Monday, January 30, 2012

Boda + Jay

Aunt Boda and Uncle Jay came to visit us from California this past weekend.

 

We're so happy they came. 

 

They got in on Saturday morning, after having woken up before the crack o' dawn for their flight, and they didn't even complain of fatigue when we hustled them right out the door to Boulder.  They begged us to listen to the CD from Alice's music class the whole way there.  We rocked out pretty hard to "I'm Gonna Play", "My Lady Wind", and "Two Little Kitty Cats" all the way up Route 36. We strolled around the pedestrian mall on Pearl Street and stopped in for lunch at a restaurant before heading back home.


After an afternoon nap for some and an hour of crib antics for others, we spent the evening eating ice cream and playing Settlers of Catan.



On Sunday we headed out to a Creole cafe where we had beignets and dinner-plate-sized biscuits.  Alice scored a set of Mardi Gras beads too. 


It was just nice enough to head over to Washington Park for a little birdes watching and kite flying afterwards. 


We were sad to see them go on Sunday evening.  Alice kept popping into the guest room asking for Boda and Jay

 

At least the beads are here to stay!

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Eighteen Months

Last week, Alice and I went to the doctor for her 18-month checkup.  Where in the world has the time gone?


She's shy around strangers now, so when the doctor walked in, she held on to me for dear life, and when he listened to her heart with the cold stethoscope and checked her ears with the ear-checker-scope, she screamed and cried and tried to scramble all the way up and onto my head to get away.


She warmed up some when the nice doctor produced a brand new book for her to take home. Unsurprisingly, that book is now in heavy rotation, since it's just page after page of objects for her to point to. Alice makes it clear that Matt and I are to name whatever it is she points to. Overandoverandover.  This is an activity that Alice seems to find endlessly satisfying. Mom and Dad kinda' wonder, what's wrong with a little plot line or character development every now and then?


Her vocabulary is growing by leaps and bounds.  I can hear her in her crib right now, chatting herself to sleep as she exclaims, "Shoes! Shoes! Shoes!"; "Oh!"; "Apple?"; "Baby? Baby?"; "Dada! Dada?"; "Wow! Wow!"; "Bubble?" and other words that are unintelligible but no less emphatic.



Physically, she's growing as well, measuring at 34.75 inches tall and weighing 28 pounds and 14 ounces. She definitely inherited Matt's height.



She is endlessly entertaining (says her unbiased mother). Whether I'm biased or not, I swear that she's just plain good company, alternating between spunky, sweet, clever, and goofy by the minute.



Sometimes, but just sometimes, when things aren't going her way, she loses all self control and explodes. Like the time that I told her we weren't going to be drawing with markers at the neighbors house, and she reached for the first thing she could find (the page out of a magazine) and tore it apart with her teeth. Or when she couldn't figure out how to get her shoes off this morning. So she tried to bite them off.



She's only 18 months old, after all. And I can't help but laugh at those sudden bursts of emotion even while trying to help her find another way to deal with them. Maybe I'm a little empathetic because if she has Matt to thank for her height, she has me to thank for her temper (can we all agree to call it spiritedness instead?).

Maybe I'm just feeling the effects of the extra sleep that Alice's new later schedule affords me, but these last couple of weeks have just been nice.



I have a feeling that I'll be reading this post wistfully in a few weeks: if I've learned one thing as a parent so far it's that everything is a phase. But for now, I think I'll just enjoy this one.

Thursday, January 12, 2012

Good Day

Some days are just good days for no particular reason.

This day started with my baby girl perched in her favorite spot, enjoying the sunshine that we were missing yesterday.



We attended our first Music Together class where we banged on percussion and sang "Jimmy Crack Corn" (not the Eminem/50 Cent version, in case you were wondering) and had a free-dance session to a little Kool and the Gang. 



And speaking of Kool, I'm pretty sure that if I Photoshopped a Harley over her Schwinn and a leather bomber jacket over her pink puffer coat, this photo would be perfect. Can't you just hear her saying "Hop on back.  We're ditching sixth period and heading to the race track"?

  

We rode up and down the street with her feet dangling and getting smacked by the pedals every time they came around.  She didn't mind one bit.



I cracked open the paints I had bought a few weeks ago and pulled out the most generously cut bib we own, and Alice went to town painting.  According to her, every color of paint in the set is "yellow" (with prominent tongue protrusion on the "ll" portion of the word), except for one color, which is "boo," naturally.


It got messy.

 

We lingered over bath time tonight, partly to be sure that every bit of paint had been washed away, but mostly because there were shapes to draw on the tub with the tub crayons that she got for Christmas, and targets to hit with streams of water squeezed from the mouths of blowfish bath toys, and shampoo bubbles to be blown and popped.

These things take time, you know.

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Snow?

Yesterday we were jacket-less at the park, and today we woke up to snow.  There were about 4 or 5 inches on the ground, and lots of ice underneath, which made driving treacherous enough for us to decide to bag the playgroup that our neighbor had invited us to crash and stay inside.



Alice and I spent lots of time playing and chatting, respectively, with the neighbors, and even though we remained indoors all day, it tired Alice out enough to make for a three-hour nap.  It was blissful.  Think there's something wrong in the world when I use the word "blissful" to describe three uninterrupted hours of financial planning? Me neither.



Ever since we came back from DC, Alice has gotten really excited every time we say the blessing before meals.   She clasps her hands together ever so tightly and says the same unintelligible word over and over, indicating that I am also to clasp my hands and say the blessing. Then she grins and does it again.



Such a pious kid.

The Rest of the Trip

 

Matt had to head back to Denver on January 1, leaving Alice and me to our own devices for another week at my mom's house.  Lucky for me, Alice wasted no time in making 2012 interesting.

 She started by applying her war paint. 
 

Then she did tribal dances around the house.

 Inspiration struck her, and she had to let loose her creative instincts.
 

 

She ignored the impediments of furniture.
 

And clothing.

And furniture again.
 

She laughed and chatted.


She picked up a new habit of grabbing something that she knows she's not supposed to play with (scissors, the salt shaker, dry spaghetti, for example) and sprinting away while laughing maniacally. She also couldn't get enough of my mom's computer.  Often, sensing that things were too quiet, I would head into the den to check on what was going on, and I would find her sitting up at the computer like somebody's secretary, clicking and typing away.  Later, I logged on only to find that every time I hit the "enter" key, instead of doing what "enter" is supposed to do, the "edit plan settings" window would open up.  I guess that's not as bad as the time she flipped the screen so that everything on it appeared sideways.

Looks like 2012 is going to keep us entertained!