Almost December already?!

I can't believe it's almost December. November seems to have flown by, and I feel like before we know it, it will be March. OK, maybe not that fast (I'll be singing a different tune when it's been 30 degrees below zero for 10 days in a row...). Maybe it's because we are at work so much that I lose track of time. Whatever the reason, time is flying by, and little baby Charlotte is growing up so much. Yesterday she said something in the car, and when I told Matt "she doesn't even know what that means," Charlotte piped up in the back seat "Yes I do!!!" I couldn't stop laughing. Where does she pick up this stuff?
Other funny stuff she is doing these days:
The first thing on her mind every morning is breakfast. On the weekends when we sleep in a little bit, she wanders into our room and climbs in bed with us. After a minute or two of snuggles, she announces "Time to eat 'beckfas!' Get up Mama!" Today we didn't comply right away, so she got herself some breakfast. Lesson in parenting: if your toddler is on the loose, and you hear the fridge door open, you might want to drag yourself out of bed and investigate. She told us it was yummy and good for her. We couldn't quite understand what she said she got out of the fridge, and we were trying to guess, based on what leftovers we knew were within her reach. Finally Matt got up to see what was going on, and all was crystal clear (and very sticky!). She had gotten a sucker out of a bag of leftover Halloween candy in the fridge! She had been calling it a popsicle, but we didn't understand her, nor did we remember the bag of candy. Lesson learned...don't let your toddler find her own breakfast.
Here are some pictures from the last month or so, starting with Halloween.

Our little bumble bee

I made an upside down apple cake, recipe courtesy of my sister-in-law Olivia. It was delicious!

Our friends Casey and Alyssa came to visit with their daughter Melia, who is about 6 months younger than Charlotte. They love to play together, but there are a lot of tears when favorite dollies and puppies are involved.

Holding hands

A few pictures of our house for my sister Laura who keeps requesting them. This is our living room when you first walk in the front door.

This is just another view of the living room

The dining room. Small, but cozy and just the right size for us.

The kitchen (part of it, anyway). Charlotte likes to help wash dishes, but her clothes always get wet. Here is one solution to that problem.

Laura, I'll post some more pictures of the house soon. Today was too gray and cloudy to have good lighting to take pictures of the rest of our house.

Big Girl Bed!

Charlotte has graduated from her crib to a toddler bed! We made the switch on Saturday because she pushed her Lego box over to her crib and flipped herself in. I found her in there a few minutes later and asked her how she got in there. To demonstrate, first she had to show me how she could get out by hoisting a leg over the side. Then she showed me how she flipped upside down to get back in. We decided this was a head or neck injury just waiting to happen, so we took down the crib and put up the big girl bed. She has done really well with it. No getting out of bed, no falling out of bed, no playing when she is supposed to be sleeping. Hopefully it stays that way!

Like how there are two electrical outlets next to her bed? Don't worry, there are outlet covers that even the parents can't pull out.

This was another time where Charlotte wasn't really interested in getting her picture taken.

Reading to her baby in bed. For the first couple nights we had her bookshelf pushed against the bed to make sure she didn't fall out.

Making a cake

Charlotte and I made a cake from scratch a while back. She loves to help bake and cook, but mostly she likes to eat flour, which you will see the evidence of in this video.

As long as I'm blogging...

Some days, Charlotte is very obliging and loves to have her picture taken. Other times she does not. Here is a great set of pictures from our recent trip to the apple orchard/pumpkin patch as an example of the latter. I didn't get a single good picture of her, but she did have fun picking up about 50 different pumpkins. The little tiny ones were her favorite, as those of you who know her could guess.

"Charlotte. Charlotte! CHARLOTTE!!! Come here, mama wants to take your picture."

"Look up at mama for a nice picture."

"Why don't you sit down on the hay bales and you can smile for me."

"Just peek through that little hole at me. Won't it be fun?"

Gardening 2009 (also known as the first time Kristi has not killed all of her plants)

Remember way back when I posted pictures of Charlotte helping me plant seeds for our upcoming bountiful harvest of home-grown vegetables and beautiful flowers? The time is now here for you to all see the "fruits" of our labor of love. (PS--look at the difference in her hair; it is so much longer and thicker now than it was in the spring!)

This is most of the garden, planted on the south side of the house. Our landlady okayed us to dig up "some" of the lawn to plant a garden; it got bigger than we had anticipated. Hopefully she isn't mad when we move out in 3 years and she realizes how big it is and has to re-grass that whole side of the yard!

Here is one of our 5 tomato plants. We had 3 heirlooms (2 pink/red ones and a yellow/red stripey one!), a roma, and a cherry. The heirlooms get big. Really big.

Here is Charlotte holding our largest heirloom tomato. Yes, that is just one tomato on her lap.

This is that same tomato. It had a bunch of splits/scars on it from getting so big! And we didn't use anything other than a little compost when we first planted the garden in June.

Here is a portion of our tomato harvest. We probably had about 4 times this many.

I had a hard time photographing the tomatoes. With a flash makes them too shiny and bright...without a flash makes it grainy and blurry and doesn't show off their color.

A roma and a couple of the cherry tomatoes. Charlotte was very willing to try the tomatoes, but she usually only took one bite and then was done, as seen in the above picture.

We grew a few bell peppers, supposedly a mix of different colors, though we really only saw green and a little purple. What started out at 30-some plants became 5 after an incident back in May and then 4 after something happened in July. Apparently peppers need to be planted inside WAY ahead of time in Minnesota which we did not do early enough. Our pepper harvest was small this year, but we learned a lot about what not to do! Better luck next year.

Here are the five peppers we ended up with. They were about the size of plum and unfortunately were probably not ripe yet because they were quite bitter. And by bitter I mean I would have preferred not to eat them at all because they were so bitter. But alas, if you plant seeds in April/May and sort through a large amount of dirt to find and replant each individual seed after a toddler disrupts their incubator and tend the plants all summer long and rescue them from the impending frost at night in the dark with a flashlight, then by golly we're going to eat them.

Don't they look delicious? At least you can pretend they are; I still have the aftertaste in my mouth.

Speaking of summertime harvesting of delicious vegetables, here was the view out our front window on Friday. Happy Fall!

Pictures

Here are some much overdue pictures for the blog dating back to early September.

Charlotte helping mama make a cake

Eating some corn on the cob, except she couldn't wait for it to get cooked, so she ate it raw!

Charlotte's great-grandma Rose Ann crocheted this poncho for her. Charlotte likes to wear it over just about anything. Or in this case, just a pair of underwear...

This is the face she made when I asked her to smile for a picture.

She likes to take care of our wooden camel; she carries him around and feeds him, covers him with blankets and puts him down for naps. He is as tall as she is.

Helping daddy bake something.

Grandma Cindy's birthday cake, an artistic rendition of a monarch butterfly.

Charlotte thought it was her birthday.

She likes cake and frosting.

Talking

Just to document some funny things Charlotte says:
"I have a kestion" (question)
"Mmmm, I'll think about it."
"Know dat?" (that)
This morning from her crib she called out "Daddy? Daddy? I can't read." When I went in there, she repeated "I can't read." Turns out the books were out of her reach and she wanted to bring a few into her crib with her. :)

She surprises us every day with the new things she says, and her ability to carry on a conversation is growing by leaps and bounds. She is now telling stories, pretending, and using her imagination all the time. She really likes to pretend she is at the ocean and splashing in the water (can you blame her?). "Baby Dear" (her favorite doll) often has to get washed in the ocean multiple times a day.

I'll post some pictures later this weekend.