Words of the Week #12

My elephant book got broken, but Dada fix it, made it all better. My elephant book hurt, Dada got medicine for elephant book and band aid for elephant book and fix it.

I'm going to dress up a purple Jawa for dragoncon. and E be a yellow jawa and F be a blue jawa and M be a pink jawa, okay Mata?

You have pretty shoes! (said to a little girl a bit older than she at the local zoo)

Play in the mud! It's bad to play in the mud?

Dada be a king, Mata be a queen.

Let's go play in my sandbox on the deck.

Like that sound?

Say cheese! I taking your picture. Just one more time, okay?

I draw whiskers on you.

Promises & Purple Jawas

One of the most important parenting values to me is keeping my promises. Promises made to a child are sacred. I want my daughter to be able to know without a doubt that when I promise her something, I really mean it. Never do I want it to be a phrase used to placate her, made with out any intention of remembering it. At times it is difficult to do and so tempting to conveniently forget mention of a cookie made earlier in the day when she doesn't seem to remember it at the time when it was promised. But I hate the thought of ignoring a promise so much that I will remind her of it instead.

Sometimes a promise will turn out to be a nice surprise, like the one fulfilled this morning. When evening came last night and A-chan wanted desperately to go play in her sandbox I had explained that we couldn't since it was dark but that I promised to go play with her in the sandbox first thing after breakfast today. And so we did. What really surprised me was how wonderfully pleasant the morning turned out to be. The weather was perfect with bright blue skies and fluffy white clouds and little breezes. It was a fantastic morning to spend outside. Realistically, without making that promise I might not have even opened the windows this morning!

It becomes a bit more of a sticky issue when the promise occurs months in advance. Like the one I made this evening. It began with a silly question and evolved into the invention of the purple jawa song. My husband maintains that he is completely innocent in this matter and takes none of the blame. But I have now promised that A-chan can dress up as a purple jawa at Dragoncon this year. Will she remember it in 4 months? With the help of the catchy theme song I'm betting that she will.

"I want to be a purple jaaaawaaaa,
At Dragon - Con this year!"

Sweet Little Memories

There are so many things that I'm afraid I will forget about A-chan's babyhood and toddlerhood. When I ask my mother things about my early years, much of it seems to have faded over time. I don't want that to happen with my memories of A-chan! That's what this blog is all about, I suppose :)

One of the extra special precious memories that I want to remember forever was a part of our going to bed ritual last night. After reading the book (the enchanted castle) on our bed, A-chan lay down on her Dada's pillow and pulled the covers up tight and then asked me to snuggle with her. "Come snuggle with me, Mata." It was so sweet! (Dada's snuggle time is morning) She patted my hair and my cheek and just grinned at me so hugely. Then she pressed her forehead against mine and pretended to go to sleep for about 30 seconds.

I don't want to forget how wonderfully sweet she is right now, how utterly cute she is and all those quirky little things she does that are so quintissentially A-chan!

Sand in the diaper

We bought a sand box for A-chan because of all the fascination that playing with dirt has suddenly held for her. Our hope is that we can say "no, that dirt isn't good for playing with, why don't you wait til we get home and play in your sand box?" and have it work :)

So far we've had it for a little over 24 hours and she definately loves it. What a nice afternoon sitting on the deck in the sun and breeze with her playing in the sand and me measuring yarn on my thankfully portable warping frame. She played long enough for me to measure out 132 pieces of yarn, 107 inches each. And then she played some more. My favorite part of sand is drawing in it. Hers appears to be burying things and then digging them back out.

The second picture is one of those that she will want to kill us for when she's about 15. She was soooo tired and we finally convinced her to nap about an hour after this shot was taken.

Pacifier free 1 day & counting...

We got A-chan to go to sleep without her paci last night! Of course it was a day without a nap, after dance class & swim class so she was totally exhausted. But it worked!

We told her that it was really hurting her teeth and her ability to communicate with us. She seemed to understand and said okay, that she would sleep without it.

Lately we had been able to tell a huge difference in her teeth and her speech that we believe is related to the use of the paci. We had to have some kind of definitive proof that it was detrimental to her to get us to take away something that our sweet girl loves so much.

We've been putting it off for so long because she has been extremely dependent upon the paci forever, and we've been dreading the day when we had to take it away - fearing that there would be dire tantrums and a flood of tears. It was actually a little anticlimactic how she just agreed that "pink paci hurting my teeth, no more pink paci." But what a huge relief as well. I've been so proud of her for giving it up!

Edit: So far it's been 6 days!! She did ask after pink paci today, but was willing enough to agree that she didn't need it anymore. Yahoo! The first night was no problem, but other nights she has been a bit restless, more so by far than when she did sleep with the paci. We have been amazed at how well it's gone and that she seems to truly understand the reason behind it.

Purple Faerie, Mata!

We went to the Renaissance Festival and A-chan was very happy indeed to be a faerie again. She remembered being a purple faerie last year and wanted to do it again, luckily she didn't mind the pink dress which was made with chiffon that I already had on hand and wasn't going to use for anything else :) She was very adamant in being a faerie, though, and asked to have her wings put on several times. Didn't like the crown very much cause it's still too big and kept falling off - she said she wants purple hair instead!

This is a picture of her bewilderment at the Mother Goose Gazebo where they had geese in costumes that you could pet. A-chan would pet the duck but didn't want anything to do with the geese.

It was a fun day but also very tiring and stressful. The best part for her, I think, was the boat swing. These very large wooden boats that swing really high: I was convinced that we'd get in it and she would get scared. Not at all the case, she loved it! She didn't want to stop. It was incredible and she smiled and giggled the whole time we were on the swing.

Later in the day she banged her head into a birdbath while chasing a bubble, and had a tantrum when we tried to convince her that it was time to leave the ren faire playground in search of vegetarian sustenance (which was actually not that bad a chore believe it or not!). A-chan also discovered a great new pastime- playing in the dirt. Not just any dirt, but red clay dirt. Yikes. We were horrified. And yet, she had an aching head from the birdbath incident and was going without a nap...so we let her play in the dirt rather than forcing the issue and have her start screaming in the middle of the dance performance we were at. I felt really guilty about her being so dirty and got a couple of disgruntled looks from the dancers over A-chan's 'toy'...

The Awalim troupe invited all the little kids in the audience up to dance and play music for a while so we and our friends with a small daughter convinced our girls to go up and have fun. A-chan enjoyed dancing with the other children and actually tried doing snake arms!

Little Five Points

After the zoo...

Above is a picture of the first new friend that A-chan made at Little 5 Points, in Atlanta. They couldn't get enough of each other! We ran into more kitties at Junkman's Daughter (which is an absolutely awesome store!) and also another little girl who wanted to pet the kitties. A-chan and she hit it off and started chattering away together and running through the store to discuss the interesting items like the selection of candy. One thing led to another and we asked the other little girl and her mother to join us for dinner at the indian restuarant nearby.

It was a lovely evening and everyone had a lot of fun. It was incredible to meet them, especially since A-chan doesn't seem to like many other children, but she just loved this little girl. Within about ten minutes of meeting they were hugging and holding hands walking down the parking lot. It was amazingly cute. (yes, we do know the little girl's name and her mother's, but we don't like using real names on the blog...)

She slept in her old travel bed for the night at the hotel (her Graco play yard). We honestly were worried about how she would sleep for a while before we went, didn't think that she would still fit in the old bed, but she did! At home, of course, she is still sleeping in her crib-bed. We've been told that we need to move her to a toddler bed but so far she isn't at all interested in climbing out and I'm perfectly happy with the bed the way it is.

We're Going to the Zoo!

The day before we were to visit the Atlanta Zoo I made the grave mistake of notifying A-chan of our weekend schedule. Since we were going to be staying in a hotel overnight I wanted to try and get her used to the idea before we left, hopefully to avoid any traumatizing. Pretty much all that we heard out of her the rest of the day, every five minutes, was the fact that we were going to the zoo. When were we going to the zoo. What we would see at the zoo. All day long.

The morning of the zoo trip dawned bright and bleary-eyed and our girl watched us getting ready and carrying out luggage and asked if we were going to Thailand now. I was floored. We hadn't mentioned Thailand or our trip there in quite a while (I think) and the fact that she connected the moving of our luggage with that event over a year ago is fascinating! We cleared things up a bit, but every now and then she would ask if we were going to Thailand later in the day.

We all had a blast at the zoo. She wanted to see the elephants first so we did, after eating our bento lunches. Then we were off to the tigers and pandas. Her squeaky shoes made quite the impression as always! Her favorite animal of the day was the panda she said. They had these little panda stamp thingies on the way out of the panda area that you could have a stamp on your hand. Ketu got one and we tried to interest A-chan in one but she wouldn't go for it. About an hour and a half later, in the car driving away, she goes "I want a panda on my hand!" lol.

When the male tiger back into the little pool in their enclosure and laid down he got his backside all wet. A-chan's comment about this was, "look, tail all messy!"

Little 5 points was our destination for dinner and as one might expect we were magnets for the kitties around there. A handsome black long hair made A-chan's acquaintance on the main street and two grey short hairs followed her around the store when we visited Junkman's. The Hello Kitty store wasn't there any longer, but we found some really cute HK stuff at Junkman's.

To Be Continued...

Tunnel Vision

The honesty of small children is often harsh but unfailing. Take this tunnel, for instance. When our friends gave it to us, two of their daughters were distraught over it leaving even though they hadn't been interested in it for months. A-chan was sympathetic for a moment the next morning as she viewed the tunnel in our house for the first time and said, "Poor M, Poor F, so sad." Then she grinned hugely and went, "Look, A-chan's tunnel!"

M and F when asked if they wanted to visit A-chan on a seperate occasion indicated that no, they wanted to go see A-chan's toys, lol.

There has not been a day so far that the tunnel hasn't seen a huge amount of playing from A-chan. We were very surprised that the cats aren't interested in it at all. She loves it, though. Sometimes she will push it into different rooms in order to play.

Words of the Week #11

Can I want a cookie?
Can you get it?
I worried about Dada.
My cup got lost!
I had fun swimming in pool.
It's raining out there. Our hair gets wet! I like it hair get wet, we get clean in a bath.
I think it's summertime.
See squirrel jumping like A-chan does? Where a squirrel go? I think she peekabo in trees.
We don't have steps or stairs in our home, but green couch in our home.
We go to swim class but first we need go to grocery store, like that sound?

Frozen Spring

It had been promising to be a beautiful and wonderful late spring with flowers and trees in full bloom as far as the eye could see and then Mother Nature blasted us with freezing temperatures. Because most of A-chan's wintery clothes were already out of circulation after weeks of 80-90 degree weather, when the 30s and 40s hit it was grab what I could mode before we ran out the door. And so it was that nothing she wore that day matched!

We had fun, though, as we visited with Grandma, Grandpa and the doggies. Poor G&G though, when I asked A-chan who she was excited about seeing the most she said the doggies. Ahh, the honesty of little children :)

My big oops of the day involved forgetting A-chan's drink cup at home. She didn't have anything to drink with our lunch and I only noticed it when her diaper was still dry after a meal...*sigh* I couldn't believe that I'd completely forgotten! She did very very well at drinking out of a big cup for the first time and has now gotten very vocal about it if I forget to get her a cup at a meal.

One of the big attractions at G&G's house are the metal animals on the back deck which A-chan likes to feed Nandina berries. There is a fish hanging up high, a frog, a rooster and a dog. I'm pretty surprised that she isn't afraid of them seeing as how she's scared of many other inanimate objects like that. Feeding them berries was a lot of fun.

It's horribly depressing to look out at the yard after the freeze. Everything is wilted and brown where just a few days ago it was lovely and colorful and vibrant. I'm glad that A-chan still had so much fun.

Movie Madness

There aren't a lot of movies that we will watch with A-chan yet, especially since we don't approve very much of Disney films. The amount of Studio Ghibli movies that we watch is rather obvious, though we still don't watch the newer ones because while they are excellent they are a little too scary for our 2.5 year old. We also watch a surprising amount of anime and again we are careful to limit it to that which isn't overtly scary. What might be surprising is that we can watch old Samurai-type movies with her. Now, that being said, we haven't exactly seen a whole lot of those either and what we have seen are films by the indomitable Akira Kurosawa.

While there is a bit of violence to them, none of it is bloody, gory, atrociously vulgar stuff. And though for her it's all in another language (she has yet to see the wonderfulness of subtitles that we do) it's still somewhat understandable to her. In particular it is the amazing facial expressions that seem to carry across the bits of story for her. And we have been impressed that she will sit still and watch the movies with us, though not all the way through as yet. There is a point at about half an hour's worth where she will get down and go play a little bit, but she will occassionally come back to check on the movie and see what is going on.

We just finished watching "Hidden Fortress" a couple of nights ago. I think the only truly bad part was at the very beginning where a soldier was killed and actually had blood on him, the only time we saw any blood during the entire movie. The two peasants were riveting, their facial expressions carrying across the story over the impediment of language. I think that A-chan liked them :) She kept calling General Makabe (Yay, Mifune!! I am such a Mifune fangirl now.) the bad guy, lol. Anyway, she watched the whole thing with us and while I would not say she was riveted, she at least didn't get bored and go to turn off the tv either. It is interesting that "Hidden Fortress" influenced her other absolute favorite (non-ghibli) film of all time: Star Wars. I love knowing things like that, it's just too neat!

So the point of this post is that Akira Kurosawa films are not altogether bad things for toddlers to watch perhaps. And they are absolutely excellent things for adults to watch.

A Girl Who Loves Bubbles

Twice in two days I have been extremely surprised by the attention span of my toddler when bubbles are around. I am beginning to think that she can play with them forever if she were allowed to. The fascination that spherical floaty shiny objects that go pop have for toddlers is pretty fascinating in itself.


Last Friday we were having dinner at my mother's house where a bottle of bubble stuff is always kept just in case A-chan might want us to blow some. Of course it usually only takes her 5 minutes between stepping over the threshold and asking for bubbles. I blew bubbles that night until I was almost hyperventilating. It may not truly have been an hour's worth, but it sure felt like a lot longer, lol.

Then the very next day we went to S & L's house and there was even more bubble stuff - this time really cool ones that were scented like fruit! Again, she had them both blowing bubbles for a long, long time. It was so adorable to watch her chase them
in the wind and try to pop them before they popped on their own. The only way to get her to go back inside was to bribe her with the as yet unopened bottle of bubbles. By the end of the day she was so exhausted, but she was so happy!