In the Meantime...

Hollie's Birthday. Thanksgiving. Other milestones. They are just falling left and right by the wayside, but I will get to them soon—oh yes, I will get to them soon.

In the meantime, here are some illustrations that David and I made at church today on the iPad (with Paper). They are Christmas-related, so we weren't being 100% naughty, just 86% naughty.

David's Robot Santa

My Robot Christmas Tree (ballistic ornaments and presents courtesy of David and his dexterous fingers)

Someone please cut this baby's bangs! This was on election day when Hollie thought the "I Voted" sticker was a barrette and kept sticking it in her hair. It was 500 times more effective than an actual baby barrette.

Spooky Grover Halloween

Han Solo, Baby Wicket, and Princess Leia

I'm clearly very behind on blogging some important Grover family moments (including a first birthday party and a first camping trip for ole' Hollie-by-Gollie).

But this will have to do for tonight.

Behold: ye olde Grover family Trunk-or-Treat (and by "olde" I mean, the very first Trunk-or-Treat me, Dave, OR Hollie have ever been to).

This semester has been horribly hard, and we almost bailed on tonight. However, the day before yesterday, we decided that we were Grovers—I say! Grovers!—and Grovers celebrate their holidays with style! So we went to Hobby Lobby last night at 8:00 p.m. (fortunately the Holiday Hours were in effect and they didn't close until the uncustomary 9:00 p.m.), gathered the needed materials, and stayed up until 1:30 making costumes, grading, and cleaning what we could of the house.

We even sewed a furry ewok costume for Hollie which we then accidentally left at home when we left for the church parking lot. Oh, well. As it turns out, everyone still thought she was super adorable.

On the way home, we stopped at a Sonic for chocolate/banana shakes and 50 cent corndogs. Hollie sat in her carseat and read Eric Carle books to herself.

All in all, not too bad for a last-ditch effort.

She literally would not stop running around the church parking lot. She couldn't stop pointing and shouting at everyone dressed up—she loved it. And she loved stomping the leaves in the gutters. She truly is a spooky little Halloween girl.

Grover Family Star Wars Trunk

This was actually after our ewok began to slow down. Still moving, just slowly enough now to get captured in the same frame as one of her parents.

Happy Halloween, everyone!

Holls...Between 10 and 11 Months...

Love her one-toothed grin. All our jack-o-lanterns this year will be our best imitations of the above smile.

The school semester started at the end of August, and the Grover fam has been blindingly busy. Hollie is walking like a maniac, Dave is attending classes and teaching classes, and I am teaching classes and studying for my qualifying exams in eighteenth-century literature. David and I also recently took on rather large responsibilities at church—the largest we've ever been asked to take on yet—so we find ourselves working closely with the local missionaries and church leadership when we aren't doing school stuff. We still don't do the daycare thing, so Hollie has become rather like a baton that David and I tag each other with as the one arrives home so the other can leave.

In the brief spaces during her waking hours that Hollie gets us both at home, she tries to situate herself so that she can be touching both of us at the same time. If one of us so much as goes to the bathroom, she gets mad. Poor little dear. We have spoiled her with our summertime laziness of being together all the time.

Fortunately, we still have plenty of Grover Family Adventures with the three of us. This morning was the first lick of autumn—crisp, cool, rainy morning of 57 degrees. We bundled up our babe, walked to the neighborhood marketplace to buy an apple and some eggs, and then returned home to eat humongous stacks of caramelized cinnamon apple 'n pecan pamcakers (pictures maybe someday, on a gloat-about-the-crap-we-eat post). We love fall at our place. We love it better than all the other seasons. We are jealous that Hollie will always get to celebrate her birthday at the brink of everything spooky-ookie and crispy-spicy (crispy-spicy in a fall leaf kind of way, not a chicken nugget kind of way).

So yes, Holls turned 10 months. In a week or so, she will be eleven months. *sigh* My poor mom has been checking in with this blog almost daily waiting for updated pictures and video. And there certainly has been plenty to document.

So here is a brief summary of stuff:

• She walks! Everywhere! She squats and crouches and stands and bends and even runs a little bit. She climbs up our mattress (we still have no actual bed) and then climbs back down to the ground. She can stand up and dance on her own now.
• She sleeps! All night! Yes! You heard right! That said, she was working on her second tooth last week and that woke her up a few times. But at least she sleeps for five hour stints rather than the every-2.5-hours-feeding schedule she was on a month ago.
• She eats! Real food! Well, real-ish. She is getting more of an appetite for foods-that-aren't-milk in general, but now she will also eat puffed baby cereal pieces and little pieces of bread and bananas. She loves to suck on pitted fruits that Dave or I help her eat, too. (She likes to feed me puffs, too.)
• She points! At books, at trees, at us, at nothing, at everything. If you hold out your pointer finger to her, she'll reach hers out and make them touch, E.T.-style. She also likes to point at all of the eyes of all the animals and people in her board books. Obsessed with eyes, this one is. She started poking David in the eye this week. We have no knack for discipline yet.
• She loves books and songs. She will sit quietly in your lap so long as you have a book or a song for her. She'll make David and I go through a stack of 15 board books in one sitting, and she'll sit through a good half hour of songs (but then my throat gets dry so we have to quit).
• She tells jokes! But most of them aren't funny. Like the joke about throwing books off the shelf and onto the floor. She thinks that one is hilarious, especially after we say "No." in a stern voice. See item four, re: we are the worst parents at disciplining our child.
• She throws tantrums! But they are mostly cute and consist of her shaking her fists and growling. Not screaming, not crying: growling. She also tries to bite us sometimes, but the jokes on her, she only has 1.2 teeth.

Here are a million pictures, followed by a video.

Hollie Margaret meets Grandma Margaret who drove from Florida to Texas to meet her great-granddaughter. They discussed politics and philosophy.

Hollie meets Grandma Barbara in Utah; she walks in grass for the first time ever (West Texas has prickly, terrible grass). She met both grandmas during the worst of her Stranger-Danger period. This is as cuddly as she got for either one of them. Poor great-grandmas.

I call this her "basset hound" look. Let's just say, if David and I are ever imprisoned, Hollie can crawl over and save us, a la the hound dog in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride.

We call this her "Grandma Face." David swears she looks like his Grandma (his mom's mom) when she pulls this face. I'll let my sisters-in-law be the judge of that.

First pair of jeggings, a present from Auntie Pan-Pan (my sister). This is what it is like to take pictures of her these days. She is always on the go, rounding corners, wobbling on the brinks of disasters, grinning madly.

Just before heading to a baptism for a local member of our congregation. We've already given up on ever looking as fashionably hip as Holls.

First toe-nail paint job. She slept on David while I painted. Cupcake Wars was playing on Hulu in the background. David was making jokes about the French way Florian said, "These cupcakes have really captured the spirit of baseball."

Here is a video of Hollie walking. I didn't have time to show all the gems we've captured, but here is a taste. The first bit is Hollie on the actual day that she turned 10 months; the second bit is the last week. We were trying to capture her walking and growling like a zombie (her latest trick). It is eerie, particularly since I've been watching a lot of zombie shows on my computer lately (don't ask—it's embarrassing. Okay, it's AMC's Walking Dead. It is DISGUSTING, and I watch them with my eyes shut and the volume nearly on mute. I do NOT let Hollie see or hear it, but I confess I hold her while she sleeps when I watch it. The characters are so compelling and I am such a sucker for post-apocalyptic narratives! Oh my, oh dear). Anyway, Hollie plays a pretty convincing zombie, but a super cute one. You can't hear her as well as I wish you could. She can get to growling pretty loudly sometimes.

Peach Pickin' Pictures

Thanks to Joleen for sending these pictures my way. Stay tuned for pictures of Miss Hollie Margaret meeting her Great-Grandma Margaret (and my Aunt Sherry and cousin Livvy) who came all the way from Florida and Mississippi for a weekend trip. Thanks to my own Mom, Dad, and brother Will for driving all the way down from Utah, too. We miss you guys already.

The Peach-Pickin' Gang. I did not dress to get my picture taken. I've been watching a lot of What Not to Wear at the gym recently, so I feel like I need to make excuses for my too-big jeans and unflattering maternity top (yep, still haven't put those maternity tops away yet. They're just so darned comfortable. But, hey: at least my jeans are a size too big! That's progress!).

The taste of summer. The rule was, you got to eat as many peaches as you wanted to while you picked them. I think I ate about five. Little ones. Well, one big, four littles.

Even the best of moms and dads sometimes forget to bring a hat for the baby. Fortunately, we never forget to bring a change of clothes for diaper blow-outs. Don't worry: I slathered sunscreen all over her. I just can't slather it on her shaggy little scalp.

Nine Months Old and Walking....almost

Hollie at 9 mo.

Hollie at 8 mo. (for comparison. I never got around to that post after all.)

It's been a thoughtful, tender, bittersweet week. In the wake of the Aurora shootings and the accidental death of a past roommate, my little baby turned nine months old, took her first early steps, and is in the process today of getting her very first tooth (we can only just see it jutting up through her gums, but we can definitely feel it. It's there). I'll admit that I have felt a few fears for Hollie as she seems so bent on growing up and moving closer to the kinds of fears and pains that I want to always protect her from. At the same time, I've found myself feeling guilty at times for having fun with Holls and Dave, laughing boisterously together when I know that there is so much heartache and pain seemingly everywhere around us. Anyway, it's been a thoughtful week.

But this post is not meant to dwell entirely on deep thinking. This post is meant to record and share the things that our little Baboo has been learning this past month or two. Let me put it this way: when David and I saw two alligators uncomfortably close to us on a hike in Brazos Bend National Park, Hollie cooed and smiled at us as Dave and I exchanged cautious glances and lickety-split our way backwards down the trail before Alligator #1 reached the shore just behind us, which would have effectively pinned us between it and Alligator #2 (who was sunbathing his/her-self across the path in front of us. David and I may be well aware of all the dangers that threaten the well-being of our little family, but Hollie is blissfully innocent of such worries. (Or maybe that isn't entirely true. We do, after all, leave her in a darkened room by herself to sleep at night. And she hates that.) In any case, regardless of any grumpy interludes by anyone of the three of us throughout the day, we have really been enjoying a summer full of silly giggles and fighting-back-tears laughter as Holls has learned to clap, play Peek-A-Boo, play Steal-Mom's-Glasses, and crack up when she sees she has inadvertently made us crack up. Nine months old is my favorite months-old so far.

Here's some stats:

Weight: Somewhere around 20 pounds. I don't know her height. But basically, we need a new car seat. We can almost just barely buckle her into her infant car seat.

Hair: Getting longer and shaggier. Sometimes we call her Simba because her hair looks like a lion cub's baby-mane. (And let's face it: her personality is way more Simba than Nala at this point.)

Favorite foods: Her staples are bananas, apples, sweet potatoes, squash, and, of course, her beloved carrots. But we also found out recently that she really likes avocado. This last week, we also drove out to a farm and picked fresh peaches (a buck a pound! how great!). I gave Hollie some pureed fresh peaches cut with some plain yogurt, and I have never seen her go after a food with such gusto before. We almost always have to trick her into eating anything past the first four or five bites of anything. But she ate a whole bowl of peaches and yogurt, and her mouth remained open between bites. I've never seen that before. (Oh, yeah. And I also made this awesome peach pie. I've always wanted to be a real master at baking pies. This pie was one baby-step closer to that goal.)

The best (and second) peach pie I've made yet.

Favorite songs: She still loves Ducktales, but she also gets really excited when we sing the "Eency-Weency Spider" (help me out: "eency-weency"? "itsy-bitsy"? Which is it? I rotate between the two on a daily basis.) and she also loves this song about the sun that the playhouse her Aunt Sarah gave her plays when you rotate a certain circle on the roof of the house. She's obsessed with it. Sarah: best gift ever. She also loves the songs that play during the credits of any television show Dave and I watch. She'll play with her toys while we watch the program, and then as soon as the music starts, she stops what she is doing, turns around, bobs to the beat, and watches the black-and-white letters run down the screen.

Favorite books: Any book with pages she can touch, especially if the pages have fluffy things to touch. She is also getting really good at pointing. She points to the mouse on her That's Not My Fairy/Penguin books, and I found out today that she will consistently point to the baby hippo on every page of Kiss Kiss, a board book from her Aunt Erin and Aunt Kate (Erin, if you're reading this, we love those books!).

Reading with Grandma Grover on the 4th of July.

Sleeping habits: Still wakes up every three hours to nurse. We've been trying to wean her from the 3:00 feeding, but then she started teething, and she just can't seem to fall back to sleep on her own. Yeah. I didn't do a really good job of sleep-training her. Hmm. It's extra hard now because she can stand up in the crib and yell, "Mamamamama!" and "Dadadadadadada!" Plus, my boobs hurt if I don't go in there. So.....there.

Hollie loves to dance. We've been trying to record her so that we can tell her she danced before she could walk, but it is hard to videotape her (she is really interested in our camera and has a hard time focusing on anything else when it is out). When Dave or I get up with her in the morning, we will turn on some music, lie down on the sofa, and watch her dance and dance and dance, grinning away. She loves dancing. She will dance to any song. Even fake songs. She will dance to whistling. She will dance to a repetition of beeps. The girl has the music in her. She can't help but dance.

Hollie really wants to walk. She can stand by herself pretty well now, at least for several seconds at a time, and she can take anywhere between two and six steps toward David or me on her own. When she isn't dancing, she is practicing walking. Crawling can get her around, sure, but she basically uses her ability to crawl to reach us so that we can help her practice walking. When I was a baby, I learned to walk when I was about nine and a half months old. I think Hollie is going to beat my record.

Here is some video documentation of Holl's early steps and dance moves. It's a bit longish, but I kept it all in because I know Hollie's grandmas won't be bored watching it. Keep in mind that we take most of our videos in the morning, so be kind to David's ridiculous clothes, my ridiculous laughter, and all the times you hear our voices in the background sounding a bit sleepy or loopy. The most boring part of the video is during the ABBA dancing scene when Hollie can't decide whether she wants to dance with Dad or crawl over to the television stand and dance on her own. She finally picks the latter. I then cut to the transition to the next song, but trust me: she danced all the way through "Money, Money, Money." This baby does not tire easily.

Finally, here are some pictures of our trip last month to visit family in Houston. Thanks to all of our family who took us in for two weeks and played with our baby (especially when it let David and I go on some dates, including one to see Moonrise Kingdom! Thank you, thank you!).

Brazos Bend State Park

Playing with Cousins Minnie and Luke.

Dancing to Dad's singing.

Reading with Cousin Faith.

Dancing with Cousin Luke.

Reading with Cousin Madison

Walking with the help of Cousins Charlotte and Claire.

Mixed feelings about being surrounded by several (but not nearly all) of her boy cousins.

My Dear Friend

My beautiful, dear, hilarious, intelligent, brave friend Ali passed away this morning. She lost her life when she stepped into the street to help a woman in a scooter accident; she didn't see the bus that was coming down the street as she stepped off the curb.

I don't know what do to with this thing that has happened. I feel that I want to record a few of my favorite Ali stories here so that I know that they are safe, so that I know that they can't be forgotten. I write this post for the girl who was in my cell phone as Ali Baba Nookie for the past six years, for the woman who was only just married this last November, who had everything ahead of her, and who has now gone ahead of all the rest of us here. Ali, I don't know what to do with you not being here, and I know that I am not alone in this sentiment. These stories are me missing you, us missing you, and hoping you are close, and hoping that you are warm, and hoping that you are smiling somewhere.

Our Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Adventure to Bear Lake. "Put these on," Ali said as I got into the car. "They're adventure hats." Yes, that's right. Ali had emergency adventure hats in the backseat of her car. How great is this woman? How irreplaceable!

I met Ali at Utah State. I was in my final year of my MA degree, and I was trying to find a cheap place to live for my last two semesters. Our town house was cheap and cheap. All of the roommates already knew, loved, and had lived with each other—I was the outsider. "You were supposed to find us," Ali told me once. "You are supposed to be our roommate."

I loved those girls. I loved Ali. Ali, Kaitlin, Lo, Yessica, Megan, and should-have-been-roommates-with-us Nicole. My abs and cheeks constantly hurt from laughing. We always stayed up too late.

I remember one night I was stuck in my office writing papers until after midnight. It was winter. There was fresh snow on The Quad, and I knew I would be lonely when only my footprints would mar the otherwise completely blank expanse of white under that bitter clear starry sky that only Logan-ites can really appreciate. As I collected my things, Ali sent me this text: "Come home quick! Kaitlin had a bad day so we are going down the stairs in cardboard boxes!"

I didn't get home in time to go down the stairs in a box myself, but I was welcomed home by a group of girls all piled on each other with broken remnants of boxes all around them. Midnight emergency roadtrips through nearby canyons were also not unheard of. I still have, in my iTunes, our "carpe diem" song list that we would sing-shout to as we drove through the forest in the dark. These are the songs that Ali, Yess, and I selected:

1. "Hakuna Matata" from The Lion King
2. "Fernando"—ABBA
3. "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun"—Cyndi Lauper
4. "A Horse with No Name"—America
5. "Bohemian Rhapsody"—Queen
6. "Smells Like Teen Spirit"—Nirvana
7. "Seize the Day"—Newsies
8. "Message in a Bottle"—The Police
9. "Changes"—Bowie
10. "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"—Rolling Stones
11. "Edge of Seventeen"—Stevie Nicks
12. the Duck Tales theme song
13. "I Think I Have a Chance with This Guy"—Strong Bad
14. "Under Pressure"—Bowie and Queen

Ali introduced me to a million great things, including Bear Lake's famous blackberry shakes.

Ali introduced me to Freaks and Geeks, and we watched all the episodes at least twice one semester. Later, when I was somewhat secretly in the LDS institute show choir, Ali and the gang came to one of my concerts and held up a big banner that said something like, "Our Car Bumper" in honor of the episode where Lindsay Weir wrecks her dad's car and then goes to a Mathletes competition. The "freaks" gang brings a bumper and holds it up to support her. Well, you just have to see the episode yourself. Ali's banner said, "WE LOVE YOU, EM!" on the back.

(I should also note that it was Ali who was always willing to watch my favorite part of Pete's Dragon with me when I was having a bad day, the "Money, Money, Money By The Pound" number that Dr. Terminus sings. THAT is real friendship.)

Spontaneous Cave Exploration

These following pictures document the time that we tried to make a Better-Than-Sex-Cake for Yess's birthday. The cake was gorgeous, but as it was cooling on our completely ghetto and safety-hazard back balcony, the worst happened—a gust of Logan wind blew the cake off the railing and face-down into the snow. "It's still good! It's still good!" Lo shouted as she dove into the chocolate disaster. Ali immediately jumped in, and I followed with a camera.

After eating half of the cake (without poor Yessica) on the balcony, in the snow, we finally salvaged the rest and returned inside.

 

 

 We ate the rest of the cake pretty cordially, but it didn't take long for things to turn into this:

I don't remember whose birthday these next photos document. All I remember is the orange cone that I think Lo might have had for some reason. Leave it to Ali to be the first to wear a cone-as-lampshade at a party.

Ali, do you remember the time we found a bird in our heating vents? Fear not, readers, it was still alive. We had heard banging in the pipes all morning, and we couldn't place the problem. I was eating cereal in the kitchen when my mouth dropped open and I found myself staring face-to-face with a small sparrow in the vent; the little guy kept poking his small beak through the vent, confused and lost and scared.

Ali unscrewed the vent to let the bird out, but it got spooked and flew deeper into the vents. She tried to coax it out with "here, Birdie birdie birdie," but that didn't work either. We thought bread might work, but, alas, none of us were very good at grocery shopping, and there was no bread in the house. Someone had, fortunately, baked a cake the night before, so Ali cut a small piece and placed it at the edge of the vent.

About twenty minutes later (dangerously close to when we all needed to leave to make it to class), the little bird emerged from the grate! What followed was a lot of laughing, screaming, and waving our arms to guide the bird not upstairs or downstairs as it seemed to be very keen on heading, but out the back door. Ali was the one to finally shepherd it to safety. I don't remember if we ate the piece of cake on the floor or not.

After Lo's concert.

These next photos document the day that Ali came home dressed as a Wookiee. I don't remember why. It doesn't really matter.

Only Ali could still look this adorable dressed in a monkey suit.

After we all graduated and moved on, we kept in touch. I'm so glad these girls kept me in their loop, even though I was technically the outsider, the girl who came at the very end of the adventures, who graduated and left earlier than the rest. When I got married in '09, Ali was the one to throw me my bachelorette party. And what a party it was. We carved cucumbers and danced without reservation to '80s music. It was so much fun. It was such the perfect night to my last evening as a single gal.

The next day, Ali and the gang came to my wedding reception and were my only guests to truly appreciate that David and I played Bowie's "As The World Falls Down" from Labyrinth for our newlywed dance. Thank you, Ali, for dancing at my wedding. Thank you for being there for me, for being such a selfless friend to so many of us, to people who will never be able to thank you enough.

Ali, Ali, Ali. My dear Ali Baba Nookie. You are so fearless. I want to be that fearless, that enthusiastic, that loving and giving. I hope it is okay with you that I share these stories here. We love you so much. We miss you miss you miss you.