Playing catch up
I am thinking it has been over a month since I last wrote and not due to our lives being boring… quite the opposite! Hope did start full-out crawling although she prefers to stick one leg out and push off with one foot and then the other knee. She gets around regardless of how she does it. She also made her first attempt at the stairs. She made it up the first three before she fell back (yes, I was there behind her to catch her). She has only gone back over to the staircase one other time since then. I am wondering if she might have some of big sister’s cautious tendencies… or she is just so laid back that she doesn’t care. She tried the stairs once, figured there was nothing so great about them and therefore hasn’t adventured back over to try to master them.
Annie has been playing hard. She loves to play with Hope, still loves to dress-up, help me in the kitchen, dance, sing the list goes on. One evening she and I were in the playroom upstairs watching something on TV and I left the room for about 5 minutes to put some laundry away that I had just finished folding. When I came back in the room I found her completely crashed on the couch. This has never happened in the history of Annie Teague… she does not fall asleep much of anywhere except for the occasional car ride after an exhausting day or her bed of course. I was shocked! So sweet!
I bought our second Knoxville Zoo membership a few weeks ago and we have already been twice. It is a really great zoo and they have a special exhibit right now called “Wee Play Zoo”. Annie especially loves playing “Vet Doctor” as she calls it. She really does have such a caring spirit. Maybe she will be a doctor or nurse of some kind one day!
We can’t leave out the first day of preschool this school year. The four-year-old class is much more structured than her class last year and Annie is thriving in it! She loves all the activities they do and came home the first day last week telling me how when her teacher “rings the bell, all eyes are to be on her and we put our hand in the air.” Is she a little mini-me rule-follower or what? She has loved meeting new friends and looks forward to Tuesdays and Thursdays each week.
Hope is still eating pretty much anything I put in front of her. Unfortunately she has pushed away some green beans lately, but I guess one food out of pretty much anything else isn’t too bad. One of her new favorites is spaghetti. Let me assure you she goes straight to the bathtub after a spaghetti dinner for sure!
And finally, after many phone conversations, two trips to LaFollette, TN (a one hour drive from our house), several helpful and generous friends, a borrowed trailer, hours of tear-down and reassembly and a good chunk o’ change, we are now the proud owners of a wooden playset! I love Craigslist and have purchased and sold several things through this wonderful website. A few nights ago I jumped on looking at dining tables and randomly decided to type in “wooden playset”. A guy had just listed his one-year-old playset that day and was asking less than 1/3 of his purchase price from Lowes. I showed it to Jon and he decided to call and the rest is history. We really are excited about this. Annie has been playing on it by herself for hours the past couple of days, and that in itself is a blessing. I can see her playing on it from all of my downstairs windows and love the thought of being able to have playdates here on pretty days and not have to clean my house before people come over! We are so thankful!
