Keeping up with Claire

Little Miss Claire is growing up so fast. Just in the past month she has completely changed. I need to write some things down before I forget.  A few notes and stories:

Helping Mom do dishes

She thinks she's a toddler already.  She crawled at 7 months.  It's a really funny crawl, though.  She goes a couple of normal gaits and then she picks up her right leg and tries to push off with her foot.  It's like she gets frustrated with crawling and wants to get up and walk.  (She also sleeps on her right side and only rolls to her right.  She's not an ambi-turner.)  Now at 7 and a half months she is pulling herself up on furniture.  She gets in to all kinds of trouble trying to figure everything out.

She still doesn't have a tooth but I'm in no hurry for that.

After some sleep training she now only wakes up twice in the middle of the night. I can't seem to wean her of night nursing.

The day she got the food bowl

She eats anywhere from one to five tablespoons of food during her three meals a day. She likes bananas, apples, pears, squash, and sweet potatoes. She tolerates peas, green beans, avocados, carrots, and parsnips. Mum mums make her day.

 Claire's favorite food, though, is paper. Its so weird, but we can't seem to keep it away from her. She pulls receipts out of my purse, finds sacrament programs on the benches at church, pulls herself up on various surfaces to find any spare page I may have left too low. She sticks the paper in her mouth, gets it nice and wet and then yanks on it with her gums until she gets a mouthful sized piece that she can swallow. Lots of my agendas from young women meetings have bite marks on them these days. A few days ago she got a hold of a pack of gum. The plastic,foil, and gum remained intact but the cardboardy paper wrapper around the pack of gum went missing except for a small scrap of paper I found in her mouth. Well I found the rest of the wrapper yesterday in her poopy diaper. Big colorful chunks. I could still make out some of the letters...

Yum... fiber

We tried to avoid "exposing" her to TV, but who were we kidding, right?  We love it too much ourselves to keep it from her for very long.  She likes Baby Einstein, Blue's Clues during the songs, and the closing credits to ANY television show, as long as there's music and words going down the screen.

Not the best view of the screen, but a great view of her cupcake bum

I babysit a little one year old named June three days a week. Claire LOVES her. I'm pretty sure June is the reason that Claire started crawling so soon. She was so anxious to follow June around and get into trouble with her. She laughs and laughs at the most normal things that June does. We can never get her to laugh like that for us.

She does make Jason and I feel special though. When she sees us, her face erupts into a ridiculously huge smile. Her eyes light up and her tongue curls up in her mouth to form the cutest expression ever. In addition, her arms and legs start bouncing up and down furiously as she tries to make her way towards us. She is just that excited to see us!

Helping Mom organize her accessories

I like to put headbands on her bald little head at church. The other day, she grabbed the bow and pulled it away from her head to get a better look at it.  Then she let go, accidentally whacking herself in the head.  She screamed in Sacrament meeting like she has never done before.  I took her out in the lobby, and luckily, June was there, so she immediately felt better. 

She doesn't babble too much, but she does make sharp quick bark yells, and she LOVES it if you make them back to her.  We have whole conversations just yelping at each other at various tones.  There are certain places where she's more vocal.  Usually these are places with good acoustics- like the parking garage or our apartment lobby.  She's figured out that she sounds louder in these places- and she likes it.

What a funny little girl- I can't wait to see what she does next.  

The Curse of the Deep Freezer

Speaking of deep freezers, we sure have had bad luck with ours...

A lovely picture of the rotting juices at the bottom of our deep freezer after it broke back 

in September

We actually never had any intention of getting one.  We were just two people, after all.  How much frozen food did we need?

Well, last summer, we went to see Jason's brother in his new office.  The person who rented out the place before him had left an ugly but functioning (we thought) deep freezer, and John didn't want it.  We reasoned that we might want it when our family got bigger.  He needed the space, our apartment had a patio, and we couldn't just let it go to waste...

 It pretty much changed our lives.  We could stock up on frozen foods when it went on sale!  We could freeze other stuff, too!  We were amazed at how fast that freezer filled up.  Suddenly the idea of living with only the tiny freezer attached to our fridge was absurd.  Who could do that?

Then there was the carnage of The Deep Freezer Disaster of 2012.  (see previous post).  The night that I found our food was rotting, I sent Jason a frantic text.  At the time, he was helping a family from our ward move.  By his side was another member of our ward who had an extra deep freezer he was looking to get rid of(!)  I'm still not exactly sure how that conversation happened, but we were thrilled for this small (free!) little miracle.  We were quickly back in business freezing all that we desired.

We sure were thinking that that would be the end of our freezer drama.  

Fast forward a month or two.  I have a sweet little baby that I am up nursing in the middle of the night.  I hear voices outside of our apartment.  This is pretty normal.  We are on the ground floor right by the front door, so people are often passing by.  I watch the shadows walk back and forth through the blinds.  Suddenly, though, one of the shadows seems way too close to our window.  Then I see the shadow of our freezer door opening!!  In terror, I call out to Jason.  He bangs on the window and the thief runs away, slipping on the ice and dropping some otter pops (or freezies depending on which country you're from) along the way.  This scares the whatever out of me, so we start looking into some way to secure our precious frozen food.  Jason and I learn the word "hasp" (we've obviously never been homeowners or repairmen)  and Jason sets out to secure our freezer with a hasp and lock.

Unfortunately, he used a drill and unfortunately we didn't know that he needed to be careful where to put those holes.  He heard an ugly hiss of air as he punctured one of the tubey things that keeps stuff frozen and that was the end of our second freezer.  For the 2nd time in 6 months we were loading up frozen food to store in the homes of various family members.  By the way, we hadn't yet gotten rid of the first freezer on our patio, so we then had TWO BROKEN deep freezers in a not a very big space.  Yeah, we're kind of white trash. 

We tried, but we couldn't go back to living without a deep freezer.  Jason's brother got us some "freezer money" for Christmas and we went to a thrift store to buy another used deep freezer- our third.  At this point, we did get rid of the other two, so that's good.

You'd think that at this point my story would be over wouldn't you?  What additional drama could we possibly have with deep freezers?

We were afraid to try the hasp and lock again.  A few months later, Claire and I went down to Arizona to visit my family for Spring Break.  Jason stayed behind, but he works, and was sleeping through the night and stuff.  At some point, someone got into our freezer.  This time, we didn't catch them.  They took EVERY. LAST. THING. in that freezer.  I'm talking homemade mystery bags of raw meat.  Who does that?  And we had just taken advantage of a big sale on ice cream.
 ICE CREAM.

I wouldn't let Jason buy any more food until he bought industrial strength glue to secure a new hasp and lock.  Our working freezer is now a fortress requiring two hands to open, which is kind of annoying when Claire is being needy and needs to be carried out to the freezer with me to grab whatever to thaw for dinner.  But it's worth it.  We are hoping that our deep freezer curse has been broken.