Maiden voyage!

After going through hundreds of posts about Olivia's infancy, toddlerhood, and childhood, I realized that this journal is too precious to give up!  I was pretty tired of blogging, but I am unreliable at remembering to put write our lives down in any other format.  So even if I have a readership of one solitary person (myself!), I will continue to plug away over here because I owe these stories to my family.  And anyway, I need somewhere to post my endless stream of photos because my Instagram followers are probably ready to kill me.

That being said, anyone is welcome to join along with us!  I would love to have you!

I couldn't come up with a clever name, but I tried my hardest.  The title isn't meant to be read as "The Jeni Journals", rather like it's something I'm actively doing; Jeni eats, Jeni runs (haha, no I don't!), Jeni jumps, Jeni journals.  

Here's what we've been up to:

OLIVIA

- I spend my days being instructed to call her Victor (reminiscent of the Norman Osborne days, if you've been a reader for a couple years!).  One day while scrolling through Netflix options, she discovered a show about teenagers who morph into dinosaurs because OF COURSE she discovered a show about teenagers who morph into dinosaurs.  Naturally, the villain is her favorite; he's a guy named Victor Veloci. Because he morphs into a velociraptor, I hear lots of sentences like, "I only want meat for dinner, Mom.  I am a velociraptor, you know!"  One night I pan-fried a lone chicken thigh for her meal and she was delighted (I obviously needed to get to grocery store, but it's so haaaarrrrrrd).  She is a velociraptor, you know!

- Kindergarten is the best thing that ever happened to her.  She cries on long weekends because she has to miss a day of school.

- Olivia has been absolutely amazing with Grey.  She is continually exclaiming over his cuteness and his little buns.  Whenever he crawls himself into her "business", as she would say, she says, "Ohhh, GREY!", then calmly picks him up and deposits him somewhere far enough away that it takes him a few minutes before he's back in her business again.  She can make him laugh harder than any of us by doing whatever random thing she would have been doing anyway; tonight she was walking by and made some weird sound (best typing guess would be, "Bahhhhg") and Grey giggled so hard he fell over.

GREY at 7++ months old

- I think the most common exclamation in our house is, "AHH, you are trouble!"  He has been army crawling for 1.5 months now and can pretty much get himself any place he wants to be.  This means he is frequently found wedged between chairs at the dinner table because he tried to go through the 4 inch gap between them, or trying to eat leaves out of the sliding door track, or pulling magazines onto his head from the magazine basket, or unplugging plugs, or, or, or!  It's pretty fun to put him at one end of the hall and have him race to you!  He can get himself up to sitting from his stomach and has begun to pull up on anything that looks like it might support him and everything that doesn't.  We are in that bumps and bruises phase that doesn't end for a couple years! Or maybe ever since he's a boy?  I'll keep you posted.

- His sleep has improved so much.  Sosososososososososososososo much!  He still wakes up 1-2 times a night, but he has almost completely dropped any night feedings and will generally just cry himself back to sleep.  Sometimes it can take a while, though, so hopefully he'll cut those out soon enough.

- This is such a fun age!  He actively seeks interaction by coughing or screeching to get your attention, then he's delighted when it works.  He will cough back and forth with you and pretty much makes you feel like you're the best person that ever existed when you respond.  Actually, he makes you feel like that anytime you catch his eye because he is such a smiley little guy.  It's funny, though- I think he is the regular amount of happy (he fusses and complains as much as the next baby), but he's just a really easy smile.  Make eye contact? SMILE.  Walk into a room and ignore him completely? SMILE.  

- Does it make a loud sound?  Can it be forcefully slammed against any object and make an even louder sound?  PERFECT.

Here are some of my favorite photos from the last couple months:

The day we realized he'd outgrown that sleeper.

On frozen Utah Lake.

She is really only standing on a couple inches of frozen water (all that walked-on snow has sand underneath), but it made for a pretty picture!  I didn't have her pose or anything, just a lucky shot.

We headed up to Midway with Emily, Casey, and Parker to swim in the Homestead Crater.  Those babies were in heaven!  Olivia, too.

Our favorite nighttime ritual is to read a chapter from a book each night; this pic was taken while we were reading The Witches by Roald Dahl.  She loved that Grand High Witch with the laser beams that she could shoot out of her eyeballs!  The above pic is Olivia's best laser-shooting impression of her favorite character.

Our Sunday evening walk yesterday.  I love spring!