Secondhand information

So the last few weeks I've been emailing my brother (he's on a mission in Albania), and after I email him I think "I should go blog. But I don't feel like typing it all up again." So this morning I decided I'll just copy paragraphs from the last few emails to him and slap them up here on my blog. It's better than nothing, which is what you'd get otherwise. So be grateful!

From 12/28:
I bet John told you that thing about your mission being the most exhausting part of your life BEFORE he had his third kid. We are EXHAUSTED! Malachi is a great baby. He is happy and laid back and sleeps well. And he loves his sisters! He will just smile and laugh and talk to them for ages, if they'll stay still long enough to engage him. Jaina likes to ay her head on his belly and say "awww". Jaina's vocabulary is growing so amazingly fast. She's picking up one to two new words a day. It is so fun to hear her talk. My favorite is when she drops something and says "Oh no! I sowwy!" and when she loses her balance and says "whoa!" She is a cute little girl. Libby starts primary next week! Crazy! It's a lot of fun to talk to her. You can have real conversations with her now. She's pretty hilarious. Christmas was great. Libby kind of got the whole Christmas thing this year. Her favorite part was the Christmas lights on the houses. She liked to go for drives to "see Christmas and go to the candy store to get candy canes. Mm-mm, yummylicious!" We had a small Christmas, and a quiet one. It was nice. Christmas Eve we went up to Mike and Joyce's to have schnitzel with her extended family. It was loud :) Oh, and we had a white Christmas! In Texas! It snowed all day and night on Christmas Eve, but didn't start sticking until night-time. So we ended up with about an inch. So the girls got to go out and play in the snow for the first time on Christmas Day. They loved it. We are currently on our third round of winter illness. I had a stomach flu a couple weeks ago, and now Libby and I have really bad head colds with fevers. Malachi and Jaina have stuffy noses. John is in the clear so far. I took some benadryl this afternoon about 90 minutes before John got home. Big mistake! It kicked in after about 30 minutes, and that last hour before he got home is a haze. I don't really remember it. I turned a movie on in there somewhere and managed to not drop the baby. When John got home I staggered to bed. I couldn't sleep because the girls kept screaming (Jaina didn't nap today and Libby was up from midnight to 2:30 am this morning), but I couldn't get out of bed because the benadryl had me all loopy and I couldn't stand up. So I just laid there staring at the ceiling for an hour until it wore off. Man!

From 1/12:
Sarah's wedding was beautiful, and she was gorgeous! During the ceremony, she and Luis were holding hands, and Sarah was literally bouncing up and down with excitement, and swinging their hands like they were a couple of little kids. It was so cute! I was really glad I got to go. Malachi did great the whole trip, hardly crying, until the flight home. He screamed the whole flight. It was great. While I was in NC, whenever I called home Libby would say "Mama, come home! I'll come get you!" Ever since my return on Sunday night she's been giving me gifts of scraps of paper, fruit snacks, toys, etc. She'll walk up and say "Mama, this is for you". It's really sweet.

From 1/24
Libby is obsessed with dinosaurs. She watches Land Before Time at least once a day. Most of what she says these days is quoted from the movie. When she sits down to eat, she'll sniff her plate and say "I smell...I smell...I smell...mmm, Ducky". She'll randomly shout "Green food! The Great Vally! I found it! I fo-ound it!" She eats grass in the backyard, claiming she is a dinosaur eating "green food". She calls Jaina "Cera" and says to her "Come on, Cera, I found green food!" after she dumps dry cereal on the carpet. And she asks us to play "Dinosaur", which consists of John and I pretending to be "Sharp Tooths" while she head butts us until we fall over. She calls John "Daddy T-Rex" and calls me "Mother", and herself "Littlefoot". We went to the library yesterday and she refused to look at any book that wasn't about dinosaurs. And they had to be "real dinosaurs", not children's story books. She wants the kind of books you would get if you were doing a 4th-grade science project on dinosaurs. At night when we put her to bed she says to us "Go out and shut the door. I want to read dinosaur books." She's pretty hilarious. I wish I could find a copy of that dinosaur song tape you used to have when you were a kid. She would love that. She just bit John on the butt! Jaina is learning multiple new words a day. It's fun when she throws out a new word or phrase. And she loves to sing. She'll do a mash-up of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star", "Old McDonald", and "We are the Dinosaurs". And she screams every time Libby looks at her because she thinks Libby is going to take whatever iis she has. Which is usually true. She calls Malachi "Kai-Kai" and likes to alternately steal his binky and shove it in his mouth. Which is probably why he's ways getting sick :) She mimics a lot of what Libby does, growling, roaring, stomping, spinning, screaming. It's really cute. Libby likes to make her laugh during meal times. Malach is 4 months old now. He rolled over from his back to his front for the first time last night. He'll forget then that he knows already how to go from his front to his back, and he'll cry because he's stuck and doesn't like being on his tummy. He's pretty huge, the biggest of all the kids. He's chubby, not fat. He's just proportionally huge. He likes to lay in the middle of the floor, and the girls will run around him in circles, screaming, of course, and he will laugh and laugh. And he likes to eat his toes. He's becoming a thumb-sucker, too.

From 2/1:
Last week LIbby was introduced to the wonders of chocolate pudding, only she calls it "chocwate pootie". She'll have a whole conversation with you about "pootie". It's hilarious. Another day she told John and I to "sit down and listen!". She held up a peice of paper and did a little presentation. We never really pinned down the subject, but she went one for about 2 minutes about random stuff. It was cute. Jaina and I got sick. Malachi got better, then got sick again. He had a well-baby check-up today, but didn't get any shots because he's all goopy again. We've been put on quarantine. We're not allowed to take the kids out of the house until spring. You'd think that would be hard, but we haven't been out in weeks already anyway. We're technically inactive at church because of all these illnesses. They did a nasal swab on Malachi to see if it grows any bacteria in the next few days. If it does, then antibiotics should kick it out. If it doesn't, then we basically wait until spring. Bad of me to say, but I'm hoping it's bacterial. While Mom and Dad got half a foot of snow, we got 33 degrees and rain, rain, rain. No wonder we're all sick. Today the sun is shining and I kicked the girls out to play. Who cares if it's only 40 degrees? Go outside and play! They didn't last long :) To be quite honest, I'm going a little stir-crazy in this little house!