Buglsyfante

Happy Halloween to all. I have not had much time to post anything to the blog in a while as life is busy as usual. This weekend, we had a good excuse as my parents made last minute trip to Omaha. Zoa was happy to have Grandma and Grandpa (or Bumpa as he will now be called) in town again. She was shy at first, but quick to warm up to them, which was a good thing since they babysat on Friday morning and Saturday evening (Yes, Brian and I actually went out!). We had a great weekend, spending a lot of time outside as the weather was absolutely beautiful for a change. Zoa enjoyed taking Grandma and Bumpa up to the park at the school next door to our house and showing off all of her tricks and vocabulary. My favorite of her more recent words are "fly" (butterfly), "flou" (flower), and "gobble-gobble-gobble." She picked up the turkey gobble from a song at daycare and she just walks around the house saying it. I wish I had some pictures to post here of our weekend, but unfortunately the only picture I took was one of my mom sitting in Zoa's hot pink baby chair. So, I will have to wait until I receive some pictures via email from them.

We do have plenty of pictures of our little Bugslyfante in her Halloween costume this year. She was not too thrilled with the head portion of the costume, so it was hard to get a good picture of her in it. However, she did wear it to the Halloween party at daycare today where she smacked at her first pinata and bobbed for apples. Brian also took her trick-or-treating tonight in our circle, while I handed out candy. Unfortunately for Zoa, Mom and Dad confiscated all of the treats and are planning to eat them.

Owl baby, frog feet, and cat poop

Zoa is in the middle of taking her 20-minute Sunday "rest." It was going well as she was playing and playing, but now she has started to complain occassionally. She has about 10 minutes left of her designated rest-time, so I thought I would take a couple mintues to write something on the blog. As the title suggests, these are Zoa's new favorite phrases. She talks a lot and seems to actually be making more sense every day. OK, so she started screaming, so I had better go. Maybe she will play by herself for longer than 10 mintues next week!

Sick again

Yes, so it has been another long lay-off from the blog due to illness. Brian and Zoa have both had a cold/flu, but then Zoa's turned into a double ear infection on Thursday. So, I have been busy taking care of Zoa and trying to get her to rest. She is finally feeling better and is acting like herself again. She talks pretty much non-stop now-a-days and is non-stop action too. She has completely given up napping at home, which makes my weekends exhausting sometimes. I actually feel like I have more energy during the week than on the weekend. Today (I am on fall break) I tried to keep her in her crib playing for 20 minutes. Although she cried much of the time, I am trying to get her used to playing by herself for a little bit so I can get a break on the weekend. All our friends who have babies Zoa's age have babies who still take 2 naps a day and go to bed at 6:30 or 7:00 at night. I feel like I would be able to get so much done with that much time. My days are so full now that this past Saturday night I was literally scrubbing the kitchen floor at 10pm. It has been 5 months since Brian have even been able to go out on anything even resembling a date. OK, so I am pissing and moaning a lot, but I am tired.

Although life is a lot of work right now, Zoa is so much fun too. We spent a ton of time together this past weekend hanging out at the park, raking leaves, and going to the zoo with a friend and her baby. Her vocabulary is so large now that I can no longer count how many words she knows. She is learning a ton of stuff from daycare and brings home these little pictures and activities to do, which is really cute. My favorite new thing that she does is the "I'm a Little Tea Pot" song. I tried to teach her the song and the moves this past weekend, because she is so enamored with the Itsy-Bitsy Spider. Now, she slaps her butt with one hand (for the handle) when she wants you to sing the Tea Pot song. She hasn't figured out the rest of the moves, but she thinks it is funny. Well, I am too tired to write more tonight, so I will just leave you with some recent pictures.

That was almost a sentence...

This past weekend Zoa officially began putting two words together. Her first two word "sentence" was "hi cat" as she looked at MewMew from the other side of the screen door. She also has some two-word phrase she says when she says good-bye, only I have yet to figure out what the second word is.

Zoa continues to get along really well at her new daycare and seems to be learning all sorts of things (good and bad) from the other kids there as well as from her little pre-school program. She now identifies pictures of many different kinds of things including cows, birds, and bread, among others. Her vocabulary is growing so fast she literally says a new word or two everyday. It is so much fun.

She has also picked up the rather nasty habit of head-butting objects, people (namely Me and Brian), and cats. I am afraid we may have encouraged this by playing the game we called "Oy" with her when she was younger. This entailed using young Zoa as a battering ram to "hit" others with. She thought it was so funny back then, and so did we. However, now she walks up to kitchen cabinets and smacks her head against them exclaming, "ow." She likes to ram things with her head especially hard when angry. This weekend she gave me a swollen lip by head-butting my face when she was mad at me. Thankfully, she saves this nasty behavior for us at home, and is alway so good at daycare. I wait the phone call saying that she has head butted another child.

This weekend was absolutely lovely weather, but miserable for me as I continue to not feel well. However, we did spend a lot of time in the yard playing and raking. Here is some photographic evidence of Zoa enjoying the unusually warm fall weather.