Good Times

A backpack, two purses, and sunglasses...I have a feeling she's going to like playing dress up

This past Saturday morning we went to the park to let her run around and play

It was quite windy at the park so we had Naomi bundled up in blankets. Jared said she looked like an old British judge.

My Mom had MLK, Jr. Day off so she came up and spent the day with us. As a grandmother, she's willing to pay the arm and a leg price to ride the "choo choo" in the mall with Charlotte. Now that Charlotte has ridden it, we probably won't be able to convince her that those are just hired actors in the train and we're not allowed to ride it. Thanks, Mom... ;)


It's hard to believe how fast our girls are growing up. Naomi turned 7 weeks old yesterday and is already over 14 pounds! At Charlotte's 2 month appointment she weighed only 10 pounds, so Naomi is our little chunk :) Along with her dairy issues, I think she also has some reflux, which has made some feedings loads of fun. There are times when she will nurse on one side, then just start fussing and pulling away, even though she acts like she wants to eat more. It's quite frustrating for the both of us. I had her on a nice 4-hour feeding schedule and by day 3 or 4 of that she even slept through the night (Hallelujah!), but then the reflux came rearing its ugly head and I thought it might be better to have smaller feedings more often. She usually has at least one fussy period each day, most often at night. Thankfully they don't last too long and are usually subsided by a tight swaddle and holding her on her side. She fusses for the first 30 seconds or so after she's swaddled, but then gives in to the comfort and snugness (snugness... it's a word) of the swaddle. And I have to "give props" (give props... I am so hip and with it!) to Jared, who is the official swaddler of the Rollins home. His swaddles last much longer and keep her much happier than mine. I'm swaddle deficient :/

Charlotte is at such a fun stage right now! She is talking up a storm. The words she says and how she says them keep us constantly laughing. She saw a box of bells I bought on clearance so I put one on a string for her to play with. She calls it a "jimmy bell". She's started calling us by our first names, which is amusing but something we're working to stop. Oh, and her obsession with Mickey Mouse is getting comical. After church on Sunday, we asked her what she did at church. Her response was, "Play wif fiends Roman, Hannah... Mickey Mouse!" Roman was there, Hannah was not, and Mickey, well, I didn't see him walking around, but who knows! Along with her talking keeping us laughing are her giggles. She has the most infectious laugh. Someone even came over to our table in a restaurant to tell us that they couldn't see her or what she was laughing at, but they were laughing just from hearing her laugh.

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I typed up everything above the dotted line this morning before we left for lunch with Jared. When we returned home I let her watch an episode of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse while I fed Naomi before nap time. I was hoping to coordinate her nap with Naomi's so that I could get in a good nap as well. No such luck. She started crying as soon as I put her down, which she has done for the past three days, but is very unusual for her before now. But she fought the nap with a vengeance. I'm talking blood-curdling screaming like someone was trying to chop her leg off. I blame Mickey Mouse. She was screaming and crying, asking for Mickey. She received a few spankings through the ordeal (probably deserved a few more than she actually got) because she wouldn't lay down when I told her to, was screaming ridiculously and needlessly, and just being an all-around brat. At one point I walked into her room just in time to catch her throwing her cross and blanket overboard as she was trying to climb over herself (she climbed over Sunday afternoon too...). I told her that was not acceptable, but a few minutes later I was in my and Jared's room wrapping up Naomi for her nap (which we all now know was a pretty lame swaddling job) and in walks Charlotte, like nothing is out of the ordinary. I was at my wit's end by that point so after putting Naomi to bed, I made Charlotte pick up all of her toys in the living room and put them in her room. I let her grab her crayons and one coloring book to bring out to the living room and told her that was the only thing she would be allowed to play with for the rest of the day and there would be no Mickey Mouse either. Over the next five minutes she asked to go into her room twice and for Mickey once. But it didn't take long for her to look like this...



So after that outburst about Mickey, I no longer find her obsession with him comical. His show is banned from our house for an undetermined number of days. She may not understand the correlation between no Mickey for the rest of the week and her bad behavior today, but it's not a bad idea to limit how much she sees of him anyway. Geez, I didn't think we'd have to worry about her obsessing over boys for at least ten more years! So now the question is do we convert the crib to a toddler bed, keep her in the crib (with the paranoid mother in me worrying about her breaking her neck on one of her dives overboard), or buy a crib tent (with that same paranoid mother worried about the fire hazard of having her zipped up in anything)?

I'm going to a ladies' Bible study tonight on James. Tonight's verses are James 1:2-4...
"Consider it pure joy, my brothers, when you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete lacking nothing."

Appropriate timing, no?