What's your name, Reid?

Harper peeking over Grandma's shoulder at the park

Playing with bubbles during Spanish class

Harper is in her own classroom for Spanish but Reid and I are in the mom/tot class, which is great for all of us. She's recently gotten very into bubbles, so today's activity was perfect for her.

Reid's words - 14 months

I feel a bit like a slacker mom, as most moms do with their second child, I imagine, since I have not been as studious about posting Reid's milestones as I was with Harper. Reid Marion is a chatterbox like her big sister before her and at 14 months, she already has a lengthy list of words. In addition to English, Reid has an ever-growing list of Spanish words because our "manny" is from Spain and speaks to the girls almost exclusively in Spanish and they are also both enrolled in Spanish class once a week.
This is a partial list (see above gripe about not being studious with the milestones...), but at least there is now some record of some of her first words:

Mama
Dada
Papa
Harper
Ball
Dog
Good-girl
Cat
Duck
Goose
Quack
"R" (if you ask her what letter her name begins with)
Baby
Water
Apple
Owl
Toot (she refers to herself as Toot)
Hot
Hat
Woof woof
Tree
Uh-huh (instead of yes)
On
Uh-oh
Sit
Up
Belly
Butt (the belly-butt sequence was learned when we taught her how to go up and down the stairs)
I do
Spanish: Hola arriba adios
Bubble
Book
Bird
Walk


I'm going to try to be more vigilant about writing them down so my goal is to provide a complete list before she's 15  months. 

First Ballet Class

Harper started ballet last week and I can't describe how excited she was. Excited and anxious. She has been obsessed with ballet ever since she saw a performance of  "The Nutcracker" over the holidays and the idea that she might actually be able to do it has been beyond her comprehension! She was bubbling over with excitement when Reid and I came back in to get her.  I made the mistake of taking Reid in ten minutes before class ended and suddenly, the class had an extra student! Reid could not contain herself with all of the big girls around, she needed to be part of the action. The lovely Miss Stephanie, her teacher, did not mind one bit. But Reid and I probably won't be coming in more than a minute or two early in the future. 

 Reid, marveling over a post-class sticker she got from Miss Stephanie.

All moved in!

We have a new address in La Grange, Illinois. La Grange is a little less than 20 miles west of downtown Chicago, it is on a train (Metra) line that goes right into the city and has an adorable downtown of it's own, to which we are walking distance. The area we live in is filled with historic homes which are quite a change from the suburbs we were banished to in Colorado thanks to our adorable and loving pit bull. Our new house was built in 1925, it's a three-bedroom, two-bath bungalow and checks the boxes of being the smallest, most expensive and with the highest taxes of any house we've owned, (three in five years, which is crazy ...). Guess we're not in Colorado anymore. Less to clean, that's what I keep telling myself!

We've been eating out more than I like to admit. Here are the girls enjoying a partial breakfast at Starbucks, with Harper hiding behind her pumpkin bread.

Painted faces

We met Harper's friend Evelyn at Whole Food's Easter Egg Hunt. It was such chaos, the girls didn't get a single egg! (Harper was not too happy about that..) but they did get their faces painted. Harper has come a long way from the girl who screamed every time I brushed her hair, refused to get on the scale at the doctor's office and wouldn't even open her mouth for the dentist. She is really growing out of some of those sensitivities. I can't imagine her wanting to get her face painted a year ago, but she sat there and enjoyed it.