Trick or Treat!

Last year Sylvia was too little to take trick-or-treating, but THIS year she was all over the neighborhood!  It didn't take long for her to get the hang of asking for candy.  We couldn't get her to say "Trick or Treat," so instead she just said, "Peeeeees!" which was fine with me because at least she was being polite!  I thought we'd only do a couple of houses but she wanted to keep going and going and going....until she finally crashed.  Her bag got too heavy and her legs got too tired and she needed to be carried home.  Sweet thing. 

Here are our Halloween highlights:

Yesterday we snapped a pic with Sylvia and her BFF - the hallway witch!

Our little monkey!

Sylvia and "Nah-noe!" (Cousin Nolan)

You want me to do WHAT now?

Baby Cecilia came to visit!  She's a cute little cow straight off her Grandpa's farm!

See ya, Papa!  I've got places to be!

Here are some videos of her first couple of houses.  Mom says when she runs in this costume she looks like a little wind-up toy! 

She kept her little hat on the whole time, probably because she saw all the other kiddos running around in costumes and she figured out what this whole thing is all about.  She really had a blast, until we got home and I made the mistake of trying to explain to an 18 month old why you can't have M&M's for dinner.  I lost that battle.  She ate M&M's (while I hid the rest of the candy) and then ate her supper.  It's Halloween!  Why not have dessert first?

Needless to say, she was one worn out monkey by bath time.  I'm sure she'll sleep well tonight!

A Year and A Half!

Dirty face from eating all her supper.  Bumps and bruises all over her clumsy head.  Clutching onto Daddy's leg as he snaps the camera at just the right moment.  Melt my heart.

Sylvia's talking like crazy now, and she's saying so many words that only we can decipher.  I don't know if she's speaking French or English, because it all comes out as a sort of controlled babble with lots of inflection and facial expressions that help quite a bit.  There are quite a few words anyone could understand (nigh-night, bye-bye, Mama, Dada, choo choo, etc.), and a lot of her words are just the beginning sounds of words.  For example, "muh" means milk, "reh" means red, and so on.  But...sometimes she comes up with the weirdest way to say something and I wanted to write a couple of her weird words down before I forgot:

airplane = "nay nay"

Nolan = "Nah-noe"

Cecilia = "Ya ya"

She spent most of her morning asking for Nah-noe.  When she found out he wasn't going to be at the sitter's house, she went up to my Aunt Patty, threw her arms in the air, palms up, and questioned, "Uh Nah-noe ooooh?"  Which clearly means, "Where'd Nolan go?"

Another funny story:  Sylvain ate a piece of pizza and set his plate and dirty paper towel down on the couch next to him.  Sylvia walked up to him, took his crumpled paper towel, smelled it, said "P.U!" and ran into the kitchen to throw it in the trash can!  Somebody has trained her to clean!  (It's not me, that's for sure.)

We're Taking This Show on the Road

I caught Sylvia jammin' to some sweet tunes at Barleycorn's tonight, and when I went to put it on You Tube I found another gem from the summer where she's shaking it to some Devo.  I'm so glad my daughter loves to dance!  (I guess I don't know many kids that don't, but we haven't blasted this much loud party music since college, so I'm having TONS of fun!)

Good Thing Joyce Uses a Camera!

Here are some pics Mom snapped recently.  Can you believe how big she's getting?

Somebody has become quite proficient at using a spoon.  See that giant soup spoon?  She shoved that entire spoon in her mouth, heaping full of applesauce, and you would have thought it was the world's greatest meal. 

Hello October!

Where in the world did you come from?  You totally sneaked up on me and tackled me from behind.  This past month has been a blur and I can't believe how long it's been since I posted!  I blame it on being laptopless (the word makes me giggle, but the truth is so sad) and on being homeless.  A situation which we will remedy soon - we're officially looking for a house!  Yippee!

Much has happened in the last month and each event really deserves it's own post, but for times' sake, I'm going to summarize as best I can.  I hope I don't get too wordy.  If I do, just skip to the end and look at the cute pic.

We closed on our house two weeks ago today!  I sat across from the people who bought our house and held back tears when they explained that they've been looking for a house for two years and they probably looked at a hundred of them.  They liked ours the best.  Thank God!  Selling a house quickly involves a lot of stress, a lot of waiting, and a LOT of money on our part (boo), but we closed exactly four months from the day we listed.  Not bad for a fresh start in a new town!

Sylvain and I are growing more in love with our schools every day.  Sylvia is growing more in love with her sitter and her sub-sitter (my Aunt Patty!) every day.  We have nestled into a lovely routine here which would be almost perfectly normal and manageable if it weren't for this dang cold weather.  All of our cold weather clothes and bundle-uppers are in boxes at my Grandma's house and I'll never find them again until we unpack all of that mess somewhere else.  They would have really come in handy this weekend - more on that later.

In much sadder news, the night before we closed on our house, my Grandma Stine passed away.  If you were a guest at our wedding, you might remember her cuteness on the dance floor when she and Grandpa won the Anniversary Dance-Off.  At the time they had been married for 55 years.  Now it's more like 60.  She was the world's greatest Grandma.  She thought that every tiny thing every grandchild ever did was AMAZING.  And she told us so, all the time.  For the last few years she hasn't been feeling very well, so I think it's safe to say that her passing has brought her a well deserved peace.  I will miss her dearly, but when I think of her, it's impossible not to also think of the wonderful family she raised and left behind.  And they make me smile, so it's not so bad.

In much happier news - Sylvia is growing like a WEED!  I wish I could take a scan of her brain every day to show you how it's absolutely exploding with new learning.  I can't believe how much language she understands!  She can follow directions to almost anything.  She knows people's names, she answers questions, she knows her animal sounds and she recently learned to say her colors - well, the names of colors.  Most color exchanges go like this:
Me: Sylvia, what color is Grover?
Sylvia: Lell-ooooo!!!!!!
Me: No, he's blue.
Sylvia: Booo!!!!!!
She can say all the color names, but the sweet thing guesses the wrong color on the first try every single time!

Also, we are constantly spelling the things we don't want her to hear, which I thought we'd never do, but now I get it.  Example - After she chugs an entire cup of milk and puts it down and walks away, I know she doesn't want or need any more.  But if Sylvain looks in the fridge and shouts, "Do we have any MILK?" she will suddenly remember that milk is her life force and she can't survive another minute without it and...

OHMYGODDIDYOUJUSTSAYMILK????? 

INEEDITNOWNOWNOWNOW!!!  

This involves screaming and STOMPING (a recently acquired skill) and head shaking and fist flailing....it's quite a sight to see, really.  Sometimes I laugh at her.  Sometimes I have to walk away because these tantrums totally wear me out and I don't want to lose it.  But usually I just stand there and wait for her to finish so I can talk to her like she's a normal person.  Anyway, that's why we now say, "Honey, do we have any m-i-l-k?" Or better yet, just avoid that word altogether.  We also avoid "pretzel," "Elmo," and "outside."  Oh heavens, don't say "outside."  You'll want those ears later.

One final newsflash - we went camping this weekend at the Annual Humbert Family Camp Out!  Well, not really.  Sylvain went down last night to meet my Dad and brothers.  Sylvia and I took John's girlfriend, Jess, down with us today in an attempt to join the fun.  But it was way too cold.  So we sat around the fire and ate s'mores until we couldn't take it anymore.  Fun fact - kids have absolutely no idea how cold they are.  Sylvia was wearing many layers (all of her REAL winter clothes are waiting patiently in Grandma's basement), and it made me cold just to look at her, but darn it, she ran around the campsite and had a dandy old time!  She probably would have run around naked if I'd let her!  After three hours of trying to keep her under a blanket (didn't happen), we decided to call it quits.  Here's the proof that she had a good time.

 
I am not sad at all that we came home, because Mom had beef stew on the stove and now Sylvia is sleeping in her nice, warm bed.  All the boys are still down there, freezing their butts off, I'm sure.

That's our month in a nutshell.  Hopefully I'll have a new laptop soon and these posts will start to pick up again!  Happy October, everyone!