Chaos: Party of Six: Anna Update

Last weekend, after confirming that Katy and David both had strep throat, we had four kids on antibiotics at once!! Yikes. Everyone is feeling well at the moment, but of course they are, they're all on meds. I hope it sticks this time.

Everyone keeps asking if Anna is walking yet. Well....kind of. Several times a day, she takes a few steps, it started as 1, then 3, now she'll take 5-7 steps at once. But she hasn't gone across the room and figured out how to be fast. So for now. crawling is still her main mode of transport. But there are so many developments at this age.

She's down to one nap, which would be fine, except that PM kindergarten means that she has a very specific window for napping. So we've had some tired days trying to figure that out (she really wants to go down before 1:00, but if I put her down early, she's not awake yet when I have to take David to school. If I wait until 1, I'm waking her up on the other end of kindergarten. It will work itself out eventually.)

She's going through that stage where she wants to be held about 85% of her waking hours. And it's not just a preference, she insists. (Believe me, I try every avenue I can think of to put her down for a spell). I know it's developmental, because my blog archives confirm that each of my one year olds did this for a period of time. But how quickly I forget how draining it is! Everyday, performing all my daily tasks with a squirmy demanding toddler on my hip: preparing, serving, and cleaning up 3 meals a day for 6 people, trying to pick up the toys that the tornado of children leave all over the house, dressing and pottying my 3 year old (this is my favorite, by the way. Do you know that we have been full time acting-like-we-are-potty-trained for 14 months now, and he has not ever, not ONCE, said "I have to got potty" and taken himself just to pee. He will do that when he has to poop, but for pee? I force him to go every 2-3 hours, and if I forget, he has an accident. I'm past the point of thinking I did something to cause this - I think we've put in our time on this one.)

But Anna is at that super sweet, super cute, learning-like-it's-her-job age. She constantly does things that surprise me (like pick up a hairbrush and start swiping her hair). Recently we have discovered that she LOVES to "color." She will sit on your lap at the table with crayon and make very faint swipes on white paper forever. And she picks purple first - favorite color? The other day I handed her her blankie and I think she said "thank you" - it had the right intonation anyway. She seems to have a pretty strong will - she is always trying to grab our phones, and when we put it out of her reach, she lets us know how she feels about it. Once Brian handed her his phone, and she was swiping it with her fingers, like she knew that's what you were supposed to do! It scares me how much technology these babies are exposed to at such a young age.

The other day I got her hair cut for the first time. It's one of those things that I don't expect anyone else to notice or be able to tell a difference, but I really like it and it was bugging me before. So before and afters...