Our little girl turns three tomorrow, so here are some of her gems from the last year.

>> 1 <<

Lucy: Look at my mouf.
Me: What's wrong with it?
Lucy: There's nothing in it.

>> 2 <<

Lucy: I don't want chocolate chips in my muffin. I want them in my hand.

>> 3 <<

Lucy: I don't like bears. They will eat me. They will put me in their mouf.
pauses 
And if they put me in their mouf, I can't put anyfing in my mouf.

(She also routinely bites her fingers because they get in the way of her overzealous teeth. Is this normal?)

>> 4 <<

While the boys are playing a raucous game of indoor soccer:
Lucy (yelling): Who's ready to pway pwincesses??
waits. 
yells louder.
Who's ready to pway pwincesses???

>> 5 <<

While cramped together in the pack-n-play, in a game of Jake's devising:

Jake: Officer LJ, begin the launch sequence!
Lucy June: I'm Pwincess Leia!
Jake: Officer LJ, begin the launch sequence!!!
Lucy June: I'M PWINCESS LEIA!!!
Jake: PRINCESS LEIA, BEGIN THE LAUNCH SEQUENCE!!
Lucy June: OKAY!!

>> 6 <<

Lucy June: Hey little daddy!

Jacob: Call me big papa.

>> 7 <<

She's also started calling her big brother "Jakey" - no one else does this.

>> 7.5 <<

Lucy June (pretending to sleep): Honk shhhh honk shhhh

We love you LuzJune! Happy Birthday!

Go see Kelly for more takes!

Follow the Little Rhodes

In another attempt to break my blogging silence: we'll go with the old fashioned what the 4 year old and 2 year old have been dishing out lately.

>><<

At dinner when Jacob leaned in to tell little Jake something:

Jake: Dad, you're throwing beer smell in my face.

>><<

After Jake overheard me saying something would be a "life saver," he agreed:

Jake: Yeah...Such a light saber. 

>><<

Lucy June, say Everybody.

"Eddybuddy"

>><<

Lucy June, say Everybody.

"All de buddies"

>><<

Jake: Mom, what's R2D2 + C3PO?

>><<

The sewer line backed up, and Jacob said he was going to check the clean out. Jake hopped off his stool and ran to his room. He came back with a mask and snorkel.

>><<

Lucy June, what's your bday?

"Octumble twenty seconds"

>><<

Lucy June, what's your bday?

"October two toesies"

>><<

After I told him that a certain health food fed the "good guys in his body":

Jake: Mom! There's nothing in my body except blood and snot!

>><<

While sitting in the overflow room at Mass on Easter Sunday, Jake turned to me and whispered: "Mama, I love watching this TV show at Mass."

>><<

After we finished eating at a restaurant, I packed up the diaper bag, fished out my keys, slung the bag over my shoulder, hiked up my 25 pound six-month-old, and started the long walk to the car. Lucy June pounded both fists in the air and started yelling: 

"Go Mama Go! Go Mama Go!"

>><<

Overheard while Jake was playing in the bathtub:

Jake: Better settle in for the winter. You're not dead till you're warm and dead.

>><<

Lucy June, say Popsicle
"Popsi-tickle"

>><<

Lucy June, say Amen

"I'm a man"

Catch Up Catch Up

Just shy of two months later and she's attempting another blogging reentry.

My lands how I've missed this space.

I think about you all a lot, but every time I try to write I end up like...crying or something. I don't know. These last few months - or let's just call it 2015 - has been TOUGH. But I'm learning about myself as a wife and a mother and as a woman and all that, so I guess it's also been good. But I'm a little tired of learning hard lessons.

Where have we been and what have we done??

I think I left off in April right before we went to watch my dad run Boston. How cool is he?? (And at mile 26!)

My little sister graduated from my old alma mater.

The nephew and niece played their parts admirably.

   

I'm still pregnant. So pregnant. Pregnancy nausea hung on to a ripe 22 weeks, at which point it became very manageable, and now at 27 weeks is totally gone. I'm still a little shell-shocked but so grateful it let up. I also weigh right about what I did when I DELIVERED Jake so...that feels good.

Jacob's work finally started to slow down a bit in May, he's home most days before five and even gets a couple days off every week. This is a far cry better than working till 7 every night 6.5 days a week. We both agree that he's been working too much. He's a contractor, so the more he works the more he makes, and it's hard to say no to work. His work is seasonal, but the busy season (right along with my nausea) hung on about eight weeks longer than expected. So after that experience we were both pretty zonked and ready to life overhaul.

Or at least I was ready to life overhaul. Jacob is more of a "just live" person and I'm more of a "plan to live" person. So I've been reading Charles Duhigg and Gretchen Rubin and imagining all the ways we can paint a deliberate life for ourselves, and he's been shaking his head.

Houston flooded at the end of May. My brother and brother-in-law were stranded in central Houston all night long, homes north of our neighborhood got over a foot of water, and we...slept...woke up to the thunder a few times...and read about it online in the morning.

It looks like we lost our beehive, probably because of the rain. They're queenless, and if they can't manage to hatch a new one soon, we'll lose them. It probably means it's time for us to move. We always lose hives before a move. My brothers, who live with and own this house with us, are under contract on another place, so we're talking about transitioning this house into a rental property.

The kids are growing right along.

Jake turned four last week. We had an Octonauts party, and he loved it. His little friends came over and Jacob played carnie outside letting little people in and out of the treehouse.

I think he requested a Blue Octopod Reef Cake which I translated to a carrot cake with cream cheese frosting decorated with pipe cleaners and toys.

The cake inspired thievery which I took as a compliment.

The cute little girl in the green gingham got the "R" before we could say "make a wish." I have no idea who stole the Octonaut Penguin.

Throwing a four year old's birthday party was much more fun than I expected. He was SO. EXCITED. about everything.  

We bought Jake some big kid legos for his birthday, and now he plays legos all the time. I'm already mourning the day when moving Han Solo's head to an astronaut body no longer holds the magical quiet time charm that it has the past week.

Lucy June is 19 months of talking all the time. She snuggles and hugs and goes right down for naps, and - aside from the full body fits when I take away her beloved chapstick and the 6:05am wake up punctuated with her squeaky morning voice from the crib: "All DONE night night! All DONE sheeping!! Get OUTTA HERE!" - she's still as sweet as ever.

Like so sweet. Like she literally will walk up, wrap her arms around my legs, and say "Hug you wuv you, mama." Since Jake was about three before I got any spontaneous affection, I'm lapping it up. And praying that she doesn't turn on us in adolescence.

And that's mostly our story these days. I really hope summer inspires my blogging game. We shall see. We shall see. 

Fluffy Ramblings and a Bump

I started my last draft with a plan to go full fluff, but then things got heavy. I cried while I wrote it. I think posts no longer qualify as fluff once someone starts crying.

So I paused it. Went on a date with Ben & Jerry's, and now I'm back.

~~~

I've been combing the archives of this little lady recently. She's like the cutest ever, and she's about to have her first baby, and she's just so delightfully stalk-able, so go forth.

~~~

I've been experimenting with DIY shampoo again. (Ah. This life. Riveting!) It's actually a terrible time to experiment because during pregnancy my hair and scalp get super dry, so it's hard to tell what's causing what, but I'm on a castille soap/honey kick right now, and I'm moderately pleased with it.

I've also finally made some epsom salt spray - I used this recipe  - and don't you know I went the chamomile/lemon route because I'm always Hail Marying for highlights. Results: not in. My spray bottle kept getting clogged and leaking and the concoction would run down my arms, and I don't wash my hair regularly, so I can't experiment very easily with how much to use. Long story short: I'm basically Mrs. Paul Mitchell.

I'll probably just throw in the beach towel and buy some, but not before it sits in my Amazon cart for a couple weeks and I go through several cycles of buyer's guilt before I've even purchased it.

We all have our neuroses I suppose.

~~~

You want to know a fluffy secret I don't think I've ever shared? You want to talk more exemplary hygiene?

I don't shave my legs. Except for the very rare occasion, I haven't shaved in the last five years.

And this isn't like a hippy, crunchy thing. I'm not some kind of hairy feminist.

I got some waxing done when I was a blushing bride and went on a razor-free honeymoon, and after six weeks of hairless underarms, I was like: I'm never shaving again. So now I mostly epilate. Yes. It hurts. An Italian friend first introduced me to epilating. At about eight hairs in, I swore I'd never do it again. But once I'd had a couple waxes, it didn't hurt near as much, and now that I'm a few years in, I don't even flinch. And then I'm golden and hair-free for 6-8 weeks. Are there any other epiladies out there?

~~~

I'm trying to cut back on the amount of meat we eat. Since I've been sick with Baby 3, our food budget has been off the hook. I haven't been cooking ($$) and Jacob's been doing all the grocery shopping ($$$). So we're trying to venture back into the wide world of legumes, but as I make this valiant effort, I'm noticing that all my bean recipes are very wintery. So I'd love any recommendations you could send my way!

~~~

Lucy June talks a lot about my parents' animals. Their cat, Izzy, who scratched her (Izzy! ouch! Izzy! Hurting!) and also their dog, Beau. When we were at their house last, my parents tried to teach her how to give the dog commands, so now she randomly walks around our house lisping: "Shit, Beau! Shit! Shit, Beau!"

I know it won't last long. Good things never do.

~~~

And as titularly promised, here we are pushing 19 weeks.

On Friday we head to Boston, to watch my dad run the marathon. I'm so proud of him and excited to see ducklings and haunt lots of quaint coffee shops.

And that's all for now.

The State of the Rhodes

Nothing like a good ole fashioned family update to jump back on the blogging scene.

(No promises that I'm back on the wagon for real. I'm 15 weeks in and nausea doesn't usually clear for me entirely until 18 weeks, but since it has consigned itself to the afternoons/evenings recently, I might actually find some time to write. We shall cross our fingers and see.)

So. The Lost Rhodes. Where are they now??

Lucy June

Lucy June is thinning out, if still a plumpster who would eat every half hour. Yesterday we confirmed that she is still allergic to avocados. Not deathly allergic, just the more she gets the more she throws up kind of allergic. Jacob finds the allergy absurd and now wants a paternity test.

She almost has hair, not enough to do anything with, but you can SEE it. I know I should probably do the whole headband thing. But I'm afraid I'll get a super cute little headband (like this one!!) and she'll just tear it off. How do you know if you've got a daughter who will keep pretty things on her head??


JakeBoy

Jake has given up his afternoon nap except for once in a blessed moon. Even though we haven't touched our preschool workbook in about two months, he proudly tells strangers that he homeschools. He still loves outerspace and makes me tell stories about the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud.

He's all energy. Whenever anyone starts crying at playgroup, there's an 85% chance he's involved. If he didn't start someone crying, he arrives shortly after to make things worse. Mr. Moth to the flame of discord. I'm sure this is my fault.

Luckily, Lucy June is on her way to exonerating me as the The World's Worst Disciplinarian because she's a playdate angel. Today at a baby shower she was playing with a ten month old and desperately wanted the toy chicken he was holding. She could've easily overpowered him, but she didn't, and instead just pitifully repeated: "Chiten? Peez? Chiten? Peez?"

Jacob

Jacob is still working so so hard. His busy season allegedly comes to a close soon, but he's still booked solid through the beginning of next month. He took four days off in a row last weekend, so he could weather the stomach flu. It's the most I've seen him since Christmas. But before you cue all the violins, know that things should slow down drastically by the end of April, and so long as we don't do something stupid, like buy another house that needs remodeling, my husband should settle into working about 25 hours a week for a couple months.

He drives all over Houston for work and gluts on historical non-fiction audiobooks. One week it's all "Andrew Jackson" and then it's all "The Dustbowl" - and I think it's cute, and I act interested, and I glaze, and then he mentions the detail in the book about the baby, and I'm like "Hmm? What was that?"

And Me

(Sorry for all the greasy-haired, pale-faced, pit-stained T-shirt reality in this photo. It's not that I don't love you enough to put on eyeliner. It's just that I don't love anyone enough to put on eyeliner these days.)

I've probably been through the most physically and emotionally exhausting winter of my life. I don't really want to write about it. But after two months of crippling nausea crowned by a bout with the stomach flu. I just. I have a newfound empathy for people with chronic illness.

I know I'm not all the way through but in the last week I've had some nausea free mornings and one blessed nausea free day, so I'm riding pretty high.

Turns out the fetal position isn't so bad for reading, so I've done a fair amount of it over the past few months. I haven't been listening to presidential biographies, instead I've enjoyed the edifying tomes of literary masters like Rainbow Rowell.

I've cooked maybe twice since January. I think we subsisted on Eggo waffles for the whole month of February, but I honestly can't remember.

I'm super emotional. Like I heard someone quote Mary Poppins the other day - "In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. You find the fun and - SNAP - the job's a game." - and I was a mess of tears.

I turned thirty. I feel thirty.

Baby Three is still reading much more beer gut than bump, but hopefully we'll get some definition in a few weeks.

I'm a bundle of aspirations whenever my nausea clears even for a moment. I want to make capsule wardrobes for the kids and cinch my summer maternity style and imbue every corner of our life with intentionality, but since Ms. Kondo is on hold at the library till doomsday, I probably will just settle for folding some laundry and remembering how to turn on the crockpot.

Tis all the nausea-gods will allow for today, but I'm excited to wake this space back up! 

The Temperaments God Gave My Kids

The other day, I was hanging out with this old friend and her sixteen month old. And this sixteen month old is such a boy. He got into everything. Climbing over boxes to get to chords. He dumped the bowl of goldfish crackers out on the coffee table and then proceeded to fling the goldfish to every corner of the room.

In short: awesome. He was awesome.

And Lucy June stood in the middle of the room, holding onto one plastic toy, and watched him very critically. Lucy June who reaches for something contraband and typically at my first "UhOh" will straighten up, smile, and go somewhere else. Lucy June who watches her hands as she signs for "more" and carefully taps her little fingers together. Lucy June who has recently started nodding when I ask "night night?"

If I had Lucy June first, I would have thought I was a pretty kick ass parent. I would've been positively insufferable.

But I didn't have Lucy June first. I had Jake.

When Jake was a baby and a toddler, I didn't have a real sense of his uniqueness. People would ask about his personality, and I would say: "Baby personality??" I had no concept of what was Him Being a Baby vs. Him Being Him. Now that I've known him a few years and had a second baby, I've clued in.

And my kids are so different. From the very beginning they've been so different. I know he's a boy and she's a girl and their differences really fall on gendered sides of the fence, but still I find it so interesting.

Several of my friends have recommended Art Bennett's The Temperament God Gave Your Kids - these are of course Catholic friends, Protestants don't talk about temperaments - which explores the idea of responding to your children according to their personalities. This seems pretty intuitive, but also essential. My parents certainly seemed to adjust according to my and my siblings' tendencies growing up. For example, my little brothers had curfews, I never did. I actually broke a window trying to sneak back IN the house after my parents forgot I wasn't home and locked me out.

So this is the face off in Casa Rhodes with regard to blossoming, burgeoning behaviors.

Jake vs. Lucy June

Jake fought sleep as a baby. Boy he fought it. But once he was asleep you couldn't wake him up if you tried.

Lucy June learned to sleep much more easily. She was a baby you could swaddle and look away and she would be asleep. But man was she light: she would wake up if I was typing in the next room.

>><<

When Jake was little he just went: he would take off and never look back. I once tested how far he would walk away from me. He walked for a quarter mile along the beach before I caught up with him. He hadn't looked for me once.

Lucy June has this invisible tether. She always knows where I am. When we're in public, I can set her down and let her wander because she will always stay where she can see me.

>><<

Jake fell off the bed probably eight times. (I thought this was my fault until:)

Lucy June fell off once.

>><<

Jake dumps bins out.

Lucy June fills the bins back up.

>><<

Jake would always rather be playing.

Lucy June would always rather be eating.

>><<

If Jake's hungry, he doesn't really notice what he's eating - with the exception of sweet peppers - he'll chomp right through it, tell me it's "delushous," and ask to be excused.

Lucy June will survey her food and, with eyebrows raised and chin tilted up, will carefully pick out that one exact bit.

>><<

Jake is the opposite of coy. When I'm out of the room, and I hear Lucy June cry, I can call and ask what happened. Jake won't skip a beat: "I hit her."

Lucy June has already grasped the concept of hiding things from me. She tried to sneak away with more ornaments off the Christmas tree than I could count.

>><<

Jake and I will play the nice little game of mistake/consequence/meltdown/timeout, and as soon as timeout is over he will skip away unfazed to the next moment's play. Jake's never held a grudge. And he's literally never grumpy.

Lucy June will trip on her socks and look around for who to blame. Her poutface is positively masterful.

>><<

Lucy June is a kisser and a cuddler.

When Jake was around her age, he snuggled with me approximately once. And that's how I figured out he had Roseola.

And that's all she wrote. Top of the Sunday to you, my friends!

Meet Me in St. Louis: A Christmas Story

I had some *deep* thoughts about our experience in the Old Order Mennonite communities this time around, and I want to share them with you, and I will...but today I'm going to talk about road tripping Christmas and barf? Because I need to maintain my status as an oversharing momblogger who keeps it realz.

In California we lived so far from our families that roadtrips with babies just didn't happen. We blissfully flew with a lap child (ha!). But now we live in Texas which is kind of closer to things, so we took the cheaper evil of the highway over navigating airports and flight times and rental cars. We did our big driving push - Texas to Tennessee - in one day. We packed up the day before and drove out at 4am. Both the kiddos transferred into their early morning car seats pretty seamlessly, and we had ourselves a sweet roadtrip sunrise with some truckstop coffee.

   

The kids woke up in Baton Rouge, and we ate cajun powdered sugar for breakfast. We were riding high. I think we even high-fived each other. Ironically of course. For lunch, we picnicked in the sketchiest of sketchy playgrounds somewhere in Alabama.

Things went pretty well till the last couple hours of dark driving in the rain. We finally made it to Chattanooga and were desperately trying to find a fast food restaurant with a playscape. In the haze of the city lights, their colors distorting on the wet windshield, for over an hour we navigated first to a Chic-Fil-A which ended up being in a food court and then another that was in a hospital and then to a "kid friendly" taco place that was closed and elicited some rather saucy verbiage from the husband. Finally we landed at this grungy, deserted fried chicken place where we literally let our overtired underexercised offspring walk around the whole restaurant. In general we're zealous "Sit Down And Eat Your Food" types, but at this point we were channeling a lot more zombie than parent, and watched pretty disinterestedly as Lucy Juney wandered into the bar and flirted with anyone who smiled at her.

The next morning we found out that Chattanooga was much more quaint and much less circle-of-hellish than our first impression led us to believe, and we had some hipster coffee before heading to the land of hot hot woodburning stoves and cold cold leaky outhouses.

We brought our own sniffles to the Mennonites this time, which was kind of nice since it made me less concerned about all the snotty noses in these vastly child-heavy communities. But two days in and Lucy June was looking greenish. We arrived at one of Jacob's cousins and for the first five minutes I tried to calm my super fussy baby and make excuses for her, but then she vomited all over the floor. The wife quickly got a bowl for me, and even though Lucy June threw up about four more times over the next few minutes, I caught none of it.

An hour later she was ripe and ready to eat again, so I fed her with all my fingers crossed, while Jake played with his cousins' pet raccoon and Jacob talked with the menfolk about trotlines, horses, and weather.

When we visit the Mennonites, we eat a lot. Virtually every meal is at a different relative's house and each one involves SO MUCH FOOD. Mennonite food is very Cracker Barrel - gravy on pancakes, creamed corn, mashed potatoes - plus semi-unrecognizable things with names like "Scrapple." And each meal has some kind of dessert. Many of Jacob's cousins asked me how I lost baby weight. I told them I didn't usually eat cheesecake after breakfast.

  

The last afternoon in the community, I was doubled over in Jacob's Aunt's house suffering through the stomach bug Lucy June bequeathed me. As I tossed my breakfast cheesecake into a chamber pot, I devised this little formula:

Mennonite In-Laws + Stomach Virus + Outhouse + Winter 

=  

How Much I Love My Husband

Soon with our sniffles and our stomach bug - and a trunk full of winter squash, canned soups, fresh milk, homemade bread and butter, and a gallon of muscadine juice -  we left Kentucky headed for my sister in law's house in St. Louis where we planned to Christmas. I didn't feel great about bringing all our diseases into her house, except her kids had Hand, Foot, and Mouth, so we just embraced our germy holiday.

I like to see Jacob around his family. I see parts of him that I don't see anywhere else, and I know it does his little extroverted heart so much good to spend time with them. We played a lot of Dominion and ate a lot of gourmet chocolate and drank lots of wine and martinis.

The stomach bug floated around the house and finally landed back with Lucy June on Christmas morning. The kids woke us up at 5:30 on Christmas morning, and shortly thereafter I found myself in the bathroom cleaning vomit (etc.) off me and my daughter and the floor - because we were covered in vomit (etc.) 

I realized at some point I was living my parenting nightmare: those horror stories you read on blogs when the whole family is sick for a week. I was living it. On Christmas. And as awful awful awful as it had always sounded, it wasn't as bad as I'd expected. It was just...life. And time got us through it.

Now the long roadtrip is over and we're home again in Houston. We'd planned to get home a day sooner, but on our drive home from St Louis, we took a right in Texarkana so we could wish my family a Happy Christmas in Fredericksburg before finally landing in Houston.

Back in Fredericksburg, my brother has strep throat or something, and now my mother is texting me "Flu! Flu! Flu!" and I think have chills and according to our meat thermometer I'm running a temp of 108. So. . .

I think Tootie and Mr. Neely say it best:

I hope your Christmastide is merry and bright. (Illness aside) ours has been quite quite lovely.

7 Quick Takes: Catch Up Catch Up

Hello hello, little blog, how I've missed you.

Life has been swimming along, and I've been swimming with it. Not drowning or anything, just not blogging. I meant to blog basically every day. . . just like I meant to finish our Christmas shopping before Advent. I'm planning to learn more self-discipline in my thirties, and how to meal plan, and how to shower regularly. It's going to be a sexy decade.

- 1 -

The house is still in various stages of done, and no single room is finished. We elected to get every room at least functioning before going back and finishing things up. We're pretty much there, except Jacob insists that the garage counts as a room and not a black hole of overflow and therefore insists on putting up shelving for all of his garage-y things before we put trim in the bathroom or finish the backsplash in the kitchen.

This and other stressors encouraged us to flee marital discord in favor of NOLA:

- 2 -

Jacob and I traipsed off to New Orleans to "get away" with some friends because that's what couples are supposed to do sometimes. We had the best time. We took basically zero pictures because all I wanted to do was eat. So I did.

One moment late Friday night, when all the cocktails had been drunk, I sat on a stoop eating fried chicken and Jacob was singing Iko Iko Wan Dey with a man wearing a washboard on a bicycle. And that pretty much sums up the trip.

- 3 -

Back at the ranch, my mother in law was watching the kiddos, and in a too exuberant moment promised to make Jake pie for every meal. My mother-in-law however is a hippy mama if ever there was one and spurns sugary desserts almost as zealously as she keeps promises to her grandchildren, and so began an onslaught of blueberry goatcheese pie, zucchini pie, chickpea pie.

Jake still dearly loves his Abu, but he is slightly more suspicious of pies.

- 4 -

We watched Sense and Sensibility last night, and I'm proud to say that it was the first time I watched it without falling in love with Willoughby. It helped that I'd just reread the book, but I also think I'm just getting older, more mature, and trading some of my Marianne for a bit more Elinor.

Emma Thomson's Sense and Sensibility is my favorite Jane Austen movie. I prefer it even to the BBC Pride and Prejudice. I haven't ventured very far into the world of Austen film adaptations, but I've seen my fair share. Where do your allegiances lie??

- 5 -

We put up our Christmas tree. It's a Norfolk Pine, and the very nice man at Home Depot told me it's also called a Hawaiian Christmas Tree.

Whenever Jacob describes my Christmas decoration efforts he uses words like "bayou". . . I should probably rethink the beads.

And please ignore the table in this photograph, I just recently retrieved it from my mother's house because its size was indispensable, but I painted it when I was fourteen and like the rest of my fourteen year old style decisions needs to go the way of a decade and a half ago. So repaint it I shall, as soon as. . . I don't know.

- 6 -

I never posted pics of the kiddos in their Halloween costumes. First time I ever dressed either of them up. I know it's December and I instagrammed it, but I never want to forget Lucy June's costume, so it has to go on the family blog, because excepting the time Grace dressed up Julia and Sebastian as Sebastian and Julia, it's my favorite Halloween costume ever.

I should probably Pinterest it. Ingredients: Six Pack Shiner Cheer & Paper Plate. Dispose of beer. (I find sisters-in-law are particularly good at this part. Inside joke! Love you, Jor! xoxo) Cut up packaging. Tape to Baby. Voila. A Baby Beer Bottle.

- 7 -

Jake was going to be a rocket, and in the eleventh hour a family friend called to let us know they had a Buzz costume if we wanted it. Score.

Jake still insists on wearing it about every three days. (He even wore it to a gathering at the house of our couple crush on Sunday. They hardly noticed because they're cool like that and their youngest son met us on the porch with nary a hello and said: "My pants are so so huge because I'm wearing shorts underneaf dem." So yeah. We're in like flynn.)

Linking up with Kelly!

Lucy Juney Turns One

Lucy June had a birthday...a couple of weeks ago almost. And true to form we did very little to celebrate, but we did SOMEthing. That something involved sticking a candle in a (still too hot to put icing on) cake, singing happy birthday before Jake blew out her candle, and taking some very poorly lit pictures.

She seemed pleased with the attention.

I'm pretty sure I just updated you on kiddo milestones, but that's actually looking like it was a whole three months ago, so I'm just gonna go ahead and do it again for the underphotographed second born.

Lucy June Lucy June

She still doesn't sleep through the night, but she routinely sleeps until the wee hours of the morning, and her night wakings are quickly shushed by a little bedsharing. She's also begun to sleep more deeply and no longer wakes up when someone sneezes in the kitchen. Not best but better, and we'll take better.

Her Words

Buh - Bye
Buh - Baby
Buh - Ball
Buh - Beau (my parents' dog)
Buh - Dog
Buh - Cat
Mama
Papa
Dja - Jake
TAH!!! - STOP!!!!
Hum hum hum - drink
Ka Ka - quack: which is, of course, her very own special way of saying: book

She burnt her hands on my parents' oven when we had a big family dinner at their house the other day. It was the classic party fail: so many eyes and none on the baby - mommy guilt be mine forever and ever. But on the plus side...she's gotten a lot better at walking?

She constantly brings me shoes to put on her and tries to pull socks over head. She likes to sit on tables and dances whenever anyone's watching. She was a mama's girl until recently, and finally she's starting to warm up to the wide world of...people other than her mother, and we're all generally digging this development.

She gives kisses and hugs and high fives. She's typically happy to play close to me, and doesn't need to get into anything and everything like her brother did. I'm exhausted just thinking about what it was like parenting her brother when he was a crawler.

Maybe next year we'll level up and actually frost the cake and put some pants on her, but until then I'll bask in her general non-demanding nature.

Happy (belated) Birthday, sweet sweet little Lucy June.

5 Faves: Books, Book-T-Shirts and an Out of Print GIVEAWAY

Linking up with Jenna today for some five favorites.

Yesterday during dinner I polled everyone's favorite books. Here is what I got from the five members of the household.

- 1 -

Robert (my little brother): East of Eden. It's my favorite book I've read recently. I also really liked War and Peace, put that one if it will make me sound cooler. I also like Gone with The Wind, but DON'T put that one.

- 2 -

Jacob: Um. Moby Dick.
Me: Wow, babe. So literary of you.
Jacob: Well, I read it really allegorically, I mean, I'm not literally into whale-hunting...I also love Mark Helprin's The Pacific.

- 3 -

Jake: Is there any kids in Moby Dick?
Jacob: No. But it has whales.
Jake: Any sharks?
Jacob: A few sharks.
Jake: I think my favorite is Smoky the Firefighter AND Busy, Busy Town AND Cars and Trucks.

- 4 -

Me: (Though none of the curious bunch asked me at the dinner table.) Such an impossible question, but if I had to choose I'd probably say Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn because nostalgia: my dad's mother gave me a first edition as a little girl and Francie Nolan and I are tight.

- 5 -

Lucy Juney's favorite book is the illustrated version of Raffi's song "Five Little Ducks" - she quacks whenever she picks up a board book. Granted, her quack is certainly more of a chirpy "mwah, mwah" sound, but she gets her point across and is very pleased with herself.

>> GIVEAWAY: Out of Print Clothing <<

Today, good friends and readers, is Lucy June's first birthday. (Time flying. Growing up too fast. Etc.) And on her birthday we've rigged up a little present from her to one of you!

When Jake was a baby, Zulily was running a special on some Out of Print T-shirts, so I snagged one for Jake. This illustrious one.

Out of Print T-Shirts feature iconic book covers. And their online store is full of super super cute stuff for the bibliophile: like pouches and totes and shirts for all sizes.  (They also donate a book to a community in need for every product that they sell.)

The shirts are soft and durable and adorable, and I just want all of them.

They graciously sent some for the kiddos and we went to the (wait for it) LIBRARY for a photo shoot, and I spent the entire time coaxing them away from the kids computer.

I let Jake pick his own shirt out, so he picked "the outerspace one"...which was fine by me since The Little Prince and I have a history.

Happy birthday, my always very hungry little caterpillar.

I'm so excited to give one of these away to some little person in your life!!

Rafflecopter it below for your own chance to win an Out of Print Kids T or a Onesie.

a Rafflecopter giveaway