Everyone has a pet sin, right?

Pet sins are perhaps the most difficult to get rid of and the answer why is simple: because we like the sin. Rachel enjoys her Sin so much, you might call them buddies. She's going to have a hard time when she has to give her Sin up.

We just got back from spending the weekend with the Masons on the Red Sea. Rachel made up a new nickname for Finn, like she does for most of her little buddies. She calls him Sin and we've been joking about that all weekend.

She walks around yelling his name, "Si-in! Sin! Sin! SIN!"

At times she sounded like an evangelical preacher, but other times she sounded more like the devil that sits on your left shoulder and urges you to sin.

"Umon, Sin!" (Translation: Come on, Sin!)

And we couldn't help but make fun.

"Uh-oh! Rachel pulled a Sin!" and "Do you love Sin, Rachel?" were just a few of the many jokes we cracked.

It's kind of a humorous nickname, I think, but I wouldn't recommend actually naming a child Sin.

This weekend Rachel also started saying "No-not," which is an infamous quote by her friend Sam, who she calls Mas. Sometimes when she's really serious she'll say, "No, no, no, no, NO-NOT!!"

We thought the timing for this was a little odd considering she hasn't seen Sam since we babysat the Lewises a week and a half ago. I happen to think it's hilarious, though, and we already know the opposite of "no-not" because the Lewises already figured it out. It's "yes-do!" So whenever Rachel says "no-not" we say "yes-do." Still, I don't know why she chose this weekend to start saying that when it's been so long since her last exposure to Sam.

Rachel also learned how to say my name this weekend. Being around Melissa and Patrick (not my brother, but Finn's dad and Melissa's husband), Rachel heard a lot more of my name than she ever has in her life because, oddly enough, Melissa and Patrick don't call me Mommy or Honey. It was a little strange to hear "Nancy" coming out of Rachel's mouth; I don't think she ever clued in that Nancy meant me but it was still strange to hear.

Also, we discovered that, like my little brother Patrick, Rachel likes necks. She spent about half of her nights at the Red Sea on a cot--and she didn't fall out of bed once, which I thought was impressive. It's hard to sleep in a new place though, so when she would wake up and discover, much to her elation, that Mommy and Daddy were asleep in the same room she was in, she would demand to come in bed with us.

There she would cup her hands around my neck until she was calmed down and then she would stroke and kiss my neck until she fell asleep. It dawned on me one night, while I was trying to get her to stop kissing me and go to sleep, that she's been doing that a lot lately, even during the day. When she's scared she grabs my neck. When she's happy she kisses my neck. When she's sad she strokes my neck. When I carry her and ask her to hold on she takes both hands and cups them around my neck...but only in the front so she's not really holding on. She loves necks.

Patrick loved necks when he was little, too.

When Rachel is alone and needs comfort, though, she turns to her bellybutton. She'd rub her bellybutton off if that were possible. She plays with it when she's bored or scared or lonely. When we put her in zippered footed pyjamas she unzips them to her navel so she can play with it in her sleep.