Our little budding artist had a lot of fun, but thank god this stuff is non-toxic!

Portman and I both just finished reading "In Defense of Food" and upon completion we both declared that it is one of the best books we’ve ever read. Since reading it we have been determined to eat fresher, "whole" foods rather than packaged or processed food. One of the family rules that we are going to try to stick to is that we don’t buy anything packaged that lists more than 5 ingredients or lists any ingredients that we can’t pronounce. It’s actually a lot easier than you think, you just have to be more creative about meals.

Anyway, in the spirit of eating fresher foods, this afternoon we went to Eastern Market, DC’s big craft, flea, and farmer’s market on Capitol Hill. The winter market is obviously not as bustling as the summer farmer’s market, but we still had a great time. We bought all of our fresh produce, meat, and fish for the week and squeezed in a quick lunch. Harper loved how busy it was – it’s a superb place for people watching! She entertained everyone at lunch with her excellent clapping skills.

We have been working on a few new things with Harper: using a spoon, and clapping. The spoon hasn’t really caught on yet, as you can see from the photos:

However, yesterday she really mastered clapping and was SO proud of herself! I’ve never seen her get so excited about learning something new. She’s been sort of clapping for a while, but as soon as it clicked, she got this amazing smile on her face and has been so excited about it ever since!

When I was pregnant with Harper and we registered for the hundreds of baby products that we thought we would need, the one thing we thought was so unnecessary was a video baby monitor. We couldn’t figure out why anyone would spend that much money just to watch their kids sleep! Well, it turns out we were WAY wrong. Yesterday Harper was having a hard time falling asleep for her morning nap and at some point started crying quite a bit. I let her cry for 10 minutes or so, then went in to check on her and found blood all over her crib. It turns out she had hit her mouth on her crib at some point and was sitting there in agony just waiting for me to rescue her! I felt so terrible. Needless to say, we went out immediately and bought a video monitor. As soon as I set it up I realized just what we had been missing – what an amazing device! The picture is not crystal clear, but it is clear enough that last night when Portman put her down we could watch her play in her crib for 10-15 minutes before laying down to sleep. And all this time we though she was going right to bed! I obviously won’t need the video at every single nap, but it is going to be awesome for those naps when she just won’t fall asleep and I have no idea what she is doing up there. Portman thinks she tries to jump out of her crib – well now we will know for sure!

If anyone is in the market, we ended up with the Summer Color Handheld Video Monior with the 2.5" screen. I would definitely go with the bigger screen if you have the extra cash. Also most of the customer reviews are very accurate.

Dirty Baby

Clean Baby

…lunch goes like this! She actually managed to get spinach in her ear. Amazing.

Yesterday was a big step for our family – we traded in my very sporty, cool and college-esque Jeep Grand Cherokee for the ultimate soccer mom car. We bought Hyundai’s new (and huge) SUV – the Veracruz – which I describe as a school bus that resembles an SUV. I have to hand it to Hyundai for making a car that has absolutely everything a mom with small children needs. It is extremely quiet, has a bottle holder in the back center console, has what I call a baby monitor mirror so that I don’t have to turn around to see them, a DVD player and so much more! Although it feels much less "cool," it is a welcome change from the rough, noisy Jeep with its million-horsepower engine.

Harper’s reaction was so funny – she was absolutely silent for the first 20 minutes, just looking around like "seriously guys? I get to ride in this instead of the tractor?" Then we put Shrek on the DVD player and her whole world changed! As a family rule, we do not let her watch any TV at home, but we’ve decided to make a concession for long car rides since she is not the greatest passenger. She was actually laughing at the movie, although I’m sure she didn’t understand it, but instead though that the fact there is a TV in the car is pretty funny!

Photos to come…

Today Harper’s friend Rachael came over to play while her mom had a doctor’s appointment. Rachael lives across the cul-de-sac from us and is 4 months older than Harper. The girls play really well together and it’s a lot of fun to watch. Today was the first time I had both of them by myself and it actually wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. They were SO good – not a single whine or fuss, and they both ate their lunch, which is pretty unusual! While they wanted to play with the same toys, they didn’t seem to care if the other one grabbed something away – they just found something else to do. It made me a lot less nervous to have a second baby! It’s next to impossible to get a photo of both of them looking at the camera, but here are a few of them playing nicely together.

As if that’s not enough excitement for one day, we got a huge snowstorm this morning. It’s pouring down "Whistler style" and is sticking to everything. It’s actually too much snow for Harper to play in, but maybe some of it will melt by tomorrow. I didn’t venture outside, but took a few pictures from the windows.

Yesterday we had Harper’s 12-month checkup, which is always more exciting for me than it is for her. She weighed in at 21.5 pounds, which puts her in the 50th percentile for her age group, and was just under 31 inches tall, which is in the whopping 95th percentile! Of the 8 or so appointments we had in the past year, she fell under the 95th percentile in length only once, so this wasn’t really a shock to us. The pediatrician said that she is extremely precocious and her activity level and dexterity are pretty advanced for her age, which again wasn’t really a surprise since we live with her and know just how active she is! They asked me if she could climb stairs yet, and I just laughed since yesterday I asked her if she was ready for lunch and she was up the stairs in about 4 seconds flat. I’m not sure if we have a daughter or a monkey!

The only news that they had for us was that we should start weaning her off the bottle, which I am really not ready to do yet – she loves it and I just can’t take it away from her! Apparently she can keep her duppie (pacifier) for as long as she wants because it’s easier to bribe it away from an older child than it is to change a feeding method. Maybe next month we’ll start the bottle thing…

Harper’s favorite game this week has been to "hide" behind the sheer curtains in our dining room. She thinks that we can’t see her even though they are completely see-through. It’s really funny.

And finally, a few cute ones from last night’s bath. As usual there are hundreds more on our Smugmug page!