It's a.....

We went for our level 2 ultrasound today to make sure the baby seems to be anatomically OK (it is) and find out the gender. And it's a ...

another GIRL :)

Here she is waving Hello.

Corinne, who came with us, says we should name her "don't make a mess" and described the frontal view of the face as "an apple face". So until she is born (sometime in late February), we'll call her Apple. We do have a name picked out this time and we're not telling!

Testing, one, two, three...

If the two's are terrible, then the three's are hell on Earth.

Suddenly my very sweet, rule abiding, eager to please daughter has discovered the power of "no". It's her answer to everything. And oh, are we ever testing our boundaries. Suddenly she has strong opinions about everything. For example, her clothes. She has decided that she will only wear her mushroom shirt (ugly), her whale shirt (too small), her Buzz Lightyear T-shirt or her crayon T-shirt (too cold!). And blue pants (jeans, none of which stay up on her skinny little waist). And this includes bedtime as well. Now that it is starting to turn cold outside our house is always a good ten degrees cooler inside than out. It definitely calls for warm, footie pajamas, especially for the one who doesn't sleep under any covers. But no, every night we battle it out over her right to sleep in whichever short sleeve T-shirt (and no pants) she has on. And there is no logic in what her preferences are. She has two identical pairs of pajamas, except that one has dinosaurs and one has lambs. Well, she loves the dino ones and, in her words, "I hate those sheep ones!". As anyone who has ever tried to reason with a toddler knows, well, you just can't. She even has opinions about my clothes now She disapproves of my grey fleece shirt that I like to wear with my fat pants. She tells me to take it off. She won't even come near you if you have that "stupid princess blankie" on you. She despises it with every fiber of her being, despites how soft it is.

For the first time she is starting to have real temper tantrums. Not the meltdowns that she has always had when something freaks her out or upsets/ scares her. No, these are just seriously pissed off, I'm not getting my own way, temper tantrums. Right now I am still mildly amused by them, if only because they are so unlike her normally sweet, passive disposition and also that this behavior is just so wonderfully normal for a toddler/ preschooler. But I suspect it's going to get old pretty quickly.

And then there's the brazen disregard for rules. Like how I told her to keep her beach sand in the box and try not to get it on the floor, only to find her with a handful of it, slowly letting it trickle out on to the rug not 30 minutes later. I told her that I'm giving her the benefit of the doubt that maybe she just forgot. This time. We know she's testing her boundaries and what she can get away with, and we know that our responses to these situations are really critical to shaping her behaviors down the road. We feel like we're ahead so far, but not by much. And she's gaining. And she may be smarter, or at least more clever and devious than we gave her credit for.

We have never really had to baby proof our house because she never got into things. And even when she did really start to explore, she was still pretty good about respecting the rules of what was off limits. But lately I never know what condition I'm going to find her bedroom in when I go in after a nap. Dresser ransacked, clothes everywhere, dirty laundry put away in its place, dozens of hair "pretties" around the necks of stuffed animals and stuffed into small containers, band aids and diapers scattered all over, sticker tags from new outfits stuck all over furniture... and today a small bottle of (fortunately) clear, sparkle nail polish opened (a month ago she couldn't even open a large jar with a loose lid!) and a quarter sized blob of it stuck on the rug. And an entire vial of fish food gone ("Doggie ate it", Hmm, didn't think Doggie knew how to open jars either). This was supposed to be two year old behavior, and we'd thought we'd gotten off easy.

I've decided that Corinne is basically just 6 months to a year behind her same-aged peers, and that for better or for worse she'll start doing "it" (whether "it" be talking, riding a bike, playing with a certain kind of toy, or just being a brat) soon enough. And while I do long for the return of my "sweet angel girl" at times, I also have a certain degree of respect for the stubborn, strong-willed, playfully mischievous personality that is emerging. Now check with me in a a couple more weeks and we'll see if I still feel that way!

Wiley Coyotes

We were abruptly awakened last night by the howling of at least two coyotes down the street from our house. It was the weirdest thing. Kind of eery and ominous. It reminded me of when we drove cross country and parked in the middle of nowhere in Utah to sleep in the back of Groucho (the pickup truck) for the night. We had eaten hamburgers at a take out place and stuck the bag of garbage up on the roof to get it out of the way. We woke up to coyotes just outside the truck howling and carrying on. The next morning their footprints were all around us. Anyway, it was surreal to hear them 20 miles from Boston. Pete was disappointed that both cats were safely in the house at the time.

Hurricanes and Lobsters and Sharks, Oh My!

This weekend we went to Maine to visit Gamma and "Old Gampa" (formerly known as Dumma and Dumpa). Despite the hurricane warnings, the weather was actually pretty nice and perfect kite flying weather. Our shark kite was the super coolest kite on the beach.

On Saturday night we picked up some lobsters for dinner (all except poor pregnant me, who can't eat them due to their high mercury content or some fool thing). We had them once before, back in June, and Corinne, despite her love for "Hey Heys", as she called them, was a little bit bugged out by them and freaked out as soon as we took them out of the bag. Not so this time. She approached them cautiously at first, and then touched one carefully. She noticed he was bumpy and had blue on him and had a pointy nose like a rhino. And he smelled like pee yew.

From there all her reservations completely dissipated. Next thing we knew she was picking them up and playing with them. She brought one upstairs to "prise Gampa". She hid one in the dresser drawer in her room to sleep with her. She called them her lobster pets and said they were so cute. Then she put all four into the lobster trap coffee table in the living room, saying it was their nice safe cage. But the absolute best Corinne quote was that they looked like "little mailmen. And they bring mail to yucky people." Ah, Corinne, you are exactly the quirky child that everyone predicted would be the offspring of Pete and I!

We put her to bed before it was time to cook her lobster friends (lest we set her back after making all this progress), although I think some of them were dead by this time already. Poor things. Death by toddler has got to be way worse than death by boiling.

A Week Under Her Belt

Well, Corinne has survived her first full week of school with flying colors. We have already added a half hour onto her day because she is doing so well, and seems to want to be involved with what the other kids are doing (as opposed to working separately with her aide). Now she stays for lunch time and sits at a table with her classmates. She also does circle time, and I'm told that she is doing her best to follow along and even stands up to say her name, shakes hands with her friends and sits between two other kids (in the past she always had to be on the end, preferably with an adult next to her). She is learning the name of her teacher, school and the town we live in, as well as her classmates names. We've settled into a nice little routine and she is always very excited when I tell her we're going to school. Everyone is thrilled with how she is doing and I think they are starting to get a taste of her true, silly personality. She has only cried twice. Once was because she got soap in her eyes and once was because she didn't like the plastic gloves that her aide has to wear to change her diaper (she told me they looked like the plastic bags that Momma puts snacks into). Go figure. So all is well and everyone is happy here at Loser Family, Inc. these days. More to come.