They allow us to have children

A Girl Obsessed

Ali is obsessed with the funny looking little boy in “The Very Lonely Firefly”. She has had this book for over a year and her favorite part used to be the hooting owl – she used to laugh quite a bit at that. But for a few weeks last month, we HAD to read this book every night before bed. She would turn the pages, almost too fast until she reached this page. She pointed and giggled and babbled excitedly, looking at us for agreement I guess. All we did was raise our eyebrows, shake our heads and laugh a little, after all we thought he was a weird looking thing and used to use an Igor-like voice when we talked for him. Now we say things like, ‘wow, you really like that little boy don’t you?’ and ‘he sure does have a groovy shirt’ and ‘look at his big ears and high rise pants’.  Below is a close up.  Yeah, I shouldn't have used a flash and I could have cropped it differently, but you get the idea.

The book is now downstairs so she can look at him whenever she wants and frankly, we were sick of reading it every night. Plus it took forever to read because we had to hang out on that page for so long. In fact the only way we could get her to agree to move on is if we promised she could go back to him when the story was done. So every night we would read it and at the end go back so she could say goodnight to her little crush. Like I said, a girl obsessed. But look at how excited she gets when she sees him. 

She LOVES him.

Our Sympathetic Little Girl

For a while now Alison has been getting very emotional when someone else is sad or hurt in any way. Is it normal for toddlers to be this worried? I know little kids get upset when another kid is crying or something but Ali seems to be overly concerned – she must get it from me. In particular she gets upset when we read certain books and has a difficult time moving on from certain pages. She has to sit and point and moan and agonize about what is going on. For example, in “The Very Hungry Caterpillar”, the caterpillar eats a whole bunch of junk food and gets a stomach ache, oohhhhhhhhh poor caterpillar. And in “Olivia and the Missing Toy”, Olivia finds that her dog has taken her best toy and chewed it to bits, ooooohhhhhhhhhh poor toy and poor Olivia. She agonizes over these things for an unusually long time and won’t allow us to turn the page, even after we assure her that everything will be alright – the caterpillar eats a leaf and feels better and Olivia fixes her toy. It doesn’t seem to matter to her, so we just wait until she’s ready to move on. Lately, reading “Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed” takes quite a while.

Oh, and I almost forgot. The latest one is “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt”. I don’t think that Alison realizes that bears are kind of scary. So far, they have been fuzzy stuffed toys that you hug and love and friendly characters in books. In this book however, a family goes on a bear hunt and they have to go through tall grass, oozy mud, dark forests, and finally into a cave, where they find the BEAR! At this point Alison thinks, great, they found him and she gives the bear a kiss. The family in the story on the other hand, runs quick back through the cave and the forest and the mud, all while the bear is chasing them. Finally they get into their house, into their bed and under the covers. I think it is hard for Ali to understand why these people might be scared of the bear – she would have invited him right in. Anyway, the bear is left to walk all sad and lonely like, back to his cold dark cave, as seen in the picture below. The problem is that this is the LAST page of the book! She is so sad for the bear and all we can tell her is that he is going back to his cave, there’s no happy ending. So, she keeps bringing this book to us, whining and pointing to the bear on the last page. Poor bear, poor distraught little Ali.

Daddy’s Girl

Lately when Daddy is home, Ali focuses most of her attention on him. I only feel a little sad about this, because I do get to spend a lot more time with her than Daddy does and she does adore him. But, sometimes it feels like she could care less if I was even there. We can be in the middle of a story and if Daddy comes in she totally bails on me. And other times only Daddy can sit on the floor and play with her. What’s funny is that now only “Daddy” can change her diaper in the evening (usually it’s a messy one). Daddy sometimes tries to persuade her into letting mommy do it, but she actually pushes me away and says “Daddy.” I just sort of shrug and say, “well, Ali says”. I guess the joke is on him.

Finally!

It finally snowed! We got about 4 inches at the beginning of the week. We have taken Ali out a couple of times to play in it and much like with everything else we think she will enjoy (the hay ride, seeing Santa, opening presents) she didn’t really care.  She basically just walked around, and insisted on holding one of our hands. I think she was frustrated because she couldn’t move so well in her snowpants and boots. We even bought a sled so we could pull her around in it. Nope, she didn’t want anything to do with that. So we walked around some and then went back inside. Fun times.

At least we got a good picture. I think this might have to be “January” for next years calendar.

More Bumps and Bruises

Last week Alison hit her head on this. I had to wait to make the post because I needed a picture of it.

She was wearing her new boots because there was a lot of soppy, wet snow outside. This is only important because they were the reason she lost her balance. She was walking up and down and across the little cement slab next to the garage (it is about 3 or 4 inches high) – she has done this a million times and this is where she first mastered her balance on short steps. But because she was wearing her boots, when she stepped off the end, she fell sideways and hit that screw thing right on the side of her head. I picked her up and took her inside. By the time we got in she had even stopped crying. I ripped off her hat to see the damage and felt nauseous. She had hit exactly where her hemagioma used to be. It had swollen so quickly that it looked like a gumball was stuck to the side of her head! Thank god it didn’t break the skin, I don’t even want to think about how much blood there would have been. I alternated with and ice pack and a cool wet cloth – alternated because she always seemed to want the one that was on her head. Although I called the nurse at the hospital, we ended up not having to go in. The swelling went down quickly and about an hour later it looked like this.

Then two days later it looked like this.  The swelling had almost gone away completely but a little crusty blood had seeped through the scrape on the surface. You can’t really tell in the picture but it also bruised pretty badly. Man, I don’t know if I’m going to survive the toddler years.

New Years Eve Sheet

It has been requested that I post Alison’s New Years Eve sheet. This has been a long running tradition in Chris’s family and we started it up again last year. It’s actually a good idea for people like us who could care less about New Years Eve – we are not big partiers see. It gives us something to look forward to and it’s fun to look back every year. 

So here it is (with some explanations):

Alison's New Years Eve 2006

Favorite Book: “Little Lamb” (This was a lift-the-flap book she got last Easter from Gma W. This is the book that mommy and daddy got so sick of reading that we hid it on a number of occasions but it always seemed to pop up again. For the last few months it has been in the car and keeps her occupied on drives.)
Favorite Movie: I have still never seen one.
Favorite TV Show: My Mommy and Daddy still do not let me watch TV.
Favorite Christmas Present: The Fisher Price Castle (although there were many favorite gifts, we chose this one because it has at times replaced her Fisher Price farm that she stills plays with every day.)
Favorite Song/Album: Farmer Tad’s Banjo songs – from the magnetic farm toy (we thought about putting some of the real music that is so often playing in our house but went with this because of how excited she used to get when she played it and because she loves to dance to it.)
Favorite Food: Cheese (she truly is our Midwestern baby)
Most Memorable Meal: Cheese curds, chocolate chip cookie and bites of cinnamon roll at the Minnesota State Fair.
Biggest Surprise this year: Halloween! Children coming to our door, walking around outside at night to other peoples houses, sorting candy, eating a kit-kat and carving pumpkins. (We thought about adding the hayride to the list because it was surprising that it was not the least bit exciting.)
Best thing that happened this year: Going to the MN State Fair and seeing real cows, pigs, ducks, sheep & goats, riding the carousal and eating yummy food.
Worst thing that happened this year: I got sick in August with pneumonia and had to go to the ER. They put me in a strange torture device to get x-rays of my lungs.
This years biggest worry: (this was a hard one, but we finally went with) Everyday I worry that my things won’t be in their proper place. (she is a little anal you know.)
Hopes/Goals for the New Year: I want to pick up the cat, go up and down the stairs all by myself, use my new potty and learn how to say more words.
Biggest Accomplishment this year: As a baby growing into a toddler I accomplished so many things, crawling, walking, some talking, feeding myself, etc. 

We Bought Ali a Potty Chair!

Yes, we figured it would be a good idea since she has peed on the floor three times in the past few months waiting to get in the tub. I’m not sure if she understands exactly what it’s for yet, but she has sat on it a few times now, before her baths. Each time she sits for a minute, says “dat da” (all done) and quickly heads for the tub. We are not expecting anything spectacular in the potty training department for a while but thought it would be good to familiarize her with it. 

Feeding Irene's Habit

Guest post from Porkbone:

Some of you probably know that on Christmas, I got Irene a new digital camera.  The theory was that this camera would replace the trusty old Sony, which has nearly 10,000 pictures on it.  Well, we played around with this new camera for a few days, and found that it did some things well, and some things not so well.  For example, it had a clear weakness taking pictures of a moving toddler in low light.  This was not a very good situation!

Meanwhile, Irene has aspirations of becoming a professional photographer someday, perhaps.  Maybe a photographer of children, or something.  So with that in mind, we returned the new Canon point-and-shoot camera I had purchased Irene for Christmas, and I went back to the camera store and stepped it up a notch.  Behold, Irene's new toy:

For those of you who love pictures, be prepared.  We are entering a whole new realm of child photography, here.  Below is the first ever picture taken with the new camera... the Nikon D40.  (click on the image for larger size):

Christmas Day

Alison was up at around 6:45am, I’m surprised Daddy didn’t wake us up before that. We all came down stairs and Ali and I did normal stuff – I changed her and she had milk while Daddy turned on all the xmas lights and made coffee. At first Ali was a little shy about going over to her toys but she made it eventually after looking from afar for a while. She liked the chair and the Uglydoll. Then she finally opened some gifts from Santa – some xmas Weebles and big pads of drawing and painting paper (which she initially thought were giant books). Boy was she disappointed when she started turning and looking at all the BLANK pages! After opening our stocking stuff, we all had some breakfast. It has been a xmas tradition for a number of years for Chris and I to have cinnamon rolls. We wanted Ali to share in this tradition as well but also did not want her to go into a sugar coma, so she filled up on toast and cheerios before she was offered a taste. At first she didn’t want to try it but boy was she glad she did! She only had about 4 bites but she grinned and giggled through them all as if she knew she was eating something she wasn’t supposed to.

After breakfast I got her dressed for the day and we went in to begin on the presents! We took out a few small ones and she wasn’t as interested as we thought she would be. We thought that she had waited so long and would just tear into everything when given the green light…. not so. I think instead she had become so used to just looking at them that she was fine with them the way they were. We thought we could get things started by bringing out her “favorite present” – the one that was partially opened during shipment, and that she had been playing with for the last week. So we brought it to the middle of the floor – she walked over pressed the button and danced to the music like she had been doing all along. I had to start peeling away the paper so she could look inside. Then she got curious and helped open the rest. That’s what xmas is all about, isn’t it? – exciting new toys! For the rest of the morning she kind of milled around the living room and watched Daddy and I open gifts, every once in a while coming over to help us. We ended up opening some of her presents as she lost interest fairly quickly, especially since so many things are packaged in such a way that it would take the better part of an hour before you could play with it anyway. There were a few easy things that we unwrapped and she did have the Fisher Price castle add-on packs that were thoughtfully free from their original packaging. She enjoyed them and played with them throughout the morning amidst the big mess in the living room. Overall she was fairly quiet and never got overly excited about anything (maybe the Santa Claus experience was a sneak peak). 

The present opening extravaganza lasted about 3 or 4 hours.  This was partly because she got some new books from Mommy and Daddy and of course we had to stop and read them a good 2-3 times before we could move on.  We didn’t mind a bit though and I have a feeling moments like those will be few and far between the older she gets.  Even though she received many cool new things, for most of the day her favorite thing was the Hello Kitty “Pocky” candy that Daddy got in his stocking.  She liked to shake it and carried it with her everywhere, eventually putting it down on her new table.  In the end she got a lot of cool stuff and a lot of stuff that she doesn’t need… but I guess that too is what xmas is all about.  For the week leading up to xmas I had already begun taking toys out of the living room and storing them in the basement or stashing them in her room somewhere to be rotated in and out of the mix later.

We all had a wonderful Christmas season. Even though it was kind of quiet and we missed our family, we had a pretty good one with just the three of us. Chris and I so enjoyed seeing Alison’s excitement with everything Christmas this year. The lights; the music; the decorations; the tree; the ornaments; the presents; the winter-y, Christmas-y books we brought into rotation and read everyday; the cookies (we did let her eat a few); and the venture to see Santa Claus at the Mall of America. It is quite the magical time! I can hardly wait for it to come around again. We had decorations up the whole month (and I am not looking forward to how boring our house will look without them). Last year we kept a little snowman up because it was Alison’s favorite ornament. He helped make boo boos better and changed some of her unhappy moods on a regular basis. He might just have to stay around another year.