Hiccups

When I was reading Serena a bedtime story, she had some pretty insistent hiccups so, midsentence, I turned to her and said,
"Aagghh!"
She jumped, and cried.
Immediately sorry, I hugged her, comforted her, and tried to explain that I didn't mean to upset her, I was just trying to scare her hiccups away. She didn't look very grateful. More... distrustful. But she stopped crying.
And, for the record, she also stopped hiccupping. So I continued reading the story.
A few pages later, Serena interrupted. "Where are my hiccups?"
"I scared them away. Sometimes we can get rid of hiccups by scaring them away," I said, rather pleased with myself.
Serena was not so pleased, "No, you can't scare my hiccups. My grandma will get me some new ones and they will be mine. And you can't scare them. I will have them. Okay, Mommy?"
"Okay. I'm sorry. I thought you didn't want to have hiccups. I won't scare them away again."
We finished reading the book in peace. No more hiccups and no more reprimands from my 2 1/2 year-old.

That's my boy

Here's Asher at 9 months old. See any resemblance? My hair was lighter at his age, but our hair's almost exactly the same color now, and our eyes. I don't have the cute gap between my front teeth, though :).

Back to Reality

Asher, Grandma (Joshua's mom), Alison, Isaac, Serena, and Tomas

Tomorrow we'll travel from 80 degrees and sunny to 30 degrees and snowy/slushy. It'll be a hard transition for many reasons. There's plenty of work awaiting both Joshua and I so we'll have to hit the ground running.

Still, it's been a great vacation, so relaxing and fun at boht of our parents' houses. Time with family is rare enough to be recognized as such a blessing, especially as our kids grow and change so fast. They've vacationed pretty well. Serena's been a little more disagreeable from time to time than she usually is, but she may just be a little stressed by continually dealing with cousins, which she's not used to. Or maybe she's just 2 1/2. Asher's been cheerful as always, even through illness. It seems like he's gotten tons older in the past two weeks - but maybe I've just had more time to focus on him. At a 9 1/2 months, he's chewing up all kinds of new foods, pulling to a stand all the time, crawling for real, playing peek-a-boo (pretty agressively), throwing things, chasing things, and doing the pre-talk social grunting thing. I'm gonna miss spending all day with them. But, back to reality...

Happy New Year!

The first half of our Christmas vacation is winding down. We've been at Amy's parents' house in Arizona for the past week. 11 of us all together under one roof is a rare occurrence, so it's been fun (and a little crazy). Unfortunately, Asher and Serena have both had a pretty yucky cold the whole time, but I'm hopeful they're getting over it as we head to Texas for a week.

Among other things, we had a surprisingly painless family photo shoot:

Joshua, Amy, Asher and Serena Sutherlun; John and Jackie Poling (Amy's parents); Paul and Veronica Jordan Poling (Amy's brother); Elisa (+Corbin), Stephen and Ava Hood (Amy's sister)

Serena's staring at her grandpa becasue he was saying "epiphany" instead of "cheese." Kids recognize weird early on.