The Abbott Family Web Site

I’m not sure where Josie gets her stubborn streak. I’ve told Steve that it must be from him because I’m sure it’s not me. *wink wink* He laughs and gives me this look. Between the Fornia blood in me and the German blood from my mom’s side, I’m sure it can’t be me. Whoever she gets it from, Josie has been demonstrating lately that she is stubborn and has a will all her own. We are still working on encouraging her to walk on her own. She’s more comfortable taking a few steps between people and will even take a few steps away from furniture over to me. But she really doesn’t want to go off walking on her own. She did surprise us the other night by standing up next to her box of books and then taking 5 or 6 steps towards the kitchen. She was holding a small bag that she plays with and I think she didn’t even realize what she was doing. So we’re getting closer but it’s definitely a slow process. On the other side of the coin, her language is great. I counted recently and she has around 50 words that she uses and there are days where she picks up 2-3 new ones. I love that she talks to me now. She also loves to tell us what a doggy says (“oof oof”), what a duck says (“ack ack”), and what a bird says (“peep peep”). We’ve been working on cat and cow but she hasn’t quite gotten those down yet.

I weighed Josie before her bath last week and she was up to 19.5 pounds. We’ll be taking her for her 18 month checkup next month so we’ll get a more accurate weight then. Hopefully she’ll be past the 20 pound mark. Although she’s not as willing to try “big girl food” as I’d like, we are making progress on moving away from baby food. She eats a lot though and let’s us know when she’s full. She is currently into “sticks”, or as she calls them “ti”. They are similar to small cheetos puffs that come in a couple different flavors. She is always asking for them. And she will inhale anything chocolate. Definitely my daughter! She must have eaten about half of the molten lava cake that we had at the Chart House.

We went to the Clark County Fair last week and had a great time. It’s a good size fair with quite a bit of vendors and 4-H activities to look at. I think Josie’s favorite was looking at the 4-H dogs. She loved woofing to all the dogs. We also had a chance to see the cross-stitch and knitting that Grammy entered into the competition. She won third place for her cross-stitch (all Disney themed) and won a first place blue ribbon for the sweater she knitted. Josie really liked the sweater.

As usual, Josie insisted on saying hi to pretty much everyone she saw. And she was very excited when they would say hi back. I think we’re pretty lucky that she is as social and friendly as she is. We also played a couple of scratch-it lottery tickets at the lotto booth and I won $20!! That was the first time I’ve won any lottery.

Josie is very excited, although she doesn’t know it yet, to be going for an extended sleepover to Grammy and Pappaw’s house soon. Steve and I will be going on an anniversary trip to Reno and Josie will get to stay with my parents for almost a week. She has had a couple of sleepovers with them where she spent the night but it’s always been just one night. I’m not sure who I’m worried more about, her or them… She is such an active little girl now that it can be quite exhausting to spend all day with her. Of course, if you have books to read and you don’t mind reading them over and over and over then you can usually entertain her for a while. She’s quite the little bookworm. We have to keep introducing new books to her library because we get so tired of them since we’re reading them all the time. But it’s worth it to us because we are thrilled that she loves to read as much as she does.

Josie’s latest fascination seems to be with balloons (“bu”). I’m not sure how she spots them but it doesn’t matter how far away they are or how hidden, she can find them. She points out every balloon in every store we go to. I had been trying to find a decent looking one for a couple of days to buy for her but the ones in the stores seemed to be partially deflated and we couldn’t find anyone to blow up a new one. However, yesterday we found a good looking stash of them at Fred Meyer and Josie got to take home her very own purple star “Happy Birthday” balloon. She’s been so excited to play with it.

I think that’s all that’s new for now. If I can think of anything else I’ll be sure to post. Hope everyone is having a fantastic summer!

About two weeks ago we lost a dear old friend. You can see him standing guard outside of our house, as he’d done for the previous 30 years or more.

I’m talking about our stately and beautiful gumball tree. I was so excited when I moved in to have a gumball tree. I remember them from when I was little. Unfortunately, it kept growing and growing. Steve would spend hours and hours every week raking the leaves during the fall. It looked like it had even more leaves than ever this year. And then in the spring/summer the gumballs started dropping and they sure hurt to step on in your bare feet. During a couple of our snow/ice/wind storms we’ve lost large limbs off the tree and have been lucky that they landed in the yard and not on the house or cars. So we started talking about having it removed. I felt terrible about it because it was such a gorgeous tree and if there wasn’t anything wrong with it, except being so much work, then was it right to cut it down? But we finally agreed and had it removed. It was a very sad morning, with many tears shed by me. We came to find as the tree was cut up that in fact it did have some issues. Something, we think perhaps a beetle, had been boring into the bark. And many of the large limbs seemed to be rotting from the inside. It would only have been a matter of time before they fell. I didn’t feel quite as bad about cutting it down after these findings. Here is the finished product:

Our house looks a bit bigger and there is definitely more light coming into the living room. I think a lot of the plants and grass in the front yard are grateful to have more sun now. And Steve has agreed to help me plant a few smaller trees and fix up the flower bed in the front. We are thinking some flowering cherry or dogwoods would be nice. We will probably also put an arch there so I can finally have my honeysuckle that I’ve wanted as well as a place to move the clematis if/when we add on to the back of the house and I have to find a new home for it. We will also hopefully put in a new lightpost since the one there is broken after some vandals decided to smash it last Halloween. In the long run, it was the right decision to have the tree removed. It was just a very hard decision to make.