Grandma Swan Comes to Visit

Aaron's mom is here for a two week visit. We are so excited to have her here. It's been really nice having another adult around to talk to during the day time while Aaron is at work. She's also been a lot of help. We like to joke that she is Adelia's "night nurse", because I'll feed Adelia and then go to bed, and Debbie will stay up with her burping her and rocking her and changing her diaper for a few hours while I sleep, and then wake me up when she gets hungry again. It's been nice to have that extra rest, instead of either Aaron or I having to get up with the baby just to burp her or change her when she isn't ready to eat yet.

Lincoln and Ivan are happy to have Grandma Swan around too. They like to help her put on her make-up and jump on her bed, and play games with her. It's fun to watch them interact, and I'm glad they still have such a great relationship with her even though they don't get to see her as often as we would like.

Debbie bought Lincoln a set of Trio blocks for his birthday, and he loves them. He's still trying to get the hang of how to snap them together on his own. But what he really loves is when someone else will build him something. Aaron made him a sword out of them. He thought that that was the greatest thing ever. He played with it all morning. At one point he ran into Debbie's room and jumped on her bed and said, "This is my ship! Grandma, you be a shark in the water." So Debbie pretended to be a shark, and acted like she was going to eat him with her hands, and Lincoln promptly popped her on the head with his sword. Oops...guess we've got some work to do on the stabbing someone/something just for pretend, instead of actually doing it.

We've also decided that since we have three kids now, the older ones are going to have to start towing some of their own weight around here. So we assigned Ivan the task of bringing in the groceries from the car.

Ok, not for real. But Ivan did want to carry in the milk really bad. He tried for a long time to pick it up, but couldn't lift it off the ground. So Aaron ended up helping him, and he was so proud of himself. It made me laugh. Ivan is growing up so fast. Maybe he's realized he isn't the baby anymore and has decided to be a big boy instead. I don't know, but he just seems to be acting so much older these days. His vocabulary is growing so fast, I can't even keep track of all the words he knows, and even his pronunciation of the words is improving rapidly. One of my favorite things that he's been doing recently is singing the wise man built his house upon a rock song. He knows all the actions, and even though he can't say most of the words, he knows the tune and can sing in jibberish while getting the tune down. When he wants me to help him sing it, he pounds his fist into his hand and says, "Rah, rah, rah (rock)" over and over and louder and louder until we sing the song. I love my Ivan Boy.

Adelia is doing well too. She's starting to have little awake stretches during the day. She is still a very peaceful, content, sleepy baby. And I will be totally fine if those (well, at least the peaceful and content ones) are permanent personality traits of hers. She starting to smile a lot. We are pretty sure she responds to the sound of my voice. And she's starting to grow out of some of her newborn sized clothes already. Yesterday we had to pull out and wash all the 0-3 month stuff so we could start working those in to her wardrobe and taking out the things that no longer fit. It's always exciting to get out new sets of clothes, but a little sad to watch them grow out of the old stuff. Why do they grow up so fast, even right from the start?

I remember worrying a lot about having a girl, just because they are so different from boys, and because the world treats girls so differently than boys, that it was almost scary to think about having to raise a girl. And I'm sure there will still be those times when I worry or am scared for her, but I feel like those times are a little ways off yet. I love that Adelia belongs to our family, and even though she's only been here a little over two weeks, our family wouldn't be complete anymore without her. Sometimes after she falls asleep in my arms I just hold her and watch her for the longest time,  hopefully I can  remember her as a baby forever. It's fun to watch them grow up and progress, but the babyhood just goes by too fast, and I don't want to miss it.