And a Happy Birthday to Lauren!

One of the great things about being part of a large family is that sometimes the blog posts just write themselves. Here’s a video that Lauren’s sister Annie (Aunt Annie to Nora & Quinn) put together after a recent trip to the apple orchards.

Thanks, Annie!

Nora and her old buddy McKinley take phone calls on the stairs.

What you’re looking at is a brand-spanking new design for FSI. From here on (unless there’s a massive revolt), all posts will live in one convenient place — on the main page. Here’s a quick list of things that are new and receiving some ongoing thought…

• Thumbnails (or no thumbnails) for Picture of the Day posts. For now I’m going to try no thumbnails to see how it feels and what it buys us. I think it’ll allow more long-form posts to evolve out of PODs — no longer should we need to decide if a picture is strictly a POD, or a regular post. The hope is that they can all live in harmony without having to push Lauren’s writing too far off the page. (to counter that, I’ve also increased the amount of posts that fit on a page from 5 to 15)
• Speaking of Lauren’s writing, the blog should be more readable than ever with an increased font size and comfortable line length.
• Twitter, at last. Up there on top of the sidebar column, you’ll see a place to catch up on the latest Nora quotes (one day Quinny!) and the rest of us. Integrating that wasn’t easy, so I’ll be keeping an eye on it over the next few days. It’s not perfect in my eyes, but it’s close enough for now.
• Post comments. Right now they’re pretty tucked away visually. I’ll find a way to elevate them. In the meantime, you can always see the latest comments on the sidebar.
• I haven’t tested the design in all browsers yet, but it works great in Chrome, Safari, and decently enough in Firefox. I’ll make sure it works perfectly in each of them soon enough.

Redesigns generally aren’t fun for site visitors, so I hope you’re able to give it some time, settle in, and see how it feels! Please send me feedback if you’ve got ideas that’ll make it better. Lastly, many thanks are due to Lauren for putting up with my endless second guessing, tweaking, and multiple restarts that went into this redesign.

Okay. All done. Now keep scrolling to enjoy today’s Picture of the Day. :)

I think we all know how this battle ended on Saturday. (let’s keep it clean, Annie) :)

It all started early this morning around 6 am. Quinn was crying for an early breakfast. After she ate, I put her back in her crib and came back to my bed. Not five minutes after I got back in, I heard her coughing over the monitor. I gave her a few minutes and went to check on her after she started crying.

She was sitting up in bed and her face seemed awfully reflective in the dim light of the hallway nightlight. Switching on her overhead light, all I saw was wetness all over her face. As my eyes focused a bit better I saw it was a combination of snot (to be expected, she’s getting over a cold), tears, and spit up. A lot of spit up. I actually blame her cold — I think she gagged on some of her sinus drainage. (Stop me if I start getting gross and descriptive, ‘kay?) It was all over her hair, the right side of her pajamas, and in a huge puddle in her bed. Trying not to panic that she’d barely missed choking on her own spit up, I started cleaning her up and changing her sheets. She was super perky for some reason. I think she thought it was time to play.

I convinced her to go back to bed and thought perhaps I could squeeze a few more minutes of rest in. But no sooner did I get back in my bed than I heard Nora get out of hers. Ah well, it was pretty much time to get Nora and Josh off to church anyway. We had already decided Quinn and I would hunker down at home.

After seeing them off, Quinny and I went back to sleep until 10! It was amazing. I felt so relaxed and rested.

It was not to last. I should also mention that before this afternoon, her cold was my main concern. I checked on her at night and during her naps to make sure she didn’t have a fever or was in any other general discomfort. Hmmph. Little did I know…

Quinn and I hung out downstairs until she was ready for her second nap. I laid her down and she seemed all snug and cozy in her little crib. Josh had dropped Nora off and headed back out. I was giving Nora a snack while making Christmas plans with my mom over the phone when I heard Quinn wake up and start fussing. She was pretty quiet about it, so I waited a few minutes to see if she was going to go back to sleep. She started crying a little harder so I headed up the stairs calling, “I’m coming, Quinny!” I opened the door and saw an empty crib.

You read that correctly.

My 8 month old was sitting on the floor next to her crib. Just sitting there. Not really crying, just sitting there. Next to her crib. Not in it. Next to it. I’m pretty sure it was my cry of “QUINNY! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” that made her wail. She seemed fine and calmed down the moment I picked her up. I, however, was completely unnerved. Should she be crying? Was she in shock? What happened??? I searched for bruises or scrapes or some sort of injury. I couldn’t think very clearly and wasn’t sure I would be able to reach Josh so I called my mom back in a slight panic.

“Quinn fell out of her crib!”

“Wait, what?”

Exactly, Mom. EXACTLY!

This made no sense. I ended up making my mom come over to help me observe her behavior and watch for any warning signs. Which was trickier than it should have been because, after all, she was getting over a bad cold and wasn’t quite back to her normal self anyway. So we were looking for “normal, not normal, a cold but getting over it” behavior.

I didn’t trust myself at this point. How on earth did she fall out? I felt so guilty and terrible but had seriously not seen this one coming. She has never (before now) pulled herself up to stand as far as I know. Once I walked in to see her holding onto the bars resting on her knees. But never standing, let alone climbing over a railing!(Horrible!) I hadn’t heard a thump or anything. Granted, I had been on the phone, but that’s the kind of noise that would usually send Remy into a tizzy. But he had been calm the entire time, too. Way to go, Remy. We’ve trained him too well to be quiet during naps.

The wonderful, amazing, relieving news is that she seems fine. She even seems to be feeling better from her cold bug.

Nora took the news in stride and calmly told Mom during her observation visit, “Quinny fell out of her crib.” No big deal. I must have done too good a job playing it cool in front of her.

Josh came home, gave her a huge hug and immediately lowered her mattress.

Me—I’m ready for bed.

A few weeks ago, we rolled up our sleeves to attempt Potty Training for a second time. We talked some different strategies and approaches and asked for lots of input. One idea we heard was to have a toy at the toy store that we would go and visit. But we couldn’t take the toy home until Nora was using the potty.

So we took Nora to Target (Is there any other store?) and found a Belle doll. We explained before we even set foot in the store that Belle would NOT becoming home today. We were just going for a visit. So we let her see it, hold the box a moment, and then went home. And stayed home for several days. We put a picture of the doll on the wall and kept pointing to it. “Don’t you want the Belle doll?!?!?” We even had a whole story about how Belle had to use the potties in her castle. Princesses have to live in clean, dry castles and can’t have wet floors. Desperate.

Nora slowly earned pink sticker after pink sticker. One evening around 6:30pm, she earned the last one. Despite the fact that it was nearing bedtime for her and Quinn, we immediately packed everyone up and shipped out to Target.

Heading into the store…

At the end where she’s saying, “Run, run!” it sounds like she was super excited and eager to get into the store. While that was true, it was more because she was very nervous that an approaching car was getting too close for comfort. While I applaud her caution, I promise it was plenty far enough away.

As you can tell, Nora was thrilled to be out of the house. She’d been quarantined for almost a week. FREEDOM IN THE WIDE, WHITE AISLES OF TARGET!!!!!

To the Pink Aisle!

At last!

That night, she proudly tucked Belle in next to her. Under the covers and everything. Best friends.

Of course, after all that, Belle has been taking a nap for a long, long time (as in days) in a doll bed in the playroom . . . I can’t resist- Who does she think she is, Sleeping Beauty? Ba dum ding!

So we went to a number of weddings this past month…