Bup Bups

Today when I was feeding Ashley lunch she had me set her "bup bups" (her two bunny rabbit stuffed animals) at the edge of the counter in front of her.  I had to pretend to feed each mouthful to each of them before she would eat it herself.  Lunch took a while today.

Nineteen months

Ashley is nineteen months old today.  She had her 18-month doctor’s appointment a couple weeks ago (which went a little better than her previous couple visits), where she weighed in at 25 pounds, 14 ounces, and measured 34.5 inches in height.   She’s still tall and light for her age.  Her thirteenth tooth is coming in.

Her favorite foods these days are apple, cheese, and cheerios.  Mostly she just wants whatever we have though.

She gives good hugs and says “hug!” when she does it.  The cat doesn’t appreciate her hugs as much as we do.  She’s generally kind of wild these days.. .climbs all over everything and doesn’t like to sit still for too long in restaurants.  She enjoys drawing, holding down the paper with one hand while she scribbles with the other.

She’s talking a lot these days, although we don’t always know what it’s about.  She likes to string 3 words together in phrase, but it usually doesn’t make much sense.  Sometimes it will be whatever she feels like eating: “apple cheese nai nai”, for example.  If she feels like seeing the animals it will be “cat cat dog”, or “cat dog cat”.  If she wants to go read books on the potty it’s “boom boom duck”, borrowing from the content of some of her favorite books that she likes to read on the potty.  She’s also started to sort of memorize some of the lines from her books… so she’ll say something that sounds a little like, for example, “the sun has set not long ago,” at the appropriate page, which entertains us to no end, though she obviously has no idea what it means.

We tried to make a list of the words that she can say.  It isn’t a complete list, but a lot of the words on it would probably be hard to understand by people other than us.  Ninety-five words.  There are two words that strike us as a little weird that she can’t say: “horse” and “bird”. 

airplane alligator apple Ashley ball ballerina banana Bango barn bath bed bee belt blanket boom bowl bread bup bup (her word for bunny rabbit) butterfly bye bye cap car (vroom vroom) cat (yow) caterpillar chair cheese chick (cheep cheep) circle come cow (moo) cracker cup

dada daddy dog (woof) down duck (quack) ear elephant (roar) eye fish floor flower fly foot frog glass (her word for glasses) gong gong goose (honk) Gossie hat Hay Gee heart hi hippo house hug ice keys kiss koala leash light mama

Mum Mum nai nai octopus off owl (hoot) panda pants paw pig pillow please po po potty puff purse rhino rice seal shoe sit sock star sun tail tiger tree tree Ty Ty uh oh up watch

Some photos from today:

“Airplane!”

Laundry baskets

If you leave an empty one out, she’ll climb right in.

I see you

Sunglasses

She likes wearing them!  Not as much as she likes other people (or animals) wearing them… but at least she’ll wear them sometimes now.

Out of gas

Pull the car to the side of the road…

Open the gas tank…	fill’er up…
close it…	and “vroom, vroom,” it’s time to go again.

Halloween

Trick or Treating was cancelled this year, so we don’t have a ton of pictures of Ashley in her costume, but Ashley and her friend P did make it down to the West Hartford Halloween Walk on Saturday before the storm hit.

Tired out

She’s just a blur

This cat is a good sport

She suffers this sort of indignity every day… puts up with it though.

Snowtober

Last Saturday we had a rare October snow.

Above was the scene out our front window, Saturday at 1:30pm, just as it started to snow.   Below is the view from our front door the next morning:

It probably only accumulated to six or ten inches where we were, but it was very heavy.  The fall colors and snow did combine to make for a nice aesthetic.  A couple of panels of our fence got taken down, but thankfully that was the only property damage we suffered.

When the big branch came down that blocked off half of the road in front of our house (in the picture two above), it took the top of the tree in front of it off with it (left, below).  The tree on the right, below, didn’t shed many branches but did look kind of cool with the snow and the orange leaves.  The bush below it is crushed by the weight of the snow.

I managed to get the car out but had to drive on the lawn a little to do it.  The town cleared the road and took away a decent chunk of that branch the next day.  Nancy managed to get rid of the rest of that branch with a post on craigslist (it was taken for use as firewood).

Our utility lines run right amongst the branches of the tree in our front yard, as you can see above.  That tree lost a lot of large branches (photos below) but somehow our lines were undamaged.

We just got our internet and cable back this evening, six days after the storm.  Our power came back in the middle of the night on Wednesday.  Mobile phone service was spotty for the first day or so, and 3G data was very slow until today, as over 150 of AT&T’s cell towers across the state were out.  As of right now, Friday night, 71% of our town is still without power.  Walking around today we saw that there are still dangling electrical lines all over the place.  We saw one utility pole that had been stripped bare of wires.  A lot of houses still have large branches on their roofs.  For some, it’s going to be a lot longer before things get back to normal—we were very lucky.