the Rizzo Report: I was so tired this morning that . . .

. . . I scrapped the last teaspoon of jam from the jar and then dropped it into my coffee instead of into my Greek yogurt, thereby leaving me without breakfast or ability to actually wake up in one fell swoop. Nevertheless, with a cup of tea on the desk in front of me I'm still going to try and get a blog post up before my little ladies wake up.

Life with two girls has been fairly all consuming lately, but I'm starting to get the hang of it I think. I'm finally starting to be ok with the new level of "clean" for our house and resigned to the fact that probably for the next 5 years the whole house will never be perfectly clean all at the same time. And I'm starting to feel even happy about the fact that it's more important for me to spend time playing with Ava and cuddling Madelyn than it is that the toilets are always spotless. I hate cleaning toilets anyway . . .

Madelyn is growing fast. She is quite vocal now, especially in the mornings. She is definitely impressed by the sound of her own voice. She rarely cries, except for a few cries of resistance when she's tired and doesn't want to close her eyes. She doesn't even cry when she wakes up hungry in the morning. She just yells for me. She's also learned how to grab onto toys and she's loving the play mat with it's dangling toys now. Which is great because she's also getting bored pretty quickly of laying on her back and needs some entertainment. She loves watching Ava and smiles any time Ava comes into her line of vision.

Ava loves Madelyn too. She loves helping me give her a bath and dress her. Yesterday Ava was holding her Lambie and I told her that soon Madelyn would have a Lambie too. Ava took off running for her bedroom and brought back a fluffy stuffed lion that Tony bought for Madelyn. Weeks ago we told Ava that the lion was a special toy "like your Lambie" for Madelyn, but that Ava could play with it until Madelyn was bigger. Apparently she remembered that conversation. For the rest of the day, wherever Madelyn went, Ava made sure the stuffed lion was by her side.

But she's not always so sweet to her. This past weekend she and I were playing in her pool and we'd set up her slide so that she could slide down into the water. We were having a great time playing together while Tony and Madelyn watched the Redskins game. At halftime Tony came out with Madelyn and put her toes in the water and Ava started crying and saying "No babies! No babies!" But we told her she had to share her pool with Madelyn because they were sisters and then she was fine with it and even had fun holding Madelyn's feet as Tony helped Madelyn "slide" down into the pool and get her toes wet.

Ava talks constantly all day long and I'm understanding more and more of what she's saying. She likes to pretend she's Dora the Explorer and I've even heard a few Spanish words. She likes to use my nursing pillow as either a horse (she bounces on it and says "neigh, neigh") or a boat (she sits on it, usually with Lambie and Baby on it in front of her and uses anything she can find as a paddle and says "paddle, paddle, paddle!).

A few days ago she had been playing with her blocks and they were scattered all over and so I asked her to clean them up and put them in their basket. I came back into the room a few minutes later and she'd already put every block away. I told her, "Ava, you were such a good girl to obey mama right away and put all of your blocks away. I'm going to give you a chocolate chip because you were so obedient." I got the chocolate chip from the kitchen and met her coming in carrying the basket. I tried to give it to her and she pushed it away and cried, "No chocolate chip, two more blocks! Two more blocks!" and ran to the kitchen window sill, where she'd left two blocks (one in each corner of the window because Ava has to have everything even . . .I wonder where she got that from . . . ) hours earlier. I couldn't believe that she remembered those were there! After she put them in the basket her task was finally complete and she came to get her chocolate chip from me.

Ava loves getting mail. My grandma sent her a note a few weeks ago and she carried it around for days. She even wanted to sleep with it but I made her put it in a special place on her shelf. But as soon as she woke up the next morning she ran to the shelf and asked for her mail. A card came for Tony a couple weeks ago and after reading it he gave it to Ava. I asked him what is said and he said "Here, read it" and he tried to take it from Ava to hand to me. Ava started crying and said, "No! I was reading it!"

Just for record keeping purposes I have to add here that Ava can count to 20 now and is always counting things, counting out blocks, counting the butterflies on her sheets, counting her pieces of toast in the morning, counting, counting, counting. And we're getting better and better with our alphabet too. My favorite word of hers is noodle, Which she pronounces, and now we all do too, "noon-nel". Which reminds me that when she was younger she had a picture book that had noodles on one page and when she'd ask me what it was and I told her "noodles" she'd always crack up laughing like that was the funniest sounding word ever. I guess it is kind of a funny sounding word . . .

Well this is quite a long post already but I have some pictures of our trip to Maine to post so I wanted to add a bit of that on as well.

We had a great time in Maine. My brothers family was sick for most of the week and my sister and her family also got sick towards the end of the week, which was a huge bummer as the cousins didn't get to play together as much as we'd all hoped. But it was relaxing and fun to all be in a house on the lake with them, especially since we don't get to see them very often.

We had fun visiting my Aunt Rita's farm for a big potluck one night. There Ava got to see cows up close and personal, climb on big rolls of hay, play in a barn, climb up into a huge tractor and pick sweet peas right out of the garden and eat them. Her Papa Jim (my dad) showed her how to pick them, pull off the string, open them up to eat the little peas inside and then eat the shell. She ran up to show me and it was so cute seeing her chubby little fingers working so hard at each step of the pea eating process. She also played a game of tackle football with her dada. Now I have to watch out because she'll come running at me and yell "tackle" and try to push me over!

We also had a great time kayaking on the lake at our rental house. Ava loved leaning over and running her hands through the water.

The family reunion was on a Saturday and we toured the little Benedicta cemetery where all my grandpa's relatives are buried. We saw one family gravestone where three children were buried. They had all died within three weeks of each other from small pox. The oldest was like 7 and the youngest was only a week old I think. I was heartbroken for that mother. Ava loved playing in the cemetery and climbing on all the old headstones. At first I thought I should maybe stop her out of respect, but then I thought that if I was dead and buried there and a cute red cheeked grubby little girl in a blue dress and pigtails was laughing and climbing over my headstone I'd be delighted. And so I let her keep playing.

The whole trip was a lot of fun and I'm really thankful that my grandma left all of us grandkids money in her will to take this trip. I'm only sorry that she didn't get to be there with us because she would have really loved that.

Only one bad thing happened during our trip. On the last night we were there we were sound asleep on our futon on the floor and I had this dream that a mouse was crawling on my hand. In my dream I could feel it's little claws and it's whiskers. I woke up from the dream with a jump and that woke Tony up. I said to him, "I just had this crazy dream that a mouse crawling on my hand and it seemed so real." Tony sat up in bed and turned his phone on and then I saw it. There was a mouse about four feet away from our bed. It hadn't been a dream after all. We jumped up and the mouse ran into the kitchen and hid. We couldn't find it so we tried to go back to sleep. But after a couple hours of not being able to sleep because I kept feeling like a mouse was on me again, we decided to just get up and get an early start on our drive back to Boston. A really early start since it was only like 4am. We got the car all packed up and then loaded the still sleeping girls into their car seats. It was cold and pitch black out in the woods and I felt like we were the Von Trapp family trying to escape the Natzi's. But we were really just the Rizzo family trying to escape a small mouse . . .

Breakfast time! We all took turns cooking so that we all got days off from having to cook at all. It was great.