Topping the list of things I let slide when we move across the country* are the following:
1. blogging;
2. taking photos;
3. brushing Alice's hair;
4. refraining from drinking caffeine.
Baking things, making the bed, and returning phone calls are all closely tied for #5.
I fired up the "machine" (as Mom would call it) this afternoon, and opened Blogger to find two sad, half-finished blog posts sneering at me. So, rather than make that three half-finished posts, I'm going to crank this out and do my best to hit "publish" before it's time to feed the baby. So get ready for some stream of consciousness writing, unedited photos, and questionable grammar.
Joanna is a dream baby! She's been eating every 3 hours or so during the day and has only been waking once per night between when we put her down at 9pm or so and when she wakes at around 6:30 or 7am.
Have I just jinxed myself by writing that down? I'll let you know tomorrow.
She is all smiles these days. Her face lights up at the sounds of that stereotypical high-pitched baby talk that I swore I would never use when I was pregnant with Alice. But, it's so effective! Babies eat it up! It's completely addictive. One afternoon, during a particularly productive baby talk session, Alice, thrilled with her sister's big grins, exclaimed, "And that's why we call you Smiley Jo!"
Needless to say, "Smiley Jo" is a nickname we're keeping, adding it to the regular rotation with Jojo, Joji,
Jojarina, and Joey.
Big sis Alice has been alternating between heart-warmingly affectionate and frustratingly stubborn lately.
Cranky in Colorado
As an example of the former, the other morning, as I was holding Joanna in our bed,
Alice crawled up, gave her a big kiss and said "I love you, Joji. Will
you be my best friend?"
I spilled some water the other day, and as I was muttering some un-child-friendly words under my breath, Alice scurried over and said, "That's okay, sweetie. You can just clean it up. Just try your best." I'm hoping that's what she hears from me when she spills something, and not the aforementioned muttered words.
She's become a lot more imaginative lately too. Yesterday, I walked over to her at the park to tell her it was time to leave and she reached down into the air next to her, and mimed as if she were grabbing something with each of her hands. I asked her what she was doing and she responded, "Juss getting my princess stuff." Right.
She's adapted surprisingly well to the upheaval of the move, but some of the concepts are still a little fuzzy with her. She has asked about (and confirmed) that California has both dessert and Santa Claus (she asked specifically about both), but we have had to explain at least ten times why some of our stuff is not with us (it's on a truck, coming from Colorado), whether everything we see out the car window is or isn't California (yes, it's all within the state of California), and why we were driving a minivan instead of our Forester (because now that we have two kids, we are legally obligated to show the world that we are no longer cool**).
I have a love/hate relationship with packing peanuts.
One more thing that I want to write down so I don't forget. Alice has trouble pronouncing the letter "l". Not that it has impeded her from talking (
tawking) from sunup to sundown, but it's noticeable and adorable. Our favorite words that result from this difficulty are "girl" and "squirrel", which come out as "gore" and "sklir". Sometimes I point to ladies on the street and ask Alice, "Is that a boy?" just to see her roll her eyes and sigh, "No mom, that's a gore."
No room in the diaper bag for the DLSR, but there's always room for the phone.
Time's up! My darling little bomb, set to detonate every three hours during the day if she's not fed, is about to go off. Hope to have more updates from sunny California soon.
* Is a Colorado to California move
considered "across the country"? Geography is not my forte, but
exaggerating is, so we're sticking with it.
** We were never cool. Do cool people even say "cool" anymore?
Hand-holding n' such 
