Happy New Year

Happy New Year! The girls partied all night and slept in for days. Tana is adding quite a few words to her vocab these days..."dog", "dare" for there, "mow", "moo", "hi dare", "mama mow mow" (point at kitty), and "me me me me" :) She cruises around saying "mow mow mama me me me me hi dare moo moo moo mama mow me me me". Laney, our mute child, doesn't say anything at all...well maybe just a little...or a constant stream of endless conversation! Her sentence structure surprises me every day! She will occasionally get the tense of a word mixed up, but she blows my mind by the things that come out of her mouth. She has some imaginary friends...the first one Don I mentioned along time ago, then Stephanie, here lately it's Steve and Terry. Laney says "Steve yells at Tana when she gets too close to the Christmas Tree." Then she says that "Terry is daddy's friend, in the big black cowboy hat, she's my friend, wanna meet her? She's Jack and June's sister, she lives at their house. She's my sister too." Sooooo anyway...I told her I definitely wanted to meet Terry...boy or girl. Steve, however, "gets grumpy, and sometimes he is grouchy." We got a new dog, Nap is his name...he's a half brother to Molly and looks a lot like Lee did. He's about 10 or 11 months, and such a sweetie. He is very aggressive when he works and looks like he's going to be an awesome addition to our family. Newt gets a little bent out of shape when Nap kisses his girls. Newt finally quit growling and picking small fights once they worked together and Newt realized that Nap was one of his people...worked like he does...but he still will just push himself in between Nap and me or Tana or Laney if any of us are getting any love from Nap. Jo doesn't seem to mind him. He came up to her the first time, they stood cheek to cheek, Jo got kind of stiff, they stood there a minute, then he wagged his tail and went off. There is just an understanding anymore that Jo just rules! She's happy to have more help, and Newt is working very well together with Nap so Jo is able to have more time off. Laney got a haircut this week. Her hair was just so tangly and her ends were so scraggly. She came to me one day and said "mom I need a haircut, my hair is just all crazy." She first told me that she wanted it all cut off, like Dad's...I told her that Dad's was pretty short and we couldn't braid it or make it pretty if we cut that much off...she really wanted it all cut off. I just gave it a trim, and about an hour later she burst into tears and said "mom I wanna put my dead ends back on."