Trees & Talking

We had a pretty fun week. After all the easter candy Seara got from Easter - and that I ate - I felt motivated to start running! We got a super nice double bike trailer/jogging stroller and on Monday began our training for the 1/2 marathon we're running in August. Since I am starting from being completely sedentary, our training is really basic right now - we run three minutes, walk three minutes, and repeat that five times. Its not challenging at all for Samuel, so he gets the kids in the stroller. :) The first couple days I did great, but on Friday I felt like I was going to die (after running three minutes!) It wasn't until the end of the jog that I remembered that I had forgotten to use my inhaler before I left. That made me feel better. Its not that I'm terribly wimpy, I just have asthma! :)

On Saturday we had a busy day. We got this gigantic ingleman spruce tree from a friend for free because it was slightly damaged on one side (the back). The tree is about 10 feet tall and weighed almost a ton. Literally. So Samuel spent about five hours digging a 4 by 4 foot hole in our hard-as-rock clay soil. Then we had a few neighbors come over and help him get the tree in the hole and fill it in. That took another three hours (with help!) It was quite then intense project, but I sure am proud of my tree! Plus, we made a lot of new friends because of it - all during church the next day people kept coming up to us and commenting on the tree. Samuel is so embarrassed because he didn't realize he was on display! :) As Samuel was finishing up the hole, I ran to the store with Lije to get some fertilizer and mulch, and left Sease to play around the yard. Well, when I came back she was covered in mud from head to toe, it was so funny! Leave it to dad to be such an attentive babysitter!

Seara is talking up a storm. She is developmentally almost a year ahead in her speech. (Which makes me feel better since she didn't roll over until she was crawling!) I attribute it to one of two things: 1) she has a gigantic head (98th percentile since she was 4 months old) or else 2) her mom has been a chatterbox since, well, I learned to talk myself. When Lija wakes up from his nap she'll come up to me before I even hear him and tell me "baby lija crying". Periodically throughout the day she'll tell me "daddy at work", "hug Tanna", and "go outside". She'll tell me "go poop" when she needs to use the restroom, and that is followed by "it hurts", which means she needs a diaper change (the remnants of a terrible diaper rash). She says about 40-50 words now and in the last two weeks has started using plurals. She is still learning how to do plural correctly, though, because she now calls hair "hairs". It is very funny. Seara loves "songs" - her favorites are "beam" and "popcorn". She knows the songs pretty well, too. She'll start "beam" for me by singing "Jesus" and when I finish the first verse she start the second by singing "happy". With "popcorn" she'll fill in the end words (and a couple in the middle) -

I looked out the window and what did I ... 'see'
Popcorn popping on the apricot ... 'twee'
Spring had brought me such a nice ... 'su-prise'
Blossoms blooming right before my ... 'eyes'
I could take an arm full and make a ... 'tweat'
A popcorn ball that would smell so ... 'sweet'
'It wasn't weewy wo' but it seemed to ... 'be'
'Popcorn' popping on the apricot 'twee'

Oh, and today as I wrote this we opened up her cousin's blog and looked at their pictures. She saw one cousin and said "Tanna!" and I had to explain to her that that was not Tanna, that is Gabi. Well, Seara immediately started practicing saying "Ga-bi" and throughout the rest of the pictures would point Gabi out and tell me "Ga-bi". I was impressed that she could even tell her apart from her other cousins!

Elijah is learning how to intentionally grab at things. Samuel is so patient and will sit with Lije for 30 minutes at a time holding out things for Elijah to practice grabbing. He is ticklish now, which makes for endless fun for mom. It cracks me up! Oh, the funniest thing happened yesterday! Lije is the kind of baby that won't just fall asleep anywhere. When he is tired he will cry and cry until you bundle him up, give him his pacifier, and lay him in his bed. Well, nap time happens to be right when sacrament meeting starts, so I bundled him up and popped the pacifier in, but Lije just did not want to be held! It was too bright to be laid down on the bench, so I finally decided to lay out a blanket and put him with his head under the bench and his body sticking out where I could see him. (Luckily we sit on the left side and only one couple with no kids sits behind us.) Anyway, he laid there quietly, drifting in and out of sleep, for the entire meeting block! It was amazing!