Ode to Isla

The only pictures I've taken this week were in the span of about 90 seconds chatting with Isla on Saturday morning.  She was having a snack and wanted to make herself look pretty.  She grabbed two bows and glasses, because glasses make you look pretty.  I put one bow on each side of her hair and popped the glasses on and she just kept telling me how pretty she looked.  I agreed.  As you can see Isla's hair is starting to grow out a bit.  We may try to grow it long...certainly her bangs are growing out...not sure about long hair on her though.  She's so dainty that it might not work.

Each day I'm more amazed by this little girl.  She has started to show us what a smart little girl she is.  She knows how to spell and write her name, and can trace nearly all the letters in the alphabet and numbers up to 20.  I don't think she can do them from memory yet, but I think she's ahead of her sister Sawyer's writing at this point...and she's got good penmanship for a 3 year old.  But really Isla is about feelings.  She is still very much a lover - needing lots of hugs and cuddling.  She is always saying thanks to us for doing the littlest things for her.  Yes, it's good manners, but also she just generally is a grateful kid.  She also loves to imitate other people's feelings.  When we read books she does imitations of the characters - their facial expressions and their hand gestures.  There could be five people on a page and she would go through all of them.  She also gives us a million facial expressions a day herself.  I've captures a bunch of them here.

Isla loves to be outside.  I would say the same about Sawyer, but Isla to an even greater extent.  She would stay out there for hours if we'd let her...unfortunately this wasn't the winter for it.  We did get both girls out on Saturday for an hour and a half - riding bikes and scooters, using chalk, taking down Christmas lights...all that good stuff.

We took all three of the girls to the mall this weekend for a little last minute vacation shopping.  Isla is a lover of clothes and especially shoes.  She picked out a pair of navy mary janes with silver piping on them and all but insisted we buy them.  The girl doesn't get a ton of new clothes so I usually concede when she finds something like that.  She also got a new dress to match and a bathing suit.  Margot may be in that suit next summer - they told me it runs small at the store (it's a size 3) and I said no worries, she is smaller than most 3 yr olds.  Well let me tell you, this will fit her but probably not all summer.  For $10 it was so cute I had to buy it, knowing Margot would also use it, and probably one of her cousins after her.  I digress.  I am looking forward to her rocking some of her new clothes on vacation though.

Yesterday I took Sawyer and Isla downtown while Mark and Margot hung out at home together.  We went to Caroline's apartment for a bit - both girls really wanted to go hang out there, and remembered that she had a lot of steps to get up to her place.  We then walked to lunch and then made our way to the Chicago River to see it dyed green for Shamrock Day as Sawyer calls it...a holiday she is not enthralled with due to her dislike of the color green.  They both liked the river though, and especially running along the river walk and the paths back up to the street.  It was a pretty cold day so we didn't last outside too long before we headed in to some Michigan Ave stores to warm up.  It was a special day out so each got a little treat - Isla picked out a play tool set/tool box, and uses the same names that Handy Manny has for his.  It's actually been a favorite of all the girls, including Margot.  After dropping Caroline off at home, we headed home.  Isla fell asleep about 10 minutes before we got home - around 5 o'clock and while I tried to wake her up for dinner she wasn't having it.  Girl just asked to go to bed, so I put her in bed clothes on and all, and she clocked in a good 14 hours last night.  She did come into our bed around 2am and slept there the rest of the night but didn't get up for good till about 7:30.  Amazing.  She doesn't nap during the day and every now and then it just catches up with her and she has a night like that.

This last shot is Isla trying to pose the way that Sawyer does in every picture.  It just makes me laugh though as she looks pretty awkward.  She's a funny girl.

A quick trip and a whole lot of busy-ness

I have been a less than successful blogger these days.  Following my last post, Margot and I packed up and went to Buffalo for a quick weekend to see family and go to a baby shower for Aunt Alicia.  The same weekend Mark packed up Sawyer and Isla and went to Michigan to celebrate Uncle Ted's birthday with him and spend time with Aunt Ann and cousins.  I don't have many details from their weekend but understand it was a huge hit.  I mean they got to choose between cake or cupcakes people.  Does it get any better than that?  They seemed to have a great time.  As for Marge and I we enjoyed ourselves but kept it low key.  We spent most of our time at Kate's with her, Maeve, Al and Michelle.  We got picked up by Barb and hit up some Ted's, Aunt Kathy's and then went home to play and watch the Olympics.  Margot loved playing with all Maeve's toys waiting for her to get home.  Even some we have at home were a new novelty at their house.

Of course the main event was the shower.  In honor of Al and Jon, Margot wore her best outfit they got her for Christmas and rocked it.  It's going to need a slight wash because girl got her first bit of cake and loved it. I mean this could be used as a first birthday picture the way she dove into it.  She lasted pretty much the whole party.

It was Margot's first flights, and the way there was definitely better than the way home.  Flight there was full, but a really nice woman sitting next to us played with her and took her right out of my hands several times.  Flight home we had a full row to ourselves but Margot was tired and unable to sleep and she definitely screamed and cried a bit.  Was tiring but once off the flight she was better, and was good until Mark picked us up and she fell asleep in the car.

Seems like forever ago thinking of that trip.  Since then things have been quite busy.  I've had a lot going on with work, including helping to plan my Company's Chicago International Women's Day celebration.  This was this Friday so I expect things will settle down a bit, but there was a lot of last minute things that were occupying my email and daytime.  This was a nice quiet weekend at home resting.  I stayed in the city on Thursday night to set up for the event, and didn't get home till 7pm Friday night so after some time with kids I pretty much passed out on the couch and have tried to spend as much time there Saturday and Sunday as possible.  Sometimes it's necessary, and in this case it sure felt like it.

In other news, Sawyer has molluscum contagiosum.  Sounds like a spell from Harry Potter but is actually a poxlike virus that causes all these nasty bumps to spread on her body.  A trip to the dermatologist told us there's not much to do other than cortisone and lotion, and a whole lot of waiting because sometimes it takes several months to go away.  I have not loved that, so after much research on the internet we are trying a natural home remedy to see if we will have any success.  Basically we are forcing the girl to take baths with apple cider vinegar in them, and then trying to apply the vinegar topically to the bumps to get them to go away.  We're two days in and it seems like there might be progress, but stay tuned.  We've stopped the cortisone and lotion to see if those were actually spreading it further vs. making it go away.

We've also had our hands full with our girl Isla lately too.  She is a pretty constant annoyance to Margot, liking to block her off from walking around the room or going into the playroom.  She basically tries to prevent her from moving anywhere but a one foot area, or will pick her up and carry her away from whatever she wants to play with.  Marge is not happy with her and she's also driving Mark and I crazy with it too.  It's totally unreasonable and she will not listen to us when we tell her to leave her alone.  On a happy note the girl is doing great learning all of her letters.  She was struggling with knowing them by sight, and also writing, but she's been doing great with it lately.  Perhaps she knows preschool is only a few months away.  Both of the girls have been happy about getting a bit more time outside now that temps aren't below zero.  It's amazing how a 30-40 degree day can make you happy.

 Happy to be throwing snow balls in the air

 Pre-snow ball throw

 Playing together.  There was a lot of climbing the "mountains" of snow.

Meanwhile we spent a lot of time in the living room watching the kids out the window.  Margot still isn't spending much time outside and so we're looking forward to warmer weather to get her enjoying the fresh air.  It's amazing how much this girl learns on a daily basis.  She was doing 5-6 steps at a time while we were in Buffalo two weeks ago.  Now she walks across rooms, is constantly letting go of furniture and heading for parts unknown and can probably do 15-20 steps before falling, reaching her destination, or dropping to a crawl.  Also new today is we learned she can do stairs.  She likes to play peek-a-boo while we are in the living room by going around near the stairs and peeking back.  Well today she didn't peek back and I learned she went up two stairs.  Quickly took her down thinking, uh-oh we're going to have a climber soon. That came sooner than we thought.  I had her on the landing of our stairs and she did the 6 stairs up to the top all on her own with no prodding from me.  She then surprised Mark and did 4-5 stairs while he wasn't looking.  Luckily we've had no falls but clearly are going to have to be on our game going forward.  Not too bad for a 9 1/2 month old.

What she's not so into is talking.  She babbles and does consonant sounds but words are minimal.  Maybe a mama and dada but I'm still not sure she does it on purpose.  We'll keep talking to her and see what happens.  No teeth yet either!  It seems our kids are destined to get their teeth late. Hasn't stopped this girl from chomping on everything she can get her hands on though.  We introduced her to Chipotle today and let's just say she's a fan.

time to go put this little one to bed now...