get over how cute it is when Natalie says her name. This afternoon she pointed to me and emphatically said, "mama!" and the pointed to herself (at her chest), thought for a moment, and then said with complete glee, "Na Na!" Can any baby possibly be so cute?

June 25, 2003 - Natalie is sitting below me right now, finger painting with baby food. Mashed prunes, specifically. (She didn't want to eat the baby food, so why not use it somehow?)  She painted a picture on paper for a little while, then she moved to painting all the Sesame Street characters that are on her plastic splat mat (which I'm trying to keep her on!), and now she's painting herself. She's doing each toe. :-)

Natalie has just been exploding with new words and signs this past week. She tries to repeat everything we say, and has really enjoyed saying the word "trunk" (as best as she can). Every time we get out of the car and get her stroller, or close it after putting it away, she points to it and says "crunk". She's also taken to associating everything she knows that is outside with telling us she wants to go out. She'll go through her whole repertoire - spider, ant, bee, dog.... If I ask her if she wants to go outside, then she'll use her 'outside' sign.  Yesterday evening while I went out for a florist meeting, Phil took Natalie to a park around here, and she finally saw a real life (as opposed to pet store or book) bunny rabbit!  They have always hopped away too fast for Natalie to see one. Phil said she got within about 10 feet of one and Natalie saw it, and got very excited and began signing "bunny" over and over again. (The sign for bunny is first two fingers like bunny ears, and hopping. Natalie does it her own way though. She makes bunny ears from her thumb and first finger.) When I got home and I asked Natalie what she saw at the park, she right away started signing bunny. She was still really excited about it.

We've been outside a lot this week. On Sunday after church we went over to my mom's friend Karen's house to swim in her new pool. The last time we went swimming (in a hotel pool in Cleveland early this spring), Natalie giggled the whole time. This time, she mostly just looked around wide-eyed the whole time. I didn't think she was enjoying it much, until I started to bring her out. She started crying right away, so back in I went. She had two little pool toys (sea horses) in her hands the entire afternoon. She didn't want to let them go!  On Monday afternoon, we went with Sarah to Alum Creek beach. Even with putting on SPF 50, I'm already getting some color! Natalie is getting a little bit of a tan but not too much, which is good. At the beach, I put more lotion on her about every 15 minutes, just in case. I know she has skin like mine! I think Sarah and I have decided we want to go up there about once a week, as long as the weather is good. It's not much of a beach, but it has real sand and real water, so that's as good as it gets in central Ohio!  After so much rain this month, we've really enjoyed getting outside!

Ooh, boy, now she's decided to eat her prune paint. She's licking it off of her paint brush (it's a food brush, actually) and saying "MMMMmmmm". (See the picture of the day, below. I couldn't resist.)

June 18, 2003 - Well, the excitement never ends around here. Natalie woke up vomiting this morning. We took her into our bed, and she threw up again.  We finally got out out bed (we didn't want to have to keep changing the sheets if this was going to continue). Natalie didn't seem to be acting very sick, but at about 10 am she threw up one more time, after she was crying for something to eat so I gave her half a graham cracker. She ate it down really fast, and then promptly threw it back up. I didn't give her anything else to eat until lunch, except for some Pedialyte, which she has kept down. Hopefully lunch will stay too.

In other news, it looks like Rosa and Spikee really are healthy fish.  Apparently we were pretty accurate when we came up with their names. They have spawned. This morning, I asked Phil to reach into the fish tank to remove a shell that was getting icky (I can't bring myself to chance touching a fish with my fingers, I know, it's crazy, they're just fish). Once he removed the shell, the tank was disturbed enough that some old food and whatnot flew up into the rest of the tank, clouding up the water for a few minutes. And there, at the bottom of the tank, was a little baby Rosa. A tiny, little thing that is definitely a fish. At lunch, Phil saw a few more, black ones I guess. Now I'm wondering just how many baby fish are lurking around underneath the filter/base of the tank. Just how many eggs does a fish lay? Now that we've seen this, now that I think about it, Rosa's belly has looked a little...swollen...lately.  I don't know what to do. I need to clean out the fish tank and give them some new water, but if I do that, there goes all of the babies. At the same time, just how many more baby fish are coming? I don't really want any more fish, two fish are just fine with me, thank you! Still, I'll feel bad about sending who knows how many fish down the sink. Caviar, anyone?

June 17, 2003 - Natalie said her name today, at least, as best as she could. We were playing the "point out and name" game again (one of Natalie's favorite things to do, particularly when it's "where's daddy?" (point to daddy), "where's mommy?" (point to mommy) and so on. She's very good at saying "mom" these days, usually said as either a single "mom" or "mom-mom" when she's just pointing me out, or a string of "mommommommom" 's when she's upset. Every now and then we can get her to say dad-da, but we have to coax it out of her. This afternoon, I asked her "where's mommy?" and she pointed to me and said "mom", and then I asked "where's Natalie?", and she pointed to herself as always, but this time she added "Na-na" as she pointed to her chest. I did it a few more times and she kept it up. Then I kept just saying her name, Natalie, and she'd point to herself and say "Na-na".  It was so cute! 

This may prove to be a little confusing to things, being that my sister goes by the name Nan (because when we were little, "Diana" was as difficult to say as "Natalie" is!) At least for right now, when Natalie is saying her name like this, we now have two Nana's in our family!

Natalie broke open my upper lip this afternoon. She was playing with a plastic pop-up toy (sitting next to me, as she has been all week), and then she started shaking it up and down with her arms. On an upswing, it caught my upper lip and gum, and it split open. Now my lip feels fat. She was very concerned for me when I was bleeding. I had been playing with her and then I suddenly jumped up, in pain, and ran to get a paper towel for my lip, which took her by surprise. After the bleeding stopped I was holding her boo-boo bunny on my lip and she wanted to either hold the bunny for me or try to look under my lip to the place where it was cut open.  I always forget just how strong that little girl is!

Speaking of being strong, Natalie has gotten into a very bad habit lately. Whenever I pick her up, she grabs hold of me in a very sensitive place and then PINCHES!  Hard! I don't know why she's suddenly doing this all the time, but it's driving me crazy! Now when I pick her up, one of the first things I do is try to hold her hand that is around the front of me so that she won't pinch. It doesn't work for too long though. For all the many, many words this kid seems to understand and learn every single day, she just can't seem to understand "don't pinch!" 

June 16, 2003 - One thing I forgot to write about yesterday. (There is always something.) Natalie is becoming quite jealous of me when someone else tries to show me affection. On Saturday when my mom hugged on me, Natalie got pretty upset about it, until we picked her up and let her sit on my lap and be hugged at the same time. Lately Natalie doesn't like to see Phil and I hug and kiss either. Yesterday Phil kissed me and Natalie started whining. So we kept hugging a little longer. (I know, we're just so cruel.) After a few moments, we picked her up and hugged her between the two of us, and she liked that. She just did NOT want to be excluded though! It was pretty funny. :-) I thought I'd have at least another five or six years before Natalie started acting this way when her mom and dad kissed. :-)

One other thing. This morning, Natalie pointed out Phil's wedding ring, then pointed out my rings, and then went to her ring finger on her left hand, fingered around where a ring would go, and shook her head "no". I guess she wants some rings too. What a clever child. :-) Maybe she'll get a ring someday, that is when she stops trying to chew on everything she touches.

Speaking of shaking her head "no", I forgot to mention this last week. On Friday, Sarah was over at our house for the afternoon. Natalie was signing "love" and pointing to me, and then she did the same to her daddy. Then she pointed to Aunt Sarah. I asked her, "Natalie, do you love Aunt Sarah?" to which instead of signing "love", she did her emphatic "no" head shake. After which she giggled. Good thing Aunt Sarah has a sense of humor too!  We really have to get Natalie's head shake on video, because it is so cute. Her blonde hair flies back and forth and she tilts her chin down but draws her eyes upward as she shakes her head back and forth. 

June 15, 2003 - What a great weekend we've had! We did lots of stuff, being my birthday yesterday and then Father's Day today. First of all, though, I wanted to mention before it slipped my mind - Natalie learned how to untie her shoelaces this weekend. She's been working on that for the last couple weeks but yesterday she succeeded. They were even double-knotted!

So, yesterday I turned 28 (at 1:33 pm, Mom, NOT 1:30). :-) Up until late Friday night, we still didn't have much of an idea of what we wanted to do. I just knew that I mostly wanted to get out, somewhere. We decided that, if the weather was clear, we were going to go to the zoo and then Alum Creek beach. We woke up Saturday morning and yes, it had been raining and it didn't look to be getting any better. So we went with plan B, which was first to go to Panera and get cinnamon crunch bagels (yum!) which we ate at April's house while she had her garage sale. Then we drove down to Cincinnati to visit a grocery store. :-) Not just any grocery store though, a BIG one, with an entire acre of produce alone, and it's also an international food market. It's called Jungle Jim's, and we saw it mentioned on a program called The Best Of on the Food Network (one of our favorite cable channels, the other being TLC - I could pretty much get rid of everything else on cable). This store was really great, and they're in the process of expanding, too; they are even going to have a monorail when the renovations are finished! They had all kinds of Asian produce that I have no idea what it is or how to cook any of it, but it looked really interesting. The store is divided into sections by country or region, and they had a big section of British food! We were so excited to find all the things I got addicted to a few years ago when I went to England, like Tango orange pop, REAL chocolate, Cadbury's hot cocoa mix, and other things. The only thing we didn't get were chocolate Hob Nobs. They stock them but they were all out. We did get some other chocolate covered "digestive" biscuits though, which look to be pretty similar. At any rate, I'm sure they will be yummy because they have real chocolate on them and not that waxy chocolate look-alike stuff you find on Keebler cookies. :-) Natalie got a little wiggly during the shopping trip, but we did spend a couple hours there. She did like the various animatronics they had around the store though. The place was sort of like a Disney store-meets grocery shopping. On the way down to Cincinnati, we also made a pit stop at a flea market in Lebanon. A lot of it reminded me of my dad because there were people there with lots of boxes of soap products! :-) We got some tomato plants; really nice and developed ones. (They had been started in a green house.) We got two big tomato plants (already flowering) that are as tall as Natalie, for $2 each, and I got 12 roma tomato plants for 25 cents each. I planted them out front of my house, where we have ripped up some of our annoying ground cover. (We want to just pretty much cement over the entire front area of our house; it's only pretty in the early spring when it gets those purple flowers!) We drove back home, and then last night my mom watched Natalie (actually just held Natalie while she cried the whole time, apparently) while Phil and I went out to BD's Mongolian BBQ for dinner. Again, yum!!! They gave me a free dessert (ice cream sundae with a brownie) for my birthday. So much for losing weight this weekend. :-)

Today, for Father's Day, we had church in the morning, and then this afternoon after dinner and a nice nap (thanks, Natalie!) we went to Inniswood Metro Gardens, which is in Westerville. I don't know how we've never thought to go there before, because this place was so lovely! There are waterfalls, ponds, lots of walkways, a kids' "farmhouse" area, and lots of roses and other flowers. It is so pretty. We spent a couple hours there, until it got dark. Natalie really had fun there too, there was fountains to play in and she had fun running around a lot too. We're definitely going to be going back there again soon.  It reminded us of the Frankin Park Conservatory, except this is all outdoors and free! :-)  We took lots of pictures. Unfortunately, I can't upload more than a couple pictures at a time from this computer (which is why I haven't had any new Club Photo albums for anyone to see for a while now), because it likes to completely freeze up every five minutes or so, for no apparent reason. I have to reboot when it does that, so I can't do anything like upload pictures. I'll hopefully get over to my mom's to get some pictures up really soon though, because I probably have about two hundred or so by now since I've last uploaded to Club Photo! 

I decided to pick the picture of Phil and Natalie that I took this morning before church for today's picture of the day. She is so cute in that dress! (My friend Murielle got it for her last week.) If I would have had time to update this yesterday though, it would have been the picture of Natalie and me by our flag, taken yesterday morning for my birthday. (Flag Day!) I just decided to make that my summer intro picture for now, though I tend to like to change that around pretty frequently. :-)

June 10, 2003 - Well, my gut feeling was correct. I took her to see Dr. Kern today, and yes she does have a double ear infection. That certainly explains her extra fussiness. This is only the third ear infection she's ever had though, so we can't complain. Hopefully she'll still enjoy taking the pink medicine, like she did last time. (The first time, she didn't like it.) As we left the doctor's office, we got a free scoop of Graeter's ice cream. They had a cart there outside of his office today, giving ice cream to everyone as they were leaving. Graeter's isn't my favorite ice cream, by far, but I'm not about to turn down free ice cream (even if it's not part of my weight loss plan - bah!) and Natalie really enjoyed it after leaving the doctor. She clung to me like a little monkey the whole time we were in the office (she definitely recognizes that place now) and cried whenever the nurse or Dr. Kern came toward her, but when all he did was check her ears, she got over it pretty quickly. She just wouldn't let me go the entire time.

One more thing I wanted to mention, Natalie is really getting both a fascination and a fear of bugs, in general. Lately everything she sees is a potential bee or spider. Today I taught her a sign for "ant" because she was seeing every ant outside and running from them and signing spider. She picked up the sign really quickly and then went around the sidewalk area and pointed out every ant (while signing ant) that she could see. I don't think she's afraid of ants; she even tried to touch one. 

June 9, 2003 - Natalie is 16 months old! Can you believe it? I know I can't. Two months from now, she'll be a year and a half old!!!! I'm really starting to get the "so when is your next coming?" question all the time now. Not ready, not ready, not ready... For one thing, I'm going to be a bridesmaid (and also wedding coordinator) in November, so there's no way I want to be pregnant then. Maybe after that, we'll start thinking about it. Maybe. I want Natalie to be weaned first, so that I don't feel like I'm still partially pregnant for at least a couple months. At least that's my plan. Ha, ha. 

Tomorrow I'm going to try to take her to the doctor. She's been having a really tough time with these last three teeth that are coming through, and now I'm wondering if she may have an ear infection as well. She is just so, so, so fussy and it's really unlike her to be this unhappy all day long for days at a time, even when she has been teething. She hasn't really been pulling on her ears, but she hadn't done that other times we found out she had an ear infection too, so I just want to be sure. It's apparent the poor girl is in pain, I just don't know if it's just the teething or something else on top of it. I'm just glad I haven't chosen to wean her before she was finished with teething, because I don't know what I would do to soothe her otherwise. Nothing, and I mean nothing, else works, not even the star combo of Advil, Orajel and popsicles, and even nursing isn't being the cure-all this time. 

Now I'd like to just add a few random pictures of things going on around here. But first, make sure you see the picture of the day below. Natalie was so cute last night. She spent quite a long time completely emptying her bag of Goldfish crackers into one of her shoes. She was very systematic about it, one fish into the shoe at a time. When the bag was empty and the shoe was filled, she carried the shoe around and ate her crackers from the shoe. Of course we had to grab a picture of this! The following pictures, I thought, were not Picture of the Day worthy, but I just wanted to add them anyway. These won't stay on once I archive June.

1) Now that I have successfully kept both Rosa and Spikee alive for several weeks (a great accomplishment for me), I thought it was a good time to introduce them. Rosa is the red and black one and Spikee is the yellow and orange one. I guess having a real fish tank and real fish works better than feeder fish in an old cookie jar.

2) Here is a beautiful bouquet of my pink peonies. For the last couple years, I didn't want to cut any to bring in the house because I didn't want to ruin the blooms outside. Then I discovered, first, how fragrant these flowers are, and second, how a single downpour of spring rain can send every single bloom crashing to the ground in a very permanent and unattractive way anyway. So this year, I've been cutting and bringing in a whole bunch of them, and I'm finally really enjoying my peonies! They make the whole living room smell so nice!

3) Finally, here's a picture of Natalie and Phil with her new baby pool. We got it at a garage sale this weekend for a quarter, and it's a good thing we only paid that much. Once we got it blown up, we found it was really too small (it would have been perfect for Natalie last year) and also, there's a hole somewhere around the top ring of the side wall. She didn't think too much of it since it was smaller than her baths even are. :-) Woohoo, really exciting, mom..

June 5, 2003 - I was mistaken the other day about Natalie's first fear being spiders and bees. Her first fear was actually vacuum cleaners; I was surprised that I had forgotten about that. I was reminded of it when I had to vacuum when just Natalie and I were home on Saturday. Phil or I usually vacuum while the other one holds Natalie. I didn't even think about it because it had been so long since I tried to vacuum on my own. Natalie was in the living room, and when I turned on the vacuum in the front hallway, she got really scared and started whimpering and backing up (just like when she saw the spider). So I had to pick Natalie up and vacuum with one hand and a baby in the other (not such an easy thing anymore since she's more squirmy and much heavier than she was several months ago!)  She's still very concerned about the spiders and bees though. She is just not yet convinced that the spider she spied (and I squashed) over by the window last week isn't still there. Several times throughout the day, she'll start signing spider and pointing to where it was, and get all concerned. I try to tell her that the spider is "all gone" but she doesn't understand. Other times, she starts to point to the front door (where she knows outside is) and she signs "bee".  She gets stuck on these ideas and no amount of explaining convinces her that she's okay. The only way to get her mind off of the idea is to get her involved in a new activity. Even that doesn't always work and I just have to tell her over and over, yes, you're right, that's where the spider / bee was. It's all gone. 

I love that the weather is finally getting nice and warm around here. We're having a particularly long spring! This weekend it felt like early April, not the first of June. We're getting out a lot these days though, which is really nice. I'm trying to exercise every single day, because I want to lose about 10 to 15 pounds by the end of the summer. (This, by the way, is the only reason that I'm not making a real concerted effort to wean Natalie right now. I'm ready to have my body back, and Natalie is very obviously only using me for comfort these days, but as long as I'm trying to lose weight, nursing does give me that extra boost to lose weight faster!) I've lost several pounds in the last few months, but I'm just trying to push for a little more because I'm tired of not being able to fit into most of my clothes. I weigh less now than I did before I got pregnant, which is nice, but since my body is shaped differently I still can't fit into a lot of those clothes; mostly because the weight has stayed around my belly.  (To which all the women in my family say "of course"!) Besides, I should have not have gained all the weight I did in the first few years of marriage (thanks to more of a disposable income and lots of Chinese buffets!) :-) I've been walking almost two miles every day (that it hasn't rained, that is) in the afternoons or early evenings. I found a good route to walk, down the road to the elementary school which has a fun playground for Natalie. So we go down there, which from my house is a walk of one tenth less than a mile, play for awhile, and then back. It's a good walk because the whole way back is pretty much all uphill, so especially pushing the stroller I get a good workout. It's been harder on the rainy days, though, because Natalie refuses to let me exercise to a video tape!  I don't know what it is; often she plays quietly on her own for times while I read over on the couch, but if I start exercising, within the first five to ten minutes she is having a meltdown. I try to lean over and talk to her several times, but she can't stand it that I'm not holding her RIGHT at that minute. (Sit ups, on the other hand, she finds amusing. She likes to sit on top of my belly and giggle while I try to do crunches with her added weight. She literally comes right over and plops down on top of me as soon as I start to do my sit ups.) She just doesn't like it when I do exercise tapes. So I'm glad it's not winter out now, because I can really only get exercise by going outside. :-)

Natalie is getting more teeth right now. She is just really going at getting these last teeth here, all at once. She's been very clingy and easily upset, as usual when she's been getting teeth. I don't know when the second molars come in, but it must be after some kind of break. I hope.  She's always gotten a lot more challenging when she's getting teeth, and this round is no exception. Speaking of challenging, I read several months ago that true defiance often begins somewhere around 15 to 16 months, and Natalie is right on track with that.  I've been seeing bits of that more and more lately (leaving me particularly exhausted every day - another reason to lose weight, so I can keep up with her!) :-) Yesterday she discovered that she can open and unload the CD player, and when I told her not to touch it, and then pulled her away to a new distraction, she looked at me with a look that said "yeah right mom" and went right back over to the CD player, and she did this several times in a row. I couldn't do anything to distract her (and then started to find the "game" funny and started to giggle every time I went to move her away) until I finally said "okay, Natalie, let's go outside to get the mail."  The word "outside" always seems to do the trick. 

I'm so happy it's June! My favorite month! Not only is it my birthday month (getting less anticipated these days), but the days are warm and (usually) less rainy, the sun stays out till nine, I have a vase full of bright pink peonies every single day (I have a huge bouquet on my table right now) and I'm picking yummy, sweet strawberries out of my garden! Kroger's versions just don't compare at all. We had some at dinner tonight and I think Natalie ate more of them - and faster than - Phil or I.