The Babes

Our little Solveig has now passed the 10 month mark.  I am surprised how perfectly she was named “Solveig Joy” as she takes that “Joy” part extremely seriously.

This isn’t her normal smile.  This is her just being silly.  This girl wakes up with a squeal and hugs me as hard as she can.  She kicks her legs when she’s excited and that’s pretty much all the time.  She likes to pull books off of bookshelves during school.  I let her because it’s a diversion.  She laughes at Lena, she really laughs at Elias, and she adores the big kids.  She is overjoyed when she sees Knut.  Overall, I’d say “Joy” is her middle name.

This is her normal smile:

When this girl smiles, she nearly shakes with intensity.  Her smile pushes those fat cheeks as best as they can and there’s normally a good squeal that goes with that.

I mentioned how much she likes Lena, but I have a photograph showing how much Lena loves her.  I was taking pictures of her as she was crawling around.  We were in the kitchen and I had not closed our makeshift gate leading to the back hallway which has stairs to the basement.  Normally she can’t get back here, but since I was standing right there, I thought I’d see what she would do.

Well, Lena was not comfortable with my choice to let her explore the rug while I overlooked.  She marched right past us both and parked her body in front of the stairs.  If Solveig was going to get to the stairs, she would have to get through Mama Lena first.

Have I mentioned lately how we have such an awesome dog?  You can train most dogs to do lots of things.  I’ve only met one other dog (Sunny, who was my step-dad’s dog) who was intuitive like this.  There’s little needs for commands as she just knows what to do.

Elias doesn’t like when I take pictures of Solveig and not him.  So here’s a little Elias love as well:

O, this guy knows how to turn on the charm!

We’re finally making strides with his “constant whining” voice that was grating at me for a few months.  I’ve been trying to teach him to speak with a smile on his face, because he has a tough time whining when he’s smiling.  It’s so cute because now when he asks for something he pushes his cheeks up with his 2 pointer fingers and goes, “See, Mom?  See?”  I think he’s very relieved to know how to ask for things now in a way that we’ll listen.  His frustration level has gone way down now that it’s clicked that whining = not getting what you want and asking nicely = better luck getting what you want.

He turns 3 next month.  He’s done everything differently than the older kids.  I’m hoping that “3” will go better this time around!