Trick or Treat

Although technically, this is Alice's third Halloween, it felt like her first.  She knew she was going to wear her costume, and every day all week she asked if it was Halloween.  Finally, today happened.  At daycare, they taught the kids how to trick or treat, so she was well prepared.  When I quizzed her, she already knew all the important parts: wear your costume, knock on the neighbors door, they open the door, you say trick or treat.  She seemed a little unclear about what happened after that.  She doesn't really know what candy is, and based on her chatter about birthday cakes, I finally figured out she was confusing candy with candles.




The mall that is a few minutes from our house was having trick-or-treating so we went there right at 6:00.  It was as soulless and awful as I had imagined, but I hadn't prepared myself for the Christmas decorations.  The incongruity was jarring.  But Alice had fun seeing the other kids in costumes and she seemed to enjoy it.  She didn't really know what they were putting in her bag, until we got to a place that was handing out popcorn.  She ate that immediately.  (Zac says she clearly takes after me in her tastes.)  We spent about 45 minutes at the mall, then went back to our own neighborhood.


We weren't sure how Alice would do knocking on stranger's doors.  She's been acting a lot more shy lately, so we thought it might be hopeless.  But she surprised us both.  She did great:  She said trick or treat, she looked at the people, she usually said thank-you and responded to their questions.  We just went to a handful of the closest houses, but discovered it was a great way to meet the neighbors (and peek inside their houses!).

Then we went back to our own house and let the trick-or-treaters come to us.  Because it was getting late, we had missed most of them while we were out ourselves.

Meanwhile, Zac had Alice dump out her loot.  She didn't really know what anything was.  See her first taste of candy in the video below (it's a bit shaky because I couldn't stop laughing).

Later, in the bath, I asked her what she wanted to be next year and she said, "A lion. Roar!"  She also talked about the bean seeds and I reminded her we didn't have any. 

Mommy's little monster

Simon on Halloween morning.

The pumpkin hat was knitted by Ami for Alice two years ago.  Simon better get used to hand-me-downs!

"Waaaaah! The beanstalk get me!"

A couple minutes after putting Alice to bed via the normal routine of bath and books, we heard some intense wailing coming from her room.  She was crying out, "The beanstalk get me!" over and over again.

This morning, instead of watching a Thomas video, Zac had Alice watch an old Mickey Mouse episode that was the story of the magic beanstalk. In the cartoon, the bean seeds fell through a crack on the floor and while everyone was sleeping, a ray of light from the moon inspired the magic stalk to grow. It carried their beds up through the sky to the giant's castle in the clouds. On the journey upwards, their beds fell apart. Alice was particularly interested in that part and kept asking, "What happened Mickey's bed?"

We hadn't talked about the cartoon all day and Alice didn't mention it. But when she was laying in her bed, she evidently remembered the beds being carried up into the sky and breaking apart.

To calm her down, Zac repeated the last part of the bedtime routine by reading her some more books.  Then she came out to give Simon and me a kiss.  But when he tried to put her in her bed, she needed to come out and give us a kiss again. (Were these not the normal goodnight kisses but actually goodbye kisses in her mind?)

The next tactic was for me to sit on the floor next to her crib and talk to her for a while.  I explained that we didn't have any been seeds.  There was no hole in the floor. We had to talk about that for a while.

We eventually got her to go back to sleep--with the light on.

Zac and I thought the whole incident was hilarious, but we will definitely be more cautious about what we let her watch.

Alice's purse

When we leave in the morning we take a bunch of bags. Alice wants to carry one, but they are all too heavy for her, so we let her take her purse instead.  It's full of trains.

Here is Alice coming home from school with her purse. She's not wearing shoes because we take them off on the porch because they are always full of sand. 

Orange triangles

Alice calls Zac's candy corn a "traffic cone."  She knows about traffic cones from her grumpy dump truck book. 

"What I need?"

We've started letting Alice "help" us cook, as a way of keeping her occupied. The activity is a bizarre combination of teaching preschool and being a celebrity chef.

The funniest part is that Alice will look at the open cupboard of baking supplies and seriously ponder, "What I need?" as she reaches for a measuring spoon or the canister of baking powder.  Cooking with her taxes one's multitasking skills heavily. In fact, her inaugural cooking project with Zac, cornbread, was an unequivocal failure as baking soda was added instead of powder and the result was inedible.

"Is it dark out?"

Since we carved the pumpkins last weekend Alice has looked forward to it getting dark every evening so she can go light the pumpkins. (We got some little LED lights so she can turn them on.) The pumpkins are still on the table on the porch so she can see them. Every night she asks if it's dark yet. When we finally say its dark enough, usually after supper, she asks which one she's going to light then answers her own question: "The little one."

Sunday afternoon bliss

Sitting with a snugly sleeping Simon. 

Dialogue

Alice: What are you doing, mommy?

Sera:  I'm feeding Simon and eating peanuts. What are you doing?

A:  I'm eating marshmallows. 

S: Are they yummy?

A: They're scrumptious!

Chase

Saturday afternoon we went and played in the small field by the pond in our neighborhood.  Alice had some fun chasing me.

BBQ baby brother

I had just finished eating my chicken by dipping it in BBQ sauce when Simon woke up. Alice saw me picking him up and said "Wanna put baby brother in the barbecue sauce?"  I did not. 

"No more straps!"

Zac took the straps off of Alice's booster seat a few days ago because we rarely needed them anymore and they got in the way. When he took them off, Alice cried and said "I want my straps" over and over again.  With a new baby brother and becoming potty trained, the poor kid has had a lot of change in her life lately and she just couldn't cope with the loss of her straps. 

Conveniently, her current collection if library books includes two stories about outgrowing things (a girl outgrows her bike and a bear outgrows his boat). So I talked to Alice and explained she was getting bigger just like Sally Jean and Little Bear. I'm not sure if she completely understood the analogies, but now everytime she gets in she booster seat she shouts happily, "No more straps!"

Tickle Me Simon

Simon always laughs when we undress him.  He must be ticklish on his right side.

Breakfast

Alice resists breakfast. She just doesn't seem to need it or want it, at least not before ten. She ate (or didn't eat) oatmeal for a long time. Then we added Cheerios as an option, but she isn't too excited about them either, and on a few occasions the whole bowl has ended up on the floor. We added bananas or oranges, and although she is ostensibly more excited about them, she tends to make "trains" with a "line leader" out of the orange segments or use the banana as a large piece if sidewalk chalk to smear on the table.

My theory was that maybe she was still full from her yogurt bedtime snack the night before.  We started the yogurt bedtime snack tradition when she was weaned and we wanted something to replace her last nursing session and keep her belly full through the night so she would sleep better.  

Now that I'm back at work, our suppers are later, so it is unlikely she's going to bed hungry. Plus, some nights she would only have a few minutes to play between the time supper ended and her bedtime snack would begin. 

So we decided to stop the yogurt and Thomas videos bedtime routine and make it the morning routine.  She doesn't do a great job eating the yogurt, but we can spoon it into her mouth while she's absorbed in the video if we need to. Plus, keeping her occupied with a video makes the morning smoother for us and we use that time in the evening to play with her. Seems like a win-win so far. 

The girl likes watermelon

When I took Alice with me to the grocery store on Saturday, she noticed the bin full of watermelons and suggested we put one in the cart.  I obliged.  Tonight we were eating the leftovers that had been stored in a plastic container.  Alice insisted on stabbing the pieces herself and putting them on her plate. The first two times we let her take a couple of pieces, then moved the container away.  But the last time, I left the tupperware next to her and got up to carry some dishes up to the sink.  I came back and she had put every last piece of watermelon on her plate.  And she ate it all.

The day before Alice was born, we went to a rained-in cookout at a friends house, and one person had brought watermelon.  I remember I couldn't stop eating it - I ate so much.  When Alice was born the next night, I joked that she wanted to come out to get some of that watermelon for real.  Or that there wasn't room for two watermelons in my belly.

Imagine a wagon full of carrots

It's a lot of fun to watch Alice's imagination emerge. She took a magnet with a picture of a red wagon on it and said it was full of carrots and that carrots were for bunnies. Zac helped her find her stuffed bunny. Alice then plucked the imaginary carrots from the wagon on the magnet and fed them to her bunny.

It's just a small thing and maybe she got the idea from a book or somewhere, but those carrots came from her imagination. 

"I'm the line leader!"

At daycare, the students take turns being the line leader when the class goes outside to play.  At home, Alice is always the line leader. On the way to the potty, she runs ahead of you shouting, "I'm the line leader!  Don't tinkle on the floor!"  Of course, her parents manipulate this desire to be line leader. Whenever she is dawdling (out the door in the morning, on a walk, going to the car) all you have to do is ask innocently, "Who's the line leader?" and Alice will run ahead yelling, "I'm the line leader!"

Alice said:

"Excuse me!  I heard my butt!"

(We've been trying to teach her to say 'excuse me' when she farts.)

Nature's playground

Fairly early on, Zac and I realized it was much easier to take Alice to a nature park because we didn't have to monitor her as closely as at the playground.  Although she can play independently at playgrounds now, we still love going to the parks where she can just explore nature.  Sunday we went to Lake Crabtree park.

Simon started out alert, but quickly fell asleep.

For most of the walk, Alice was either running or stopping to pick up something.

Sometimes, it occurred to her to look up at the canopy.

The activities provided by nature's playground include:

jumping on bridges

climbing on logs

standing on stumps

dropping sand in the lake

seeing a snake

touching your shadow

and just being happy.

Sera said:

"Alice, please don't touch me with your cucumber."

Pumpkin carving

We did our first pumpkin carving with Alice. Before we opened it up, I asked her what was inside and she said, "Seeds!"  I think they must have already done this at daycare.  I'll admit, there's always a part of me that is sad that she experiences a lot of things when I'm not there to see it.  On the other hand, daycare is really good for her and it gives her a lot of experiences and interaction that she wouldn't get if she was only with her parents all the time. 

At any rate, she had no fear of the pumpkin brains and scooped them out with relish.

"I want to get my feet dark!"

Alice was asking where her purse was, and I said it was out in the van.  I told her to take her socks off so we could walk out to the van and to get the mail.  I said, "It's dark out.  Have you ever been outside in the dark?"  I opened the door and Alice said excitedly, "I want to get my feet dark!"

Once outside, she was afraid of the neighbor's orange Halloween lights, so I had to carry her the whole time anyway.

"Here, Simon."

Alice was having some trouble eating her supper, so she said, "Here, mommy" and handed her plate to me.  I said, "No thank you.  You should eat it."  She said, "I don't want it.  Here, daddy."  Zac, who was holding Simon, also said, "No thank you."  Then Alice, getting desperate, said, "Here, Simon."  Simon also declined to eat her food for her.

Catwalk

Today was the Halloween celebration at daycare. 

I got her outfit on in her daycare room, and she was quite clingy because something weird was going on. She was happy to see Zac peeking through the window to take a picture. 

Alice, Ms. Carson, and Ellie Rose walk in the Halloween parade.

The parade went down to the infant room, so I took Alice in to show her Simon's room. She was mostly interested in the toys. But Simon was definitely interested in her.

And a group picture (Or part of it. They were in a long line).

Sibling photo shoot

"Simon put the blue foot on the napkin!"

I still can't get over Alice speaking in complete sentences.  Granted, her grammar is not always perfect, but her vocabulary is growing daily and she's getting better and better at communicating.  Combine this with her developing imagination and ability to think symbolically, and we have a lot of fun.

During supper today, I gave Simon the red dog to play with while we ate.  At some point, he knocked it out of the car seat, and Alice said, astonished, "Simon put the blue foot on the napkin!"  (The dog has four different colored feet and only the blue one had landed on the napkins.)  I find the level of specificity interesting, because I would have just said something like, "Simon knocked the dog out."

She also held up a long, thin piece of chicken that had some skin hanging off of one end and said, "It's an American flag!"  I really don't know why two-year-olds have such a bad reputation.  They are the most amazing creatures on earth.

Simon at daycare

We visited Simon's daycare room this morning for about an hour. The teachers and everything else is pretty much the same from when Alice was there. Simon made a good first impression by not crying, barfing or pooping. In fact, he just peacefully fell asleep in Ms. Elena's arms after looking around for a while. 

Some evenings are really good

We have a two year old, so some evenings are really bad, where she is crying or cranky or reluctant to eat supper.  But sometimes she is really good, like this evening.

She came in the door with her purse (an orange bag filled with trains) that she had taken out to the van on the way to daycare yesterday.  She "tinkled on the potty" and washed her hands without much fuss.  She wanted to see supper, as always, but wasn't crying when we didn't pick her up the whole time. We had her current favorite meal, spaghetti with a side of microwaved frozen spinach.  I gave her a basil leaf to smell. I let her test a couple of noodles, per our tradition, and for some reason she had to take her bowl over to the couch and sit on a red pillow to eat them. She did her job of getting the forks and putting them on the table.  Some of the time while I was cooking, she was playing with her new alphabet puzzle, which she calls a calendar for some reason.

For supper, she ate three helpings of spaghetti and we let her shake the Parmesan cheese on herself (her favorite part).  She was really interested in the bread sticks again.  She wanted a big one, but Zac said she had to eat a little (broken) one first.  She took her time about it, but finally did.  She said, "I crunch it."  So then she got a big one and bit the end off.  She said, "Where's the mommy?...In my mouth."  Apparently the end of the bread stick is the mommy?  Then she said, "I eat it like corn?"  When we indicated that although this was weird, it was technically acceptable (not wanting to stifle her creativity and all that) she ate the very thin bread stick sideways like corn (she also ate her banana this morning like corn). During supper she talked about the hayride, asked where Julian was, and listed everyone else she went with.

After supper she laid on the play mat with Simon, who was being quite vocal at that moment, and she asked him, "What are you saying?" over and over again (because when he was "talking" earlier, we had asked Alice what he was saying).

At one point, she said, "I go to the bathroom.  I'll be right back" and then she went potty by herself.

I was loading the dishwasher (which she is currently forbidden to touch) and she was doing a pretty good job restraining herself (I tell her to keep her hands on her belly so she has something to focus on to keep her grabby impulses under control).  But she was testing, as a two year old tends to do, just what the limits were.  So she touched the door.  I told her if she did it again, she would go to time out.  So she did it again and then happily went to time out (the end of the hall).  But she wanted me to turn the light on in her bedroom because it was too dark and scary.

After  her very pleasant time out, I told her I had a special job for her: unloading the dryer.  She did it, then emptied the lint screen into the trashcan.  Then she helped me carry the basket to the bedroom and made sure I dumped it on the bed.  I had some sweaters drying on a rack, which she'd never seen before.  She felt the sweaters, which were damp, then looked up at me and said, "You peed on it, mommy?"  I explained that they were wet from the washing machine because you can't put sweaters in the dryer.  I'm not sure she bought it.  She also pulled her "new jammies" and blankie from the laundry pile to put back in her room for tonight.

I herded her back out to the kitchen, where she got her yogurt out of the fridge and her spoon all by herself.  I got her a small cup (not a sippie cup) of water for her to keep practicing not spilling it.  She can drink it just fine, but doesn't have good appendage awareness yet, so she often knocks it over. (No joke, as I typed this sentence she knocked over her cup of water). Her bedtime snack was only interrupted by another trip to the potty.  Overheard from the bathroom, "I pooped in the potty, mommy!"

Thomas video watched and yogurt finished, Zac scooped Alice out of her chair, but then had to put her back in because she wanted to get down herself.  Then it was off to the bath and potty once again.  Alice fell down in the bathtub (partially my fault--I got tired of her standing there and poured water on her head) and said, "I need a bandaid on my butt!"

When the bath and toothbrushing was taken care of, Alice (wrapped in her elephant towel) went out to the living room to kiss daddy and baby brother goodnight.  Then back to the bedroom, night diaper, pajamas, and stories (Fireman Small and Super Dragon tonight).  The current final bedtime routine is that after she turns out the light, we pick her up and go over to the spy camera and we tell it "Don't scare Alice!  She's bold and brave like Thomas" then she "flies" to her crib like Super Dragon and sleeps like super daughter.

Simon and Gertie

Here is a video of Simon interacting with Gertie, our puppet doll with a rattly brain.  The video is a bit grainy because the lights were dim when I took it.

Exciting times in potty land

Alice went a whole day in undies without any accidents. She even went to the bathroom and pooped in the potty all by herself tonight. (Sera was in the office pumping and Zac was holding Simon on the couch). This is no small feat. She had to use the stool to turn on the light, then pull down her jeans and undies and get on the potty. I never thought I'd see the day. It's amazing what marshmallows can can motivate her to do. And we know it's the marshmallows because she's always talking about them as she is running down the hall towards the bathroom.

A sneeze, a horizontal jig, and lots of smiles

Simon is doing a great job lately of entertaining himself on the play mat.  This is good news, especially as we near the time for sending him off to day care.  It wasn't too long ago that he needed held almost constantly, but now he seems to enjoy exploring the world for more extended periods of time.  Here is a video of a couple of minutes on the play mat.

Girl in motion

As I looked through the pictures from our little hike at Hemlock Bluffs, I was initially disappointed that so many of them were blurry.  Granted, the day was cloudy and we were in a forest, so there wasn't much light, but we'd splurged on an expensive SLR camera in order to get good shots of Alice. But as I thought about it, I realized that if we only had good, clear shots of her, that would mean she was just standing there doing nothing.  So I'm embracing my blurry child -- it means she is a girl who is in motion, who is eagerly and excitedly moving through the world.

Much of the trail at Hemlock Bluffs is a board walk, and she loves running on the "bridges.  
Click here for some video footage of this girl in motion.

She loves Hemlock Bluffs because she gets to go down (and later, up) a bunch of stairs.  

Hay Ride

We joined Grandpa Arcaro and family for a hay ride at Iseley Farms in Burlington.

On things like this, something new, around other people, Alice often gets in this intense mode where she doesn't talk much, just kind of sits there (which is very unusual for her).  I used to think it meant she wasn't having fun, but I've come to realize it is more a reflection of the intensity of the experience.  She had a lot to process on the hay ride.

Add this to the list of weird places I've nursed.  I fit in well with the cows. 

She came out of "intense mode" after the hay ride was over and she got a little pumpkin of her own.

She never sees a wagon she doesn't try to pull.

That is, until it gets too heavy--then it's more fun to ride.