23 Months Old

It's here. Less than a month until she turns two. Cuh-razy.

At 23 months Noel:

*has 18 teeth and her last two 2-year molars on their way. When Noel gets teeth, she gets a lot of them. I think of all the almost-20 teeth in her mouth that she's only gotten two of them individually. The others she has gotten in groups…2 here, 3 there, 3 again, 3 again, etc. I'm hoping we're done with teething by the time she turns two…the poor girl's mouth has taken a beating in the last year (she will have gotten 12 teeth [8 molars and 4 incisors] in less than a year)!

*is a hoot. She's started giving a "cheese" face for the camera (scrunching her eyes closed and "smiling"). She'll pick up our…phone that connects with the buzzer outside…and say, "Heh-do? Was your name? Is Miz Janna. Bye-bye!" The first time she heard our home phone ring she stared at it and then said, "Heh-do! Was your name?"


Playing with "Snow Dough" earlier this week. The girls played with this stuff for 1.5 hours.

*knows a lot of letters (can identify about 20 of them), numbers (can identify 8 or so), and the sounds the letters make. She doesn't get them all right, but she knows a lot of them. Thank you, The Letter Factory!

*is now napping in our bed instead of in the pack-n-play. Either Shannon or I lie down with her until she falls asleep, which usually doesn't take more than 15 minutes. She was to the point where if we put her in the pack-n-play for nap time she'd play and toss and turn for a good hour or longer, and then she'd want to sleep until 4:00. Then she wouldn't want to go to sleep at a normal bedtime, so…we're doing this for now. And it's working for now. She can also skip a nap if need be and be fine, for the most part, as long as we put her in bed quite early.



*has decided that she likes chicken. I remember that Lane was right around 2 when she started to eat meat, too. She does not like sauce of any kind on her noodles. She does like things that Lane still does not really like a lot…cucumbers and raw bell peppers. She still loves cheese and yogurt and fruit and pizza and french fries. She's a pretty good eater…I have found that she is more likely to eat something new off of my plate than her own, especially if I have it in a room other than the kitchen. I did that with Lane, too…would purposely bring my own lunch into the living room and let her decide she wanted to try it (and like it) before giving her her own. Reverse psychology, I tell you.

*is starting to get whiney sometimes. I'm sure that some of it is the new teeth (wow am I ready to be done with teething for awhile!) and some of it is just her age. She's pretty good at stopping the crying when I tell her to use words, though, and she'll tell me what's wrong. If I explain to her that she can't have such-and-such for whatever reason, she still might start crying again, but generally I can redirect her to something else and get her to stop the fit. When she's unconsolable, though, she goes to lie in her crib or on a bed until she's done.

*had her first tea party last week. We got some cold tea and dried fruit and the three of us girls set up at the table in their room and had a tea party. "Real" tea parties are old news for Lane, but for Noel they're still quite novel.


First real tea party. Excuse the sweaty bed head.

*can count to 14 accurately. Sometimes she can count objects correctly up to three or four. This is not consistent at all, though.

*loves to cut our cut-able fruit. As long as I will put the pieces back together she will keep cutting them apart.

*can successfully narrate what she did when I was gone, what she saw, what she ate, etc.

*is wearing a size 6 shoe. She's still wearing a few of her 18-month clothes but is mostly wearing 24-month clothes. Later this month when we start packing in earnest for the States we'll figure out what we still have stored away for her, because I know we have more clothes…I just don't know where they are right now.


That girl loves her some ice cream!

*is still just really good at playing by herself. She loves to play with someone, to have directed play, but if she's on her own…she's just so good at playing alone. And playing pretend alone. It's gotta be because she's not a firstborn…she's had plenty of opportunities to watch other people play whereas, for example, Lane, did not, and therefore it's taken her a long time to play well alone.

*still loves to be read to. Currently she loves this book called Wiggle Waggle. It's about how different animals walk and it's her favorite. Honestly it's kind of a lame book, but hey, she loves it! She also likes A Potty for Me, and our Little People Let's Go To the ______ books.

*lets me clip her fingernails and toenails, clean her ears, put a ponytail holder in, etc., with no balking or fussing or complaining. She's still not a big fan of getting her teeth brushed, but I think that has a lot to do with big molars coming in.

The next update I write about Noel will be about her birthday celebrations. I can't believe my baby will be two in 27 days!

Life Lately

Life is crazy like always. But that's not why I haven't been around…I just haven't felt like blogging. Maybe my blogging days are coming to an end? I don't know, though…I really enjoy reading over past posts. Maybe that will motivate me to keep on posting. Maybe a new blog look would do it. Maybe I just need some rest to refresh me. I don't know. What I do know is that today I'm going to update.

So, here's the deal.

1) I'm 16 weeks pregnant with our third little miracle. I had a month or so, between 7-11 or 12 weeks where I was exhausted and didn't feel spectacular. But overall I've been feeling alright. We'll have this baby while we're in the States, and I think we're going to let it be a surprise baby, since we'll be able to buy whatever we need in the States. I'm guessing it's another girl, just because I feel similar to how I felt with both the girls. Who knows, though! We haven't spent much time thinking about names yet…we have a boy's first name picked out, but that's it. We need to spend some time working on it.


Our Facebook pregnancy announcement.

2) We will be here for about six more weeks (give or take a few days…we haven't booked our tickets yet) before we head to the States. We are very excited to spend the holidays with family, to take our kids to the zoo, to Chic-fil-a and the movie theater, and so on. I already have a HUGE running list in my mind of places to visit, places to eat, and so on. Before we actually leave I think I'm going to type out a "bucket list" of things to do in the States. And this time in the States is going to just be different…we've never really been parents in America. When we left we had a 5-month old. So we were just getting started in the parenthood thing, and let's face it, having a newborn is about the same wherever you are: you're exhausted, they eat, sleep, and poop, and you're just trying to adjust to life with them. So we're excited to be parents of little girls while in America. I'm so excited to experience the States through their eyes.



3) Our past few months here have just been insane. About a week ago we learned that our visas had been renewed, so that answered quite a few questions in our minds about our future. Before that we had thought we might have to leave the country and that if we didn't that we would definitely have to move apartments. Turns out we didn't have to do either, but of course we didn't know that until the last-minute, making life oh-so-stressful for awhile. We've also had two colds and a stomach bug. Add that onto morning sickness / pregnancy exhaustion and the result is that September and a large chunk of October are barely memories in our minds, because we barely survived them.


Just for fun…this was Shannon's birthday cake. We made it for him in late August or early September since he was in the States without us on his actual birthday. I don't know what happened to the cake but it obviously didn't set right. I dumped it on a plate and covered it in frosting. Ugliest cake I've ever made in my life, but Shannon still thought it tasted great!

4) Our kids have been so cranky lately. Seriously. Noel is cutting her third 2-year molar and is just. a. grump. All day long. It's miserable. I wish I hadn't lost our amber teething necklace because I really think it helped but…it's gone. So we're all pulling out hair out around here. Lane has had a virus or something…I thought she had the beginnings of pink eye but her eyes never turned pink and the goop in her eyes let up. But then she was saying her ears hurt and they were oh-so-red around the eardrum but not the eardrum itself. And she had a fever. And then she fell and busted her chin open, large enough that it made me slightly panic but not large enough to actually need to go to the doctor. The girls are just cranky and it's making me batty that we're cooped up indoors due to not-so-great weather.



5) Last Sunday the ex-pats in our city had a Harvest Celebration party. We all dressed up, ate yummy food, and played some games. We were going to carve pumpkins but didn't because it got dark and then we had cranky kids who needed to sleep. So I still have a pumpkin and am trying to decide if it's worth roasting…it probably is, I just need to get off my lazy tired bum and do it. One of the games that we played at the party was that game where you put your head on the end of a baseball bat, spin around X number of times, and then run to a marker and back. I was last for my team, and Shannon was last for his. He got a couple-spin head start on me, but as soon as I stood up from spinning myself around I took off…right for the wall of the house next to me. I don't think I actually went forward at all, but totally just crashed into the wall. After things had stopped spinning and friends had helped me up, I learned that Shannon had also crashed into the house, albeit five or six feet in front of me. So, I don't think anyone will ask the Scarbroughs to be on their team for that game again! (Although in my defense I did ask before we started if pregnant people got to spin fewer times…I was dizzy already from the 3-legged-race!)


Our crew in their costumes. Bonus points if you can figure out who I was.

6) There are just days when the culture here just drives me nuts. Today was one of them, and I wasn't even out much. I drove to my favorite grocery store, and they have one of those parking lots where the parking spaces are slanted, indicating the direction you are supposed to park, drive, etc. Well of course the parking lot is packed. So I see some guys getting into their car (which is of course parked the wrong way) and figure that I'll wait for them to pull out and then I'll take their spot. They just sit in the car looking at me for probably 3-4 minutes. I'm thinking, "What, you think you can pull out this way? There are cars behind me." So they attempt to pull out and turn around but are completely incapable of doing so, which was just so annoying because they were in a little car. I could have done it. Eventually someone else pulled out, they were able to pull into that spot (going the right way), and then back out and leave and I could finally park after waiting for 6-7 minutes on a spot. This might not seem like such a big deal to you, my reader, but trust me when I say that all I think about in situations like that is about how I live in a country full of people who think of nobody but themselves, especially when it comes to driving. I cannot wait to drive in America where people actually follow traffic rules and for the most part are respectful drivers.

And…there you have it. It's not even 9:00 yet and I think I'm going to head to bed. This has been the theme of my life lately…always in bed before 10:00, often before 9:00, and frequently before 8:00. This pregnancy is wearing me out.