Santa Baby

We were expecting a fat little man to come around Grandma and Grandpa's on Christmas Eve, saying, "Ho ho ho." Instead, we had a giggly little girl with a toy stuffed up her shirt saying, "I have babies in my tummy, just like Mommy!" 

In between giggles, she was really good about adding in appropriate grunts and strained waddles. I realize that I'm significantly bigger than most people would be at 15 weeks, but I'm not that big.

Christmas morning proper took some explaining. Paige didn't quite get that she was now allowed to unwrap the presents, and that there were actually things inside the boxes for her. Plus, she was pretty sleepy, so things started off kind of slow.

Jeff gave me this awesome pregnancy pillow that I love! It's super comfy, and I used it most of the morning, but when I came back from a bathroom break, Paige had pulled it off the couch and commandeered it. Stinker.

Paige helped me pick out a gift for Daddy this year, and we had a chance to talk about giving presents and keeping secrets. She did amazingly well, and was super excited about it. When Daddy actually opened his box of popcorn, Paige said, "Merry Christmas, Daddy! You share with me?" I love this little girl.

On the first day of Christmas,

My doctor showed to me...

Two babies in one mommy!! Now accepting donations to the Tucker Twin Fund. Prayers and luck also accepted.

Elimeno Peas

I wish I could say that we're completely unpacked and decorated for Christmas. Instead, here's my smartypants girl, who's going a little stir-crazy from unpacking all day. She was willing to sing for the camera just so she could watch the video afterward. We'll finish soon! (I hope)

In like...well, in at least.

We finally got internet set up today. It felt like a long time, but then I opened up a browser and realized that the most pressing things I needed to do online were find the nearest grocery store, and check prices on Brita pitchers (our tap water tastes very metallic). I felt a little silly.

Anyway, we are officially in our new apartment! We're still living out of and around boxes, but we made scalloped potatoes and had family home evening last night, which made it feel quite homey.

Early Halloween

Our ward Halloween party was yesterday, and with Frankenstorm headed our way, we're probably not going to do much more trick-or-treating on Tuesday. Jeff is heart-broken. I think he actually did a little dance at the thought of Halloween being cancelled. 

Anyway to answer the question I know is burning in your minds, Paige decided that she wanted to be a Tinkerbell-Pirate this year. Observe:

This is my favorite. My cute little scallywag.

That's my girl!
Wish us luck with the storm! Happy Halloween!

Chilly 'n' Silly

It's definitely getting colder here, so I decided it would be a good time to make Paige some new clothes. Unfortunately, I didn't have the fabrics I needed to make her what she needed. I did, for some reason though, have lots of fabric that worked for boy clothes. So I decided to make some outfits for cousin Colton, who oddly enough is the same size as Paige. He's 14 months...

It was fun to experiment with the faux pockets and fly.  I'm still working on getting consistent sizing though.
Meanwhile, Paige spent her time rocking out with her bad self:

Brushing up on her General Lee impersonations

And, of course, taking care of her baby

We did make a couple excursions outside. Paige has been talking a lot about the temple lately, so we made a trip out to DC to walk around. She had a lot of fun. The front-desk worker even let her come into the lobby and gave her a mint!

Our other big trip was to a little farm that runs a petting zoo and pumpkin patch. I thought that feeding the donkey and petting a goat would be the big highlight. Then, we tried out the hay maze. She was in Heaven.

So Delicious!

Tough Princess

 Paige has recently decided that she's a princess. In spite of dressing up in her tutu daily though, she still insists on wearing her favorite dump truck or steam shovel jammies. Which she wears while watching Tinkerbell and putting on pretty chapstick.

Yup. Tough like Daddy. I promise she's really smiling in this picture.

 Or she'll carefully mother her little baby while watching pirates and octonauts.

.

We like to think that she's well-rounded. Mostly though, she's just silly.

New Stuffs!

It's been a quiet week on this side of the country. For the most part, we're doing expensive and stressful, but boring things like registering our car and filling out leasing agreements.

Grandma Tucker took me shopping for my birthday and I got some new jeans and a pair of Chacos!

I suddenly feel like a cool kid.
Speaking of cool kids, this one got some new shoes too! She was cooking up a storm tonight. We're eating pretty well lately, though we might want to check if the steak and eggs are BPA free.

 She's stylish too! I'm rarely allowed to pick out her clothes for her anymore. 

 And that's the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and the children are all above average. Have a good week everybody!

Gone Fishin'

For Labor Day, Grandpa took us fishing at Piney Run!

When Paige wasn't playing on the slides near the shore, she had fun looking at Grandpa's lures. Especially the worms.

 
For a while we thought that we weren't going to catch anything, but after leaving his pole in the water for a minute to go play with Paige, Jeff proudly stated that he'd caught the first fish. Gutsy little guy too, going after a lure almost as big as himself.

I was lucky enough to claim the second fish of the night. The first fish I've baited, cast and reeled in all by myself! I'll teach him to run off with all my bait.

Paige said it was a talking fish, so we put it back in hopes of getting a wish. We're still waiting to hear back...
We didn't end up with anything to take home for dinner, but it sure made for a fun day! Thanks, Grandpa!

Give a Mouse a Cookie

If you let Rebecca make mushroom lasagna for dinner, she'll want chocolate ice cream for dessert.

Since there's no chocolate ice cream in the house, she'll want to make her own, and eventually settle on a recipe for chocolate ice cream with brownie bits.

After making the brownies, she'll realize that ice cream only uses egg yolks, so she'll want to make some macaroons to use up the whites. 

Of course, cooking is no fun if you don't get to sample everything along the way, and by the time she's done with all three desserts that she's impulsively made at 10'o'clock at night, she'll probably have a stomach ache. And a whole mess of dishes (for second time that day). 

Doing all those dishes will make Rebecca super tired, so she'll sleep in the next morning.

Sleeping in will make her soo hungry that she won't want to take the time to figure out a proper breakfast, so she'll probably eat cookies and brownies.

Which will give her stomach ache. And make her fat.

And that, children, is why Rebecca should never be allowed to cook after seven.

Digs

After looking at over a dozen different apartments, we've finally settled on this one:

Yup! We're staying at Grandma and Grandpa's! Well, at least for month or two until an affordable place at one of the places we like opens up. For now, this is home sweet home. You can tell Paige is really bummed.

Mom asked me if Jeff and I had a song, so I had her listen to the song Jeff learned to play and sang to me when we were engaged. Paige gussied up and made us all dance to it. Perfect little anniversary moment.

Damage Control

It's raining in Maryland. Grandpa and Grandma's house has a lot of Very Nice Things. We spend a lot of time telling Paige 'No.' She's not thrilled.

Up until now, Paige has been sleeping in a crib, but since we've been here, she's been sleeping in Tuck Tuck's bed (with Phillip, La La, Clifford, and Elmo). Because it's only been a couple days that she's been sleeping without bars, I didn't necessarily expect to walk in on her Friday, having smeared an entire tube of Desitin all over the bed and herself. Ironically, none of it got into her diaper, because she couldn't get her pants off, and that's what she was crying about when I came in.

By some miracle, the carpet was also spared, but it still took us well over an hour to get everything cleaned up. We've run the sheets through the washer three times though, and they still smell like bum cream.

Now, the next part is my own fault. For some reason I decided that we needed to top things off by giving Paige a haircut right before bed. Yeah, I don't know what I was thinking. Anyway, having had a long day of being scrubbed and rebuked and punished, she was in a right mood. She sat very patiently in the chair while I got her all ready, but as soon as I started cutting, I may as well have been giving a haircut to bobblehead on a dirt road. What was going to be a quick trim became shorter and shorter as I tried to fix botched clips without spearing my thrashing baby. Jeff finally called a halt to the madness and sent us both to our rooms.

After a good night's sleep, we looked over the situation yesterday and each took a turn trying to patch things up. Four packs of fruit snacks and an episode of Spongebob later, here's what we got: it's short, and definitely not ideal, but it'll do till it grows back out. Sheesh.

Off the Road

Well folks, we're safely at Grandma and Grandpa Tuckers'! Here's some of what we learned along the way:

1. Always drive with Benadryl, towels, Fabreeze and a bucket. And, gas station sponge baths are not the end of the world, or a trip. Life goes on.

2. Always bring stickers. When she wasn't queasy, Paige was pretty happy, but a sticker book that can entertain her for 3 hours is always a plus. (I think there's a baby back there!)

3. While the super cheap motels are livable, paying an extra $20 to forgo the funny smells and sticky floors is probably worth it.

4. Des Moines is really pretty. West Virginia is gorgeous.Wow.

5. These two are my favorite travel companions ever.

6. I'm okay with not eating beef jerky or powerade for a while. Yes, I am.

Pulling Her Own

We run a tight ship here on the USS Tucker, and with us leaving port soon, we've stressed to the crew that there will be no lollygagging. As you may remember from our last voyage, our newest mate has a history of being somewhat insubordinate:


However, we are pleased to report that she has since improved significantly:

Provided the mate continues to pull her own weight (all 24 pounds of it), we believe she now exhibits all qualifications and readiness for advancement from Poopy Officer 1st Class to Chief Potty Officer at the next port of call. Plus, the Captain and 1st Mate are getting tired of changing diapers

Counting to 10 + 3.5 minutes of other stuff

The following video is four minutes long, which means those of you with a 21st century attention span probably won't make it through the whole thing.  No worries.  If you can't sit still through four minutes of my incredibly cute daughter being incredibly cute it just means you're modern; in no way does it imply that you're an awful human being.  This is really for Paige, who loves watching videos of herself.  Ecclesiastes tells us that 'all is vanity,' so I figure why fight it?

Paige has been learning to count over the last couple of months.  She nailed the whole 1-10 thing a while ago but she still hasn't quite learned that numbers correspond with things.  I got excited the other day because we had a small break-thru whilst counting some plastic cups she likes to play with.  Paige very patiently pointed at each one, assigned it one (and only one) number, and stopped upon reaching the last cup.  We did this together for about 10 minutes, but when I went to film she was only willing to do it once, and even then it was a half-effort.  Regardless, I kept the film rolling and captured three minutes of Paige being Paige - this is a very good example of her sense of play, which seems like a good thing to record for posterity.  So all you grandmas out there: enjoy four minutes of cuteness.  Everyone else, when you get bored after 30 seconds I found this great site you can go to: it's called 'youtube.'

Quoth the Paige

"Mommy, pea'ut butter is bad. Very bad. It dangerous. An' nummy."

Jumpin' June

We had so many exciting things happen the last couple of weeks, and we actually took pictures of them! The only problem was that we took most of the pictures with Nathan's camera, so I just barely got the exciting ones. Moral of the story? I need to buy myself a really fancy camera. Yep. Lesson learned.

Anyway, let's start at the beginning. The beginning of June, that is.
First off: an early birthday party at the zoo with her best buds, Gabriel and Taylor! Paige has since decided that her favorite animal is the monkey. 

 The animal fun didn't stop there though. The next Tuesday we went to Tracy Aviary with the scouts! We got to throw seed to some pretty mallards, watch the staff feed a condor, and chase peacocks until they chased us back! (Not recommended). I make full apologies to all birds involved. Sorry for the fowl play.

That same week, we started swim lessons!

 

Since we'd eaten cake and ice cream the week before, Paige had a pudding cup with blueberries and candles on it. She didn't seem to mind. (This is the smile she gives me whenever I point a camera at her)

As for this last week, we started with a Father's Day present that anyone called 'Father' should have:

Then we upped the ante by adding in a handful of cousins and a family reunion!

 
Complete with wagon rides,

donut-eating contests,

bobbing for apples,

and all kinds of races!

Guess who won the tug-of-war?

June's been such a fun month. We're sad to go back to normal life again. Well, as normal as it gets around here.

(In case you can't tell (which you probably can't) those are animal print oven mitts on her feet. We've got a winner here.)