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!

Color Coordinating

Watching A-chan color coordinate is an interesting if baffling pasttime. There are certain rules that apply to toys but apparently not to clothing or anything else. But colored toys must match. Pink cup with pink plate with pink spoon. All the red shapes together, all the green shapes together. Princesses in pink dresses on the right, princesses in blue dresses in the middle, princesses in yellow dresses on the left. We occassionally try to mix things up a little by going wild and putting a blue block in with the yellow ones. It generally ends up backfiring on us.

The very interesting part is watching her color on a computer game. There is a picture and beside it a palette of 15 colors to choose from. You click on a color and then click on the picture in the place that you want that color. A-chan's philosphy is that colors don't mix, so she ends up with the entire picture one color. The she moves on to redo the same picture in the next color on the palette and so on until she has painted that picture all the colors. It is only then that she can move on to the next picture to repeat the procedure. It is always done in order of the colors in the palette and if she happens to leave the computer during the process of painting, she will pick up where she left off, going to the next color. Although usually she only comes away from the computer when she has 'finished' a picture, she won't leave until she has completed each of the palette colors. She will invite me to sit and paint with her, then offer me the use of the next color in the palette. I do try to be a wild child and paint the picture with many colors but she then goes back to the color I was supposed to have stuck to and paint the picture entirely of that color.

I must admit to being a bit worried over this behaviour. It seems so stifling to me. I'm not sure how to get her to use different colors together and I feel that it's important for her to do so. But maybe it's nothing to worry about. She seems to be in a phase of categorization lately and perhaps the color coordination is a part of that. We've been hearing a lot of "this is not lemonade, it's punch" and "it's not morning, it's evening" lately.

Another phenomenon that we've been pelted with today was the "But, why?" question about a thousand times. (Okay, so it was only about 10, but it still seemed like a thousand) It's very cute how she will ask, "But why, Mata?"