In which I ramble for posterity's sake

Hmm… what's happened this week…  There was General Conference.  Kessa did pretty well during all the sessions, though she really just wanted to go play with friends.  Abby slept through most of the sessions.

It was Spring Break this week, so Kessa didn't have preschool.  We've spent a bunch of it playing with friends, and a bunch cooped up in the house because of the torrential rain and wind.  Welcome to Spring, right?  :)

The drip system, pre-burial

Friday Travis came out and spent the day building me a drip system on steroids for my garden.  I'm so happy!!!  We've got it all built and the PVC base of it buried in my garden.  Now there are just heads popping up for me to attach drip hoses to.  I need to go out and level the ground, then build new boxes (we're getting nicer wood that'll last longer, not give so many slivers, and look better), fill them with new dirt, then get planting!  Hooray!  Hopefully with nice dirt and an irrigation system that is hooked up to my sprinkler system (so it waters automatically), I will get a much better yield this year.  If not, I will cry.  Because I'm putting an awful lot of money into this.  Haha.  Yay for tax returns!  :D

Some of our friends, Mitchell and Melanie (I've probably told you about them.  Kessa loves their daughter, Audrey, and they have twin baby boys who are 5 months younger than Abby, but are bigger than her) now have her sister, Eileen, living with them.  And she goes to bed right after the kids do.  Which is fantastic, because that means they can leave the house after bedtime and not have to put someone else out to babysit.  So we had them over on Tuesday to play Leaders, our new 7 Wonders expansion.  BJ really likes it.  I think I'd need to play it another time or two to really get a feel and opinion for it.

Abby is practically running now.  Or, at least, walking super fast.  Now that she's got a good feel for it, she definitely prefers walking to crawling.  I accidentally upended a box of Kix all over my kitchen floor today.  Abby spotted it while in the family room (I was by the pantry) and she got the biggest grin on her face and booked it on over to come clean it up for me.  haha.  Oh!  And she has shoes now for when we leave the house.  Except I always forget to put them on her…  But they're cute.

I've been enforcing the rule of no friends until Kessa makes her bed, cleans her room, and picks up her toys in the Loft and Family Room.  It's been hard to enforce, but good.  And it's getting easier.  But it's so funny to watch her make her bed.  She'll put down the blankets (usually with help) and then pile half (or more) of her stuffed animals onto her bed.  I have to laugh, because I totally did the same thing as a kid.

Kessa is absolutely loving playing with Abby.  To the point of overwhelming her half the time to the point of tears.  It's kind of funny to me that half of my reprimands to Kessa are things like, "Ok Kessa, time to stop hugging Abby.  She doesn't like it anymore."  She's rarely ever mean to her, but she sure can love her to a fault.  But she often plays with her and insists on Abby being involved.  I attached a picture of them riding the rocking horse together.  Kessa sat behind the saddle and insisted I put Abby in front of her.  It was so adorable and they both loved it.

That's not to say that Kessa is always looking out for Abby, though…  BJ has this ball that can be squished flat and held flat with suction cups.  But the cups are dying a little and it only stays flat for maybe a second or two, then it pops back open.  Kessa loves playing with it.  The other day we had it outside with her, Izzy, and another neighbor, Jason.  They would all stand around it, pushing it down, then counting, because they were certain that the longer they held it down, the higher it would bounce when it popped open.  It was adorable.  But somehow Abby has developed an irrational fear of this ball being squished.  She's just fine if the ball is just a ball, but the second Kessa squishes it, she bursts into tears and has a look of pure terror on her face.  Her eyes will lock on the ball and she'll stare it down, sobbing, until Kessa stops.  Usually it's when Abby is in her high chair, facing the kitchen, and Kessa is in the family room behind her.  Somehow she hears it start to be squished and will whip around, then cry.  It's hilariously heartbreaking.  The kind of thing YouTube videos are made of.  The best I can figure is that she must have gotten her fingers pinched in it sometime or something.  I don't know.

I'm getting ideas for decorating Kessa's room.  I'm pretty positive I'll do it all in pink and purple.  She already has purple curtains, a pink laundry hamper, and her blankets have a lot of pink to them.  Plus, they're her favorite colors.  It seems appropriate.  I'm thinking I want to take off her closet doors and hang up curtains.  I just hate those doors so much, because the center is never, ever accessible.  So I'm thinking about curtains, then getting a low dresser (only about 3 drawers) and putting it in the center of her closet and getting a lower rod to hang up in her closet so she can reach her shirts.   I'm considering getting a kid-sized wardrobe with pink doors on it (from IKEA) to hang up dress up clothes.  She just loves to dress up so much.  It's been fun getting real ideas of what to do.

And… that's all I can think of.  So I'll end with our Kessa-isms:

Our old garden boxes with Kessa inside.
We're building newer, better ones.

• Look! I made a wand! Ta da! I made toilet paper!
• Kessa is walking around saying “argue, argue, bicker, bicker” from her new Berenstain Bears book.
• BJ (at bedtime): Ok, Kessa.  I want you to stay in your room and not come downstairs."  Kessa: "But daddy!  What if I get stuck in my wall?!"
• Monday we had an FHE about praying and talked about how we should say new things in our prayers so we actually think about what we're saying in our prayers.  She then said the closing prayer for FHE and her bedtime prayers.  Both included, "And please help me get a blue wagon I really want."  I have no idea where this came from.  She's never said anything about a blue wagon outside of her prayers.