Hot Stuff!

We are a household with one spicy food lover, one spicy food hater and one yet undecided but leaning towards loving spicy food maybe. I love hot and spicy food. As hot as I can get it. I am known to add cayenne pepper to everything from mac'n'cheese to soy-turkey sandwiches to tomato soup and brownies. Ketu is more conservative and prefers mostly bland to relatively mild foodstuffs. He always tries to order mild food at the Indian restaurant and regrets it horribly when he lets the older women who take our order talk him into getting medium.

So far A-chan has a penchant for hot and spicy food. *yay!* She loves salsa and will eat it to the exclusion of what one might otherwise consider to be 'real' food. When we went to the mexican restaurant recently I noticed that she was refusing her salsa. Uh-oh, I thought, it was too good to last. But after I stole her salsa bowl for my own nefarious purposes, adding lovely bunches of the hot sauce they keep on the table, she asked for it back and ate the whole thing! The next time we went to the restaurant she asked me to add the hot sauce for her.

Ketu and I both like hot mustard, though. Give us Dijon or Gulden's brown mustard and we're happy. I had held off on giving A-chan any, thinking that it might be too much for her. The other day I added tiny drops of mustard to her lunch tray as part of the design and she ate some, liked it and every bite of hot dog thereafter had to have mustard on it in order to get eaten.

Although she seemed to like spiciness in salsa and indian foods, I hadn't yet tried any asian foods with spice to them. At dinner last night she came and asked to try what I was having (Thai green curry with spice almost to the spoon-melting-point, rice and fried tofu with szechuan hot dipping sauce - which was very different from what she and Ketu were eating). I warned her that it was hot and spicy rice and did she still want to try it? Indeed she did. I gave her a small mouthful and watched her eat, then had this conversation:

me: "Was that good? Do you like spicy rice?"

A-chan: "mm-hmm, yep."

pause

A-chan: "make mouth feel better. drink punch."

me: "would you like more spicy rice?"

A-chan: "okay!"

me: "are you sure?"

A-chan: "like spicy rice, a-chan yes"

pause

A-chan: "make more punch, please?"

Words of the week #5

scuse me dada; I got to move
make tongue feel better
i love you toastie, i give you hug
wash a-chan lady, all by self!
i sit on my couch
what's wrong?
dada happy, mata happy, a-chan happy, all happy!
dada likes tofu (he'd asked for a bite of her pickle so that maybe she would eat the bit of tofu on her fork, but she switched and gave him the tofu instead...)
I love blue buggy
A-chan, Hello Kitty ride blue buggy at grocery store
tickle you? you funny!
eat cake blue
look, 'S' in book, look
got scratch, blue (she just noticed the vein on her wrist)

Dog toys

Today was our local humane society's rabies clinic where people bring their animals to get rabies shots, flea & tick treatment, nail trims and microchiping. Ketu and I have been working at the clinic as volunteers for about 3 years maybe? I'm not sure how long, but A-chan has been going almost every month since she was 2 months old. It's held in a pet store with a huge variety of pet related merchandise including dog toys that sound exactly like A-chan's squeaky shoes. As an effort to keep track of our girl we put on her two-squeak shoes (ie both feet squeak as opposed to her 'quiet' shoes where only the right foot squeaks). This proceeded to drive dogs nuts as she ran around the store and they heard toys. One poor dog had been abused by a previous owner and was scared to death of squeaky toys. Of course that was the one A-chan wanted to pet and would try to run towards! Her shoes help us to keep track of her soooo much, I don't know what we would do without them. She also wore her Thailand hat today, the one with the bells on. All in all we were the noisiest people in the whole store even over the barking dogs, lol.

A-chan has been a lot more inter-active with her dolls lately. Hello Kitty gets to wear her hats and sunglasses and had the privilege of being introduced to all of the disney princesses tonight. Hello Kitty also got to each tortilla chips at dinner, thankfully she was not offered salsa. The Totoros get hugs and kisses, a teddy bear gets to take a bath in a basket which is actually a cat bed. Her Little Tikes bike got to wear a bib the other day. The cutest thing was when she tried to explain the round-a-bout cat toy to Hello Kitty this morning and have her play with it. It's very interesting to watch and incredibly cute.

The Hug, for L :D

Han Solo wears a necklace

Gender roles are fun things, aren't they? I'm so glad that I had a girl because girls get the best of all worlds. They can play with dolls and cars, but boys only get cars. Teaching gender in our house is more of a challenge, I think, than most households.

Mata wears skirts and has long hair.
Dada wears a kilt and has long hair.
Dada generally wears more jewelry than Mata. (He wears a torc, armbands, 2 rings while I only wear one ring and some earrings though I wear more when I'm dressing fancy.)

The easiest identifiers for gender have been taken away. All that's left in the easy category is facial hair. We do, however, have very clearly defined gender roles. They are very similar to what could be termed "old fashioned". I cook. Ketu takes out the trash. I clean everything but the toilets and the litterboxes, Ketu cleans those. I weave, sew, embroider and Ketu does all the driving. But I don't want my girl to be stuck on the idea of gender defined by work roles. Even if it weren't a silly way to teach gender, most of the world has changed and that is no longer a good identifier.

So what is? How do I teach her who is a boy and who is a girl? The issue is not exactly pressing, but it will need to be addressed eventually. Though I must admit it's funny to hear her say "good girl, dada", lol.

The issue was originally brought to mind when A-chan was playing with one of her necklaces, the kind that needs the clasp opened and won't fit over the head, and not being able to wear it herself she decided it looked good on her Han Solo figure. Now that isn't bad or anything, in fact Solo does wear a necklace (well, a medal still looks like a necklace to a 2 year old...) at the end of "A New Hope". But then she stepped back and pronounced, "pretty girl".

Kiki

Here is a pic of A-chan playing Kiki from "Kiki's Delivery Service". She doesn't playact Kiki as often as she does Totoro, but when she does it's adorable. Especially when she quotes the "fat, fat, FAT" scene. I'm not sure if she actually knows what fat means. I've tried to explain it to her in terms of the cats - who is fat and who is skinny - but I didn't think it clicked. Is it wrong to worry about her self-image and body-image this early? I don't want her to be obsessed with her weight, etc. Am I being too paranoid?

Edit 01-05-06

We believe that we have proof that A-chan does indeed know the meaning of the word fat. Yesterday she went and put a huge ball in her basketball net and when it wouldn't fit through she commented, "purple ball fat". Later on in the day she found my stuffed faerie cat who admittedly is a bit portly and named him, "fat cat". So I guess we can start worrying now :)

A year ago today

It was the first day of the new year in 2006 that our lovely baby girl decided to walk for the first time. There was no preamble, no warning, she just stood up in the middle of the dining room, saw her Dada in his office and went. She walked all the way over to him through one and a half rooms! We were flabbergast and just overjoyed - we'd been very worried about her since she was never interested in crawling and didn't seem interested in walking either. And what a day she chose to show us that we needn't worry, lol. It is so incredible to think back on that moment of unexpected happiness.

This year she learned how to operate a mouse on the computer. We provided some incentive to wow us with a late holiday gift of her own computer. (Technically it's Ketu's computer that doesn't get used much, an old monitor that we already had but a new toddler keyboard and mouse and games) We've been hoping that this will save our sanity in terms of being able to do work on our computers without her enthusiastic assistance. So far the Little Bear toddler game is doing a good job of providing a mouse-learning environment. She certainly seemed to enjoy it and after some encouragement and assistance from us in the beginning started to get the hang of the mouse.

Around ten o'clock last night I decided that I wanted to watch the Rose Parade today (George Lucas, stormtroopers!!!!). Ketu was happy to try to oblige me and spent a while last night trying to get tv through the antiquated antenna on our roof. What was truly amazing is that he succeeded! We were all set to watch it today until we woke up this morning and found that the cloud cover (here last night and gone this morning) was what allowed us to get tv reception. I hurridly called my mother who was very nice to rush home from Walmart to tape the parade for me. And then Ketu ran out to get the tape in time for us to watch it over dinner. whew. So much work for so fleeting a moment, but it was worth it! I've always loved the parade and always loved Star Wars and the two together were just wonderful. A-chan loved it as well, she thought all the stormtroopers were pretty awesome and said wow about a couple of the floats. And most amazing of all...she actually sat through dinner AND ate all by herself!!!

Being a complete Star Wars fangirl and geek, I have to say, "Star wars is the best thing ever, ever, ever!! (I tried to get A-chan to say this, even offering her a cookie in return but she said 'oh, nope'.) It was so neat to see all the stormtroopers, etc. because they all come from different places and different backgrounds but they have this common interest in (dare I say love of) Star Wars and that allows them to become comrades and this is incredible to me. I loved it. I love that my baby girl wanted to be a stormtrooper for halloween. I love that she asked Ketu to be in the 501st.