Sisterly Love (i.e. the Little One has Attitude)

When Ellie woke up this morning, she demanded a book about gorillas (she did this by repeatedly banging her chest and making a Tarzan-ish call, then glaring at me pointedly). The problem was that Annie was asleep in the room with most of the books. I did the best I could, gathering every book I could find outside of Annie's bedroom that involved animals and Ellie was momentarily satiated, and she happily 'read' books to herself for awhile this morning. The happiness lasted pretty much 'til Annie also woke up and wanted in on the action. She had been thumbing through books, making all the animal noises and pointing out all her favorites, while giggling and laughing and having the time of her life. Then her big sister came in the room, and her attitude showed up and took over. (And look how sweet Annie is to her, just trying to show her stuff and teach her things. This is pretty true to life of most of their interactions lately.)

(Ellie keeps watching these videos, excitedly pointing and repeating gorilla sounds (pointing out the books), and the word "Lala" (which is Ellie speak for "Ellie.) She's just recently got very interested in pointing herself out by name.)

Ellie reading her 'gorilla' books. Check out how much hair she has now! Only took 19 months . . .

Annie, cheerful, despite her mild case of bedhead. :-)

After baths, both girls wanted to wear the new bathrobes that Uncle Cody had given them for Christmas.

Here's the back of Ellie's . . . she like a tiny pink prizefighter! :-)

"Little Girl Range"

There's an old wives tale, that you can predict a baby's gender by the speed of it's heartrate. The faster it is, the more likely to be a girl, and the slower, the more likely to be a boy. Every time my last OB would find my girls' heart rates, from my first appointment on, he'd always smile and say, "Well, that's little girl range." And, both times he was right. With this pregnancy, we had an ultrasound to date the pregnancy when I was about 10 weeks (since my miscarriage the month before had thrown everything off and we really had no idea what the due date should be for this one) and they found the heart rate, and we listened to it, but the tech never mentioned what it was, and I hadn't thought about it again. Then this week I had my 14 week appointment, and I got to hear the heart rate on the doppler. Paula smiled and said, "Well that's a fast 170 . . . little girl range . . ." I smiled back, this was the fastest heart rate of all three of my pregnancies at this stage.
Little girl? Hmmm, we'll see. (Probably sometime in mid-February).

What were your experiences? Did your doctors/midwives ever comment on heart rate/gender connection?

A few other notes:
• Still feeling quite icky all day. Not throwing up or anything, so I feel like I shouldn't complain, but I just feel icky and nauseous and horrible for hours and hours at a time, sapping my energy and will to play. I keep telling myself this should end any day now. In the meantime, I think I'm more grateful for Greg now than I ever have been before, and that's saying something. The nights I need it, he will come home from work, distract the kids while I go lay down, and take care of dinner, clean up (well, superficially, at least), and getting the girls bathed and ready for bed. If the girls are being extra demand-y for Mom, he'll come up with some errand to run, dragging the three of them out to Smith's or something.
• Besides hearing the heart rate, my favorite part was hearing the baby repeatedly kick at the doppler. My midwife would laugh and comment, "This one is feisty." I imagine this time little baby, curled up the size of a lemon, weighing in at less than 2 ounces, kicking at anything that disturbs it's little world, and already picture a personality forming. :-) My first two babies (both who have been referred to as 'feisty' from time to time) were notorious for kicking at the doppler/ultrasound wand. Annie was so good at it, that at half of my prenatal checkups the doctor was never able to even get a heart rate (there would just be question marks on the chart) . . . he would find the heart rate, start clocking it, and 'thud' there'd be a kick and Annie would roll away, and he'd have to find it again. He'd try this five or six times . . . get the heart rate for just a few seconds, then 'thud', roll. We had two different ultrasounds with Annie, with two different techs, both of which commented, "This is the wiggliest baby I've ever seen!"

Energizer Baby

We just had this video from a few days before Christmas that Greg and I were watching with great amusement. This kid cracks me up -- she has so much energy! And she is wobbly! And obsessed with her stuffed elephant ("Broo") and her stuffed lamb ("Baaa") . . . seriously, we have to know where these two toys are at all times.

Great Grandma Helen

I have a scrapbook my Mom made me several years ago, filled with pictures going back a couple generations. I love looking at them, marvelling how much I look just like my Mom, how much my cousin Joey looks just like Grandpa, how much my Mom and I look like my Grandma, how there's this one picture of my Grandpa as a young teen that reminds me so much of my Uncle Jeff . . . et cetera, et cetera . . .

There's one person throughout the pictures who captures my attention the most. My Great Grandma Helen, my Mom's Mom's Mom. :-) She just seems to have such an outgoing personality, so full of life and all that.

She's the toddler in this picture, standing next to her mother, Jennie, and her younger sibling Leslie (don't know if it's a boy or girl -- the dress doesn't tell you anything in pictures from this era, and neither does the name Leslie!)
Isn't she just so cute -- like a mischievous elf or something?

This is Grandma Helen and her long time boyfriend of four years. Apparently he was a pretty angry drunk, and would regularly drink too much, get mad and leave town for awhile. Once after he left, a friend of Helen's approached her and said, "I know a nice fellow you could go out with . . ." Four months later she was married to Grandpa Movell.
I like this picture, 'cause for some odd reason it reminds me of some movie set of some old western movie or something.

We have some great pictures of Grandma Helen just hanging out with friends, which I think is pretty cool, 'cause at a time when people weren't just walking around with point and shoot cameras, it feels very fortunate that we have like 30+ pictures of this woman. Here she is with an unnamed friend (she's on the right).

One of my favorites -- this is Grandma Helen (on the right again), with her sister in law Alda (who was married to Grandpa Movell's brother Cloy -- and yes, those people should've lost the right to name their own children) :-) Sassy, right? :-)

These next three are from Movell & Helen's honeymoon.
Behind them is the new car they bought for $900.00. Here she is on her honeymoon, sporting a cool tie and tall boots. I'm curious where they went on their honeymoon . . .

Here she is riding on Movell's shoulders. It stands to reasons that honeymooners throughout the ages have been fairly jovial and carefree -- but how often do you see old black and white pictures of new brides on their husband's shoulders like this?

Here they are sometime after getting married.

Grandma Helen, their baby (my Great Aunt Zan), my Grandma Kay, and Grandpa Movell.

You can't see it quite as much in that last picture, but in this picture it is crystal clear where my Mom comes from -- she is the spitting image of my Grandma Kay (left, top corner).

So anyway, those are pictures of my Great Grandma Helen. Neither her or my Great Grandma Movell lived very long, both dying before even my own mother was born. (He died around the age of 45, she died around 49.) Helen was born in 1906 in Lindon, Utah, the oldest of six children (two passed away in childhood). Her father Frank left when she was young to serve an LDS mission, but suffered a ruptured appendix and came home early. They moved to Salt Lake City, while her father worked as a street car conductor, until there was an accident on one of the cars one day, and he was very badly hurt, having to have a steel plate put into his head. His hearing was ruined, and he could no longer work on the street cars, so they moved to Standardville (I have NO idea where that is) where they ran a boarding house. Helen worked as a teenager in the local ice cream parlor, as well as pumping the player piano at the silent movies on Saturday nights. She was known to be quite beautiful and had "many beaus" (as one of her written histories records).
Her soon to be husband, Movell, was working as a coal miner and met her right after she'd broken up with her old fiancee (the mean drunk one). They were married by the Justice of the Peace in Price, UT and ended up living there for a few years until they moved to Salt Lake where they both went to school -- him to become a barber, her to become a beautician. Grandma Helen stayed home with her baby (my Grandma Kay), and Grandpa Movell worked at his barbershop -- where he ended up being converted to the LDS Church by some of his customers, and the two of them were eventually sealed in the Salt Lake Temple in March of 1941.

While raising her kids she was known as an immaculate housekeeper (a gene my Mom got, and I did not). She loved to sew, (another gene that my Mom got and I didn't) and would look at dresses in stores, then come home and make a perfect replica. She was barely 5'2", and everyone called her "Little Helen" (yet another gene that alluded me). In 1950, her and her husband built a double business building where she had her beauty shop and he ran his barbershop, and she loved going to work each day with him. Unfortunately, Grandpa died when he was only 45, and she spent a few years spending time with her daughters' and their fledgling families, but just a few years later she was diagnosed with cancer, and with her youngest daughter (who'd moved back home to take care of her while sick) and her own parents living in her home, she passed away. My own Grandma would've only been about 23 years old when she lost her second parent, and my own Mom never knew her mother's parents. It's one of those things that makes me feel amazingly blessed that my girls know all four of their grandparents, and have spent time and holidays and Sunday visits with 5 of their 8 great grandparents.

Oh, and semi-related . . . Grandma Helen's great Grandma (so my great, great, great, great Grandma) was named Sophia -- it's where we got Ellie's middle name. Greg and I joke that we had to go back that far to find a usable name -- but seriously, just on my side of the family we have family names like Sophia's own husband, Spicer, her daughter, Irinda, not to mention names like: Movell, Cloy, Cordelia, Sophronia, Belva, Olive, Petronella, Ingeborg (that's a woman), Gunhild (also a woman), my own Grandpa's name is Pennell (and his twin brother's name is Parnell). Then there's mine and Greg's favorite names -- the couple who probably got married 'cause they'd found another person who understood the pain of being unfortunately named: Wilmurth LaMaude and Mahonri Moriancumer. Poor Greg and I had to pour over decades worth of family names to before finding a middle name for Ellie :-)

Flex Spending Woes

Greg and I take full advantage of his health care/flex spending plan set up through work. Pay into it tax free, and swipe our magic debit card at the doctor's office, and voila, medical bills don't affect our budget! I love and appreciate the whole flex spending system.

Less of a fan of the new way it was handled this past year though. It was our first year with a flex spending debit card, which was a huge plus, but we were never sent or emailed any kind of statements or updates on our account. It used to be I'd get regular updates through the mail with how much money we had left, how much had come through, and if anything had been denied. This year, I would check the balance online from time to time, and be all, "Good, we have $350 left." Then, "Only $170 left, that's not gonna last long," a little later. Then, "Crap, we have $80 left . . . that's only two ear infections . . ." back in October. But, we made it through October with money in the account, which isn't too bad. (Unfortunately, between Annie's ear infections, surgeries and my emergency room visit, we did rack up close to $400 in medical bills sans flex money. Oh well.) I was double checking it one last time for the year when I noticed a screen I hadn't checked before. Clicked on that, and lo and behold, we have an outstanding $208.16 that the flex spending company would like a check for, FROM MARCH OF 2009, because they apparently feel these were unacceptable charges. We can feel free to dispute these by sending in more information, or to mail in a check. This company feels we owe them two hundred plus bucks since early this year, and they never once contacted us about it?! So, now I'm tracking down paperwork and receipts and crap from like 9 months ago, and it's making me feel bitter. The real kicker to me is what they're disputing: a charge from INSTACARE, from our DENTIST, and from an EYE DOCTOR. Seriously?!

(I'm possibly more grumpy than I should be about it -- but I just talked to the really nice receptionist at the dentist office, who'll be faxing everything to Greg at work for me, all the while my kids were screaming at each other from the top of their lungs. I've had to have Greg make phone calls to reset passwords to websites I need access to but have lost the login info too. It was especially frustrating that I couldn't just do it myself, since they only would release the password to Greg himself. I've been tracking down papers, calling offices, and getting stuff printed up -- while dealing with Annie who is ornery and has come down with a bit of a fever, Ellie who seems to have developed a bad cold, an eye infection, and an attitude, and with my morning sickness that has not seemed to get the memo that I am in my 2nd trimester now and it can feel free to leave at any time. Thus, the grumpiness.)

World Traveller

Annie and Ellie got dressed up in their finest (one in a yellow Belle gown from Grandma Karine, and the other in a pink and orange giant tutu from Grandma Ruth), climbed into their pink kids chairs in the frontroom, and sat and waited. I asked Annie what they were doing, and she informed me they had just gotten on a bus, and were going on a trip. "Really," I asked, "and where are you guys going?"
"The bus is taking us to Australian!" she excitedly informed me.


Another quick Annie story (although, it is most likely a 'you had to be there' kinda story.)
Last night, I was saying nightly prayers, with Annie throwing in occasional suggestions for things I'd carelessly forgotten to say. Right at the end, as I was saying, "We say these things humbly, in the name . . . " Annie started giggling. Then laughing. "Humbeley?!" she giggled, "Humbelely?!" (Think of the word being sung by Winnie the Pooh in his "I'm so rumbly in my tumbly," song and rhyming perfectly.) I tried explaining what the word meant, which only amused her further, her doting my explanation with giggles and repeated use of the an incredulous sounding "Humbeley?!" Mom's so funny when she makes up silly sound words.

Christmas Day 2009

The girls' dollhouse set up in front of the tree and fireplace before Annie & Ellie were awake.

Ellie chowing down on candy from her stocking -- Annie much more interested in playing with her new dollhouse.

Ellie had the Daddy stand in the toilet a lot. She'd happily squeal "Dada!" and point and laugh.

Annie showing off her new bathrobe that Uncle Cody had given her. (Uncle Cody also gave a princess robe to Ellie, and a new belgian waffle maker for Greg and I -- anyone else convinced 18 year old Cody had his Mom do ALL his shopping for him?) :-)

Ellie got these new shoes from Aunt Lacy -- they're pink sparkly Minnie Mouse shoes. She was so excited she immediately started putting it on over her footie pajamas, and wore them like that the rest of the morning! :-)

Aunt Lacy and Ellie, in one of her finer moments of the morning!

Lacy & Dad

Uncle Cody with her new racetrack that Annie & Ellie had given him -- it had a ramp that launched cars at high speeds. I have giant dents in my wall to prove it. :-)

Me showing off my new jewelry that Annie, Ellie and Daddy had picked out for me.

Aunt Lacy, a happy looking Annie (this was the first 'wall' she hit that day -- she rebounded nicely though, for awhile, at least) and Aunt Star.

Ellie with her new vacuum that Annie had given her, in her new fancy shoes.

Annie showing off her Mulan action figure.

Happy looking Annie and Mom.

Annie & Ellie on their pony. (Who's been officially named "Rory" now -- short for Aurora.)

Annie & Uncle Cody on the pony.

Annie with Grandpa K.C. before Christmas brunch.

Ellie and Uncle James.

Annie, completely thrilled, when she opened her new camera from Grandma Ruth and Grandpa K.C.
Check out Annie's adorable skirt that Grandma Ruth got her!

Ellie in her new chair, in her cute skirt.

Ellie finally crashed for her first (and only) 30 minute nap of the day.

Annie with Grandpa, keeping warm with her new blanket that Grandma made.

This was the next day, when we went to go visit Great Grandma Verla -- where Ellie unwrapped and fell in love with her brand new giant stuffed Elephant.

Annie had brought along her fancy princess dress (along with a red shawl that was in her stocking that Santa left at Grandma Karine's house).

Back to first thing Christmas Morning:
We were amused by Ellie's main focus, the Dad, when playing with the doll house --

Christmas Eve 2009

Christmas Eve was at my parent's house -- and although the house felt strangely empty (Talina and David had to fly out earlier that morning, a day early, to avoid a storm that was going to hit Omaha, where David's family was waiting for them -- add to that Cody AND Lacy both had to work -- Star is always able to see the bright side though, and as the only remaining Aunt around, she was happy to have all my girls' attention). We still had a lot of fun though, opening some of our gifts and watching Annie and Ellie squeal and dance with excitement!

Annie opening her first gift of the night, a present from Aunt Star, that we snuck in before dinnertime.

Ellie was equally thrilled with her new CareBear from Aunt Star.

Always so appreciative!

Ellie acting as Grandpa's pillow.

After dinner the girls opened their gifts from Mom & Dad. Shockingly, it was pajamas. :-)

Quickly eclipsing the PJs though, was this princess dress from Grandma Karine & Grandpa Robert (with matching shoes!)

Ellie actually desperately wanted her dress on, but as soon as Dad tried getting it on her she completely freaked out -- someone was a bit overtired!

Ellie with a new baby doll.

Annie with hers.

Me and my princesses!

Ellie shocked by whatever it is she was learning in the book Grandma got.

The girl's got these Alaskan pillows from Grandma & Grandpa -- they have both slept with them and dragged them all over ever since!

We had so much fun -- and the girls only got the bed an hour and a half late. For the third night in a row. When they were going to be letting them wake up at 6:30 the next morning (usually they try to wake up around then, but Mom refuses to acknowledge their awakeness until 7AM). It was kind of a recipe for disaster -- but a Christmas Miracle kept them fairly sane until Christmas Evening!