What a Weird Day

Weird good...mostly.  The bad part is we had flooding rains - a really unusual trailing line-up of storms that dumped almost 2 feet of rain on us over the past couple days.  That's a third of the amount of rain we usually get in a year.  And none of the storms were hurricanes or even tropical storm-grade.  The last time we had this much rain was during the one-two punch of Dennis and Floyd back in 1999.  Before that, the last rain this big was in 1871.  Our town has been all over the weather channel today.  Fortunately we have not been personally affected other than GW not being able to go to work and Av being home from school.  In fact we got to have a fun romp in the "rivers" on the sides of our street, and later we saw a huge double rainbow.  I tried to get a picture of it but my camera couldn't capture the colors.

Today was me & GW's 10th wedding anniversary.  The whole family is getting over a stomach virus, in addition to being trapped in the house because of the rain, so we didn't go out.  We broke out our wedding and honeymoon pictures and paraphrenalia and looked through it all with Av.  She thought that was pretty cool.  She's trying to understand what a wedding is, what it means to get married.  Later we made cupcakes.

After we put the kids to bed I came back downstairs to check my email.  Being one of the presidents of the board at Av's school this year means that I have to help decide whether the kids will have school tomorrow, and I knew people would be emailing to ask what the deal is.  Anyway I was greeted in the family room by three tiny baby tree frogs, perched in various places near the back door.  One of them was no bigger than my pinky finger nail. They must have snuck in while we were outside playing in the lake where our back yard used to be.  I thought about finding something to keep them in so Av could see them tomorrow, but I don't really have anything that would serve that purpose and I was afraid I'd end up hurting them.  So I got them to jump into a water cup one by one and set them outside on the patio.  I think it's good luck when frogs get in your house.  Right?  Or is it just that they lower your bug population?  Gee, a rainbow, tree frogs, big anniversary, weird storms....weird day.  Oh, and a poltergeist stole our Bumbo seat.

A Great Big Red Mad Mad Baby Head

I wrote this somewhere around September 10th.  Not sure why I didn't put it up, but here it is now.  Jeez - out of order posts.  How sloppy of me.


Having one's tonsils out comes with many privileges: eating lots of popsicles and ice cream, watching lots of movies, getting dibs on the computer to play games, having your grandmother travel 500 miles to help serve your every need, to name a few.  Playing on your parents' sympathies in the week following surgery is bound to work, so you might eek out many other little bonuses along the way.  Tonight Av cashed in a bunch of her bargaining chips and offered to forego bedtime stories in exchange for being allowed to stay up an extra half hour to watch Diego.  She knew I would cave, seeing as how Daddy was working late and I was on my own with her and a tired 7-month-old with pooping problems.  All she had to do was crank her voice up an octave and let it waver a bit.  She was fully prepared to squeeze out a couple of tears, if necessary, but since I immediately rolled over like a hound dog with heat stroke, she didn't have to go that far.  But something on Diego didn't sit right with her.  I don't know what it was, but she complained that it didn't make any sense and started making up alternate endings for this apparently inadequate episode, which she turned off about 15 minutes in.  I wish I'd done a better job of recording the things she said.  I was dealing with El and not paying close enough attention, but all of a sudden I realized that Av was rolling out all this wildly creative stuff.  She has a way of talking off the top of her head like a rapper on open mic night.  She looks around the room while she's doing it, taking whatever she sees and riffing on it - hence the great big red mad mad baby head that ended up in her story as a bizarre creature that Diego had to rescue from a pit of hot lava.  I think she gets this ability from GW - he's creative off the top of his head like that.  Pulls stuff from God-knows-where and works it into something hilarious.

Well, El sure is a great big red mad mad baby head today.  Poor little girl.  As much as she wants to eat solid food, it seems her digestive system isn't ready yet.  It makes weaning her off the nursing-five-times-a-night thing a hard sell.  Good thing she's so damn cute and cuddly.

El the Baby, Baby-ing, in Pictures

"Heyyyyyy!"

7.5 months old and already has a weird sense of humor.

"Give. Me. The. Camera."

  

Av took the rest of these...

    

                                                           

                                       
Please don't fault me for the formatting of these pictures.  Blogger kind of put them wherever the hell it felt like.  Leaving now to go pick up a copy of HTML for Dummies.   Btw, Av's not a bad photographer, eh?                                                                     

Av the Superhero (What's the Buzz II)

Last year, during the months before Halloween, Av changed her mind about her costume about six times, and two of those changes happened the morning of trick-or-treat.  This year, not so.  She has decided, and it has been written in stone, and so it shall be.  The costume has been purchased and played in several times already, and there is no turning back.  Personally, I love her choice almost as much as she does. 

Her baby sister is impressed.  Of course, El is enthralled with just about everything Av does.  Av is El's superhero, quite literally, and I gotta say Av pulls off the role pretty well.  The pictures say it better.

Because I Can't Not Write This Down

El has a word for me.  It's "Nyeh-nyeh."  I realized it the other day, as she was crawling around the house after me, saying it over and over.  It dawned on me, suddenly, that that's what she always says when she's following me around or when she's in someone else's arms and she wants to be in mine.  She says a lot of sounds now, including "Dah, dah, dehd," and "Ma, ma, ma," but this is the first sound she's made that specifically refers to something or someone.  That I know of.

Avery started around this age, making sounds that meant something.  Her first word was "Daddy," and for the longest time she referred to both GW and me as Daddy.  It was so cute we didn't want to correct her.

Here are both my little girls, around 8 months old:

 

 

What's the Buzz?

Av identifies with heroes. Wants to be one when she grows up. Early this summer, GW took her to see the movie "Toy Story 3" (in 3-D, of course) at the movie theater.  It was a huge deal for her - the first big-screen experience she's had that really made an impact on her.  She's been to the movie theater before, to see stuff like "Ponyo" and "Up," but TS3 was different.  Maybe the 3D element had something to do with it, but probably it was more her developmental level, intersecting with the fact that those amoral, high-paid manipulators at Disney did their job really, really well. Oops - I mean, it was a great story, with lots of fun action and great characters and a very worthy continuation of a really quality movie series.

So ever since then, she's been into Buzz Lightyear.  She has two "Buzzes" now, each about six inches tall and bearing the exact same colors and costume, but with different poses.  Av loves to pretend she's doing superhero stuff, like saving people and beating up monsters, and when she thinks I'm not looking, she practices her kung-fu.  Some of her moves actually look...well, like kung fu. 

I bought her the movies.  She's partial to the second one right now.  We watch the beginning together, and I gasp with worry as Buzz falls down a long hollow shaft during his attempt to hijack the evil Zurg's power source.  Av puts a hand up to soothe me.  "Wait for it...." she says, her wide eyes on the screen, "Wait for it...." Buzz presses a button on his utility belt in free fall and a glowing protective orb immediately forms around him, floating him safely back up to face his nemesis.  Av looks at me with a big grin.  "See?"  I am relieved.

Yet Another Milestone For The New Kid

Today El pulled herself up to a standing position, all by her little self.  She's been working on it for about a week or so.  I gotta say it's been hilarious, in a beyond-cute kind of way, to be sitting on the bed reading Av a story, and watching El try her stunt.  You suddenly see her pink head wobble up from the bottom of the bed, her face a mixture of surprise, delight, and concentration.  She grins big when she makes eye contact with somebody, then she teeters and drops out of sight.  It's the best thing ever.  Well, except for the other thousand things about her that are the best thing ever.  So tonight she pulled herself up and stayed up for a good minute or two.  Av walked at 11 months; maybe El will be a little early too.  She's really getting fast with the crawling, though, so maybe she won't bother for a while.  Who knows.  She does seem to be hitting a lot of milestones all at once - why is she in such a hurry to grow up?  I guess having an older sibling to catch up with is pretty motivating.  I wouldn't know, only had younger.

Now, if we could only convince you that food does not enter the body through one's fist, little Miss Spoon-Grabber!

Av-isms: A Cosmic Kind of Morning

"Who would take care of you if you were the first person born in the world?"

Uhm....

Earlier we were upstairs in the playroom.  We had just finished sewing part of a pillow she's making, and she laid down on the floor for a little rest (we're still recovering from tonsil surgery).  After a moment of staring at the ceiling, contemplating, she sat back up.  "Mom?  If I die, and then I get alive again and I have to get my tonsils out....I have an idea."  She went to her arts & crafts drawers and took out some paper and markers, and started making signs.  We had done this before her surgery, with index cards, in case it hurt her to talk and she needed another way to communicate the things she wanted.  Really it was a way to prepare her for the surgery - I wasn't sure she'd actually need the signs, but the process of making them opened up conversation about the various aspects of recovery and what she was likely to experience.  We drew stuff like popsicles, applesauce, juice, the TV, her Leapster, some board games, the bed.  So this morning, for whatever reason, she decided she needed a repeat session of sign-making.  She drew the computer, to indicate she wanted to play a computer game, and her Toy Story II movie, which she is watching as I write this. 

On the couch a few minutes ago is where & when she asked the question about being the first person born in the world.  GW and I looked at each other wide-eyed, and answered that people have been asking that question, in various ways, since the dawn of time.  She decided that astronauts would take care of you, were you to find yourself in that situation, and went back to her movie.