Today

Today A-chan helped fix her breakfast for the first time! And she woke herself up singing the abc's again then moved on to twinkle twinkle little star. She discovered yesterday that it makes a funny sound when I wash her mouth and she's talking. We did a lot of extra face washing after lunch today :) She likes blowfish kisses. We did a lot of those after lunch too!

Here is how our day went:
A-chan woke herself up by singing ABCs and clapping at the end.
She got a clean diaper and then went to wake-up dada.
She let out boober & tigger by self. (translation: she opened the door for two cats to come out of their room all on her own)
I made breakfast with A-chan sitting on the counter beside me. She watched me make my coffee, then poured her own packet of oatmeal into the bowl to help. Breakfast: oatmeal, banana, milk
After breakfast pink paci goes to a safe spot for the day while A-chan plays.
A-chan played on her computer, played with her castle and R2D2.
She watched the 'Brainy Baby: English video' while I took a shower.
The cats wanted petting and Purrpurr needed blankets.
While I made lunch she read books to herself.
Lunch was hot dogs, mac n cheese, grapes and squash.
Then we washed hands and face with interesting noises, and gave each other blowfish kisses.
In order for A-chan to take her after-lunch nap we must: find flatcat and nekobus, get pink paci, change diaper, give hugs and "I love you" whispers, jump on the bed, covers up, turn the light on.

While A-chan napped we did our best to be very quiet, as usual. S&L came by for a few moments and we poor adults whispered our entire conversation.
"mata! mata!" Was her wake up signal today. "time aeri go play"
While I changed her diaper after the nap I explained the schedule for the evening: we would get ready to go, drive me to my dance class, she and dada would go to the grocery store and then come back to get me and go swimming!
She helped us get ready to go: clothes and diaper, shoes and closed the bathroom door.
We went out the door all together. Dada puts her into her car seat and we drive.
(Dada's part of the day)
She was waving at me through the window of the Y when I get out of dance class and said, "Hi mata!" when I came out the door.
We went into the Y where she turned into a shy girl and then we got get changed...she loves her ladybug swimsuit and carried her towel around her neck to the pool.
Swimming was fun with lots of bouncing in the water and blastoffs from the wall, but A-chan still doesn't like the noodle. Her friend Caycay helped her discover kick boards which are way fun.
When Ketu swam underwater for a long way she got very upset.
Out of the pool again she got upset when I wouldn't let her climb the bench after getting dressed again.
Caycay and her mommy rode home with us in the car. A-chan said," caycay let's be quiet, shhh." and " stop that, caycay, that's enough." A-chan isn't used to anyone being in the back seat with her and is very protective of personal space :)
We had bentos for dinner at home with spicy rice, though not much was eaten.
She got upset at caycay, got time out, apologized and watched a movie. The movie was "The Cat Returns" which both of the girls really like. She did hug caycay when they went home.
She watched the rest of the movie in my lap and in Ketu's lap.
When it was time for our bedtime ritual to begin she found my gemstone bags on our bed. She had to look at all the stones on the bed, then helped me put them back in the bags. Apparently the garnets were a hit.
We read the Wacky Goat book on our bed, tickled A-chan and giggled, Dada carried her to her room and changed her diaper, then it was hugs and kisses time then into the bed for jumping and sleeping with the light on.

Remembrances

During dinner yesterday A-chan started teaching Ketu and I some sign-language letters. S and L, her godparents, are both linguists so it's no big surprise that we have a few books on toddler sign-language around the house. What's surprising is that when we did these books with her, we never really thought that she was paying attention to it. And she hadn't seen either of the books in at least two weeks. But in the middle of dinner she started lessons with 'i', 'j', 'k', 'e' and so on. She would tell us 'good job, mata' or 'great, dada!' when we repeated them properly, lol.

It's amazing to me just how well she remembers things. Even things that I'd swear she hadn't paid any attention to. A-chan claims to remember things from a year ago, like being in Thailand. Occassionally she will say something about Thailand and just shock the pants off of us, but it's very rare and usually prompted by special objects that we brought home. But still!

Of course, I look back on a year ago and can't truly get a grasp on how much she has changed. Looking at pictures proves the incredible differences, though. Especially in hair length :) I want to remember all the little things that she did, but I already find myself forgetting and it makes me so sad.

Both pictures are from a little over a year ago. The bottom one was taken in Doi Mae Salong, Thailand.

The Cupcake Incident

Once again it was time for the Star Wars game. There was marathon cleaning and the creation of yumminess. Our girl inoocently donned a grey t-shirt bearing Lego & star wars logos and proudly displayed R2 and C3po. She rushed out to greet all of the guys that attended, monopolizing attention and generally having a grand time. And then...Ketu lifted her up far enough that she could see the layout of the goodies on the kitchen counter. A cupcake was requested. It was countered with the fact of a quickly approaching lunch.

Apparently lunch holds no power over the need for cupcake. She would say almost every minute, "I don't want that, I want a cupcake." And there was no room for bargaining - a bite of my lunch in order to get a cupcake, no thanks. "want cupcake!" We stuck to our guns, despite the yelling and the repeating refrain of cupcake, cupcake, cupcake (while the GM struggled not to laugh as I tried to talk through the toddler encoding mechanism) and insisted that she had to eat one bite of a broccoli bite in order to obtain her prize. After about 30 minutes she gave in, had that one bite and got to share a cupcake with me (yay, bonus me!)

Like mother like daughter? Stubborn sweettooth in the genetics, I swear :)

Words of the Week #8

I too tired, mata feed A-chan
What beautiful A-chan!
want a cupcake.
I no eat any more.
luke light saber green, A-chan light saber purple
I kiss mike?
No, I fine. No, I alright, thank you.
Let's be quiet, rain. Shhhh.
Pink paci hurts my teeth. (this is a refrain for after breakfast when the paci gets taken away until nap time. all we had to do was explain once that the reason we didn't want her to have the paci all day was that it was hurting her teeth and making them grow incorrectly. She now says this phrase each morning)
That's enough!
yeah, sure.

Imagination is a wonderful thing

Last night at dinner A-chan startled us by announcing that she was riding a dragon. She even swayed in her chair as though she were riding. When asked she proceeded to describe the dragon as green and white, big and flying through the air. Ketu asked if the dragon had a saddle for her to ride on like a horse does. She gave him a disbelieving glare and repeated, "It's a DRAgon!" I asked if she had given the dragon a name. She looked down at the floor for a second and the pronounced, "Name is Ember." Our cat Ember had just happened to be walking past her chair, lol. Needless to say we were delighted! We wondered a bit if she was copying a movie or had just made it up herself, and couldn't think of any movie with a flying dragon in it that she might have seen. (We are extremely particular about what videos she gets to see, so we're pretty sure we can remember them all...)

Then tonight at dinner she again announced that she was riding a dragon. This one was blue and red and white. We are completely amazed by how much imagination she already has. I can't wait to see how it develops as she grows! It will be interesting to see if there is a different dragon tomorrow night. And although I think the whole thing is exteremely cool, I do kind of wish that the dragons would wait until after dinner to take my girl on a ride. She really doesn't do much eating while she is riding her imaginary dragons!

It occurs to me that her increasing interaction at the dinner table is probably caused by the fact that we do actually eat at the table now. This is something that has happened only twice before in our entire married life...we usually would eat at trays in front of a video. But A-chan refused to take a bite while the video was on and eventually we decided to try the 'big table'. We've been doing this consistently now for about two weeks, I guess, and there has been a pretty marked difference in our girl's demeanor and her eating after this change. It's amazing how much the tv can suck your brain away and it's also amazing how liberating it can be to take some time and eat together at the dinner table. I have to admit, though, that I do sometimes miss being able to watch a video while we eat. There are so many shows that I would like to watch but right now we only have time for maybe 2 hours of video a week plus a half hour of watching A-chan's videos after dinner.

Towers

A-chan's been building towers. She seems to be enthralled by them at the moment. But our spanish tile floors are not friends to the towers. In fact, one might call our floor the miniature architect's nightmare. There are very few level surfaces. A tower might have a stable base if it is built in the center of a tile, but anywhere else and you're fighting gravity. She is learning how to work with the floor, though and off setting her blocks a little in whatever direction is needed for continuing building. It's a tricky business and is hard to learn, but she's working on it which amazes us. The main danger to her towers at the moment are her knees and bottom. She doesn't realize just how much they protrude, lol.

Library Books #1

We took A-chan to the library for the very first time the other day. Yes, it really did take us almost 2.5 years to get her there! I'm a book store girl, returning books is anathema to me - even though I worked in libraries for a few years :) The biggest obstacle is time, we're always packing as much stuff into our forays out of the house as we can so that we only go out once or maybe twice a week. And then there was the problem of finding sneaky shoes as taking her in her very happy but very loud squeaky shoes was not going to happen. We did finally find shoes that made no noise but had no leather that she liked and fit her properly, w00t!

Here are the books that we checked out for her this first time with ratings in front...

4 I am a Hindu
4 Religions of the World: Hinduism
2 Origami: Myths and Legends
9 Sheep on a Ship
9 Sheep in a Shop
7 Toot and Puddle
9 The Paper Dragon
5 What to Expect When You Use the Potty
5 The Slumber Party
8 Anklet for a Princess

The best part of going to the library for A-chan was the stairs. Up and down, up and down and did you know that stairs go up and down? We tested them several times just to be sure we understood how they work.

The best part of going to the library for me is having new, never before read books to read!!!! We realized last week that I wasn't even looking at her books to read them anymore, I'd memorized most of them - that's when I decided to look for sneaky shoes in earnest.