A Few Pictures, Before, During, and After Thanksgiving 2012

Ready to run the Turkey Trot at big sister's school.  Goggles are important.

Avery's popsicle stick boat

Side dish: biggest potsticker in the universe.  Avery's idea.  YUM!

To the beach with Aunt Megan

It's never too cold for the beach.

After diving full-body into the waves, in 60 degree weather.  Luckily Mom made her bring her fleece.

Ahhhhhhhh!!!  Water's cooooooold!!!

Tree is decorated!

Hmm.  May have found another ornament.

Mischief time!!

Halloween 2012

This was really E.'s first trick-or-treat experience.  She would have gone last year, but she was sick, so stayed home with Dad handing out candy.  She was so excited for this, and she kept up with big kids every step of the way.  Became enraged when I demanded she hold my hand to cross the street.  Weaved through undulating seas of costumed teenagers to extract her piece of candy.  Did a wonderful job saying "bink you!" every time she got one.

This One's Not About the Kids

http://www.foodmatters.tv/articles-1/emotional-stress-how-chronic-emotional-stress-can-ruin-your-health

I read this article by a doctor named Ben Kim on the almighty internets today and felt a strong need to re-post it, even though I have an aversion to re-posting other people's stuff - it's why I feel weird about Pinterest. But this article has particular relevance to my life right now, so I love it...and hate it with the heat of a nova (to quote Toby from The West Wing).  But let me tell you why.

Hate it:  Here's a quote from early in the article:  "...your body cannot defend itself against the damage that emotional stress quietly creates over time. [You] pay a heavy physiological price for every moment that you feel anxious, tense, frustrated, and angry."   Just reading that makes me feel anxious, tense, frustrated and angry about my anxiety, tension, frustration, and anger.  Could it really be true that I'm doing irreparable damage to my body every moment I experience one of those feelings?  Is it helpful to even have the thought that my body is damaged every time I feel these things?  

As a therapist, mother, wife, daughter, sister, etc. etc. and just as a participant in the game of life, there are things I've come to understand about myself and everyone else.  Here are two of them: 1.) We can't change our feelings, or make ourselves not feel them.  We can tolerate them, or squash them down and pretend not to feel them, and we can make decisions about what we're going to do because of them, but we can't change them.  At least not without some serious, long term alterations in our thoughts and behavior, and even that's questionable.  2.) What we think has a huge influence on how we feel.  

For me, reading things like Dr. Kim's statement on the damage stress does to the body causes stress.  It makes me feel scared and guilty on top of stressed - scared that the stress I'm experiencing in my life right now, and struggling to overcome, is doing permanent damage from which I have no hope of recovering, and guilty about what I've apparently done to myself.  Not helpful, Doc.  

He fleshes things out a bit here:  "I'm not suggesting that you should strive to never feel these emotions. Anxiety, tension, frustration, and anger all serve important purposes when they first arise. The danger is in experiencing these emotions on a chronic basis."  Now, the second sentence in this quote seems to directly contradict what the good Doctor said in his intro about every moment of stress causing dire physiological consequences.  So I wonder which statement he truly believes. 

She's Getting Older and Wise-ass-er

I'm in the car with E. the other day, on our way to pick up A., and we sit at a red light next to the Trader Joe's construction site.  I'm all happy about Trader Joe's coming to our town, so I entertain myself with a little made-up song about it.  After a minute E. says, without looking up from her Leapster, "Mommy, stop it!"

I ignore her and keep singing.  She ratchets up the whine: "Mommy-y, stop iiiiit!"

"Aw, why?" I ask her.

"Because.  Noying."

Fine, cuteness wins.  Again.

So sweet

Today I was working at my desk in the family room while E. played.  We were alone together while Dad and A. were out.  She'd found an old doll of hers from last Christmas, a cloth one with a floppy plastic head and an outfit you could wrestle on and off, and she was happily testing the tensile strength of the threads that held its arms on when....well.....the inevitable happened.

I dropped what I was doing when I heard her wail, because you can tell immediately when it's not just an "Ow, I pinched my finger trying to close the lid on my fake jewelry box" but rather an "I'm super-traumatized right now cause my baby doll's arm fell off!"  I hugged her close and told her it would be okay, and she clung to me and sobbed as if her heart was breaking.  And it was. 

Finally she was ready to hear about solutions.  But to add insult to injury, she developed the need for a major diaper change at this point, so while we talked we took care of that business as well.  I explained about my sewing kit, and that Baby's arm could be repaired in less time than it would take Dora to rescue a pygmie marmoset, even with Diego's help.

Looking up at me from her changing pad, E. said, "Thank you."  She said it in her little helium voice, with her toddler-ish pronunciation, but her tone was very mature and serious, like the tone my grandmother took while thanking her beloved daughters for speaking at their beloved father's funeral.  "No seriously - thank you," E. might as well have said.   I wasted no time procuring the sewing kit and getting that arm back to rights.  Times like this I realize how important my job is.

E., Current

To launch this post, I'm starting with either a HUGE complaint about Blogger or a HUGE revelation of my own stupidity.  Please, will someone tell me why I cannot insert text into a post in which I've already inserted the photographs?  Is this a Blogger thing, or am I just hopelessly inept?  Thanks in advance to my readers (both of you) for any feedback.

Here is the text I wanted to include, and I'll put the pics in afterward this time.  Again.

Elena's recent accomplishments:
1.) Did the bunji-jumping thing at the mall for the first and second time.  I didn't let Avery do that until she was 4.  Goes to show you what happens with the second child....what happens to the parents, that is.  We get more realistic, and by more realistic I mean less pathologically overprotective.  Please don't ever tell my mother I said that, though.  It's more ammunition for her constant criticism, which she's completely unaware that she levels at every opportunity.  I didn't write that last sentence out loud, either.
2.) Learned to stick her face in the water in the pool, and then generalized to the ocean.  Repeatedly, on purpose, and solely because it frightened her parents.  Nice.
3.) Cut her own hair.  Finally.  I've been holding my breath waiting for this to happen, in part because it's my observation that every female child does this around the age of 2, and partly because I have a superstition (Avery's fault) that as soon as Elena cut off own hair and I was forced to give her the Dorothy Hamill style, her curls would be gone forever, like her older sister's.  But for good or ill, she has a completely different head of hair than Avery does - thinner, I guess - and the long, chunky strands she cut out before I tackled her and snatched away the Fiskars did not make the world of difference to her look that Avery's incident did.  So apparently I rushed her to the E.R., and by E.R. I mean Sweet-N-Sassy, the local salon for little girly-girls, for nothing.  She looks about the same.  Cute as Hell.  I mean Ever.

The photographic evidence of all this and more is as follows.

Elena on bunji at the mall

We went to the beach in the rain.  Kids don't care.

Playing Rock Band on Wii with cousins in Aunt Kristin's basement.

As Elmo at Children's Museum, Wilmington, Nanny's visit.

Grocery shopping at Children's Museum

Climbing on turtle at the mall

Preschool driver's ed at the mall

Nanny and Me, Wilmington mall circa 8/17/12

I'm here 'cause I did it to myself.

My pretty sparkly cheek heart, reward for making it through hair cut.

E., Current

Playing Rock Band on the Wii in Aunt Kristin's basement

As Elmo at the Children's Museum

Grocery shopping at the Children's Museum

At the beach in the rain.  Why not?

The PuddleJumper is a legal life saving device.

At the play-place in the Mall with Nanny

Preschool driver ed.

Me & Nanny

Elena does the bunji-jumping thing at the mall now.

First Day of First Grade

8/22/12 in the CFCI parking lot 8:00am

Questions she's been asking this summer:
1.) How did the world start?
2.) Who was the first person in the world? Or were there lots of first people?
3.) How come I can't imagine forever?


Summer accomplishments:
1.) Hung out with awesome babysitter
2.) Learned every song to every episode of My Little Pony
3.) Taught younger sister how to be an awesome playmate
4.) Went to Jungle Rapids with one of her BFF's
5.) Harvested lots of stuff in the back garden with Dad.  Made veggie care packages for neighbors, own initiative.
6.) Honed swimming/diving/somersaulting skills in the pool
7.) Had a couple of pool play-dates with school mates
8.) Earned and saved money
9.) Enjoyed visit from Uncle Alex, whose gift for her happened to be a new purse to house said money
10.) Helped Dad make beer
11.) Went to PA, had a great time with cousins and killed on the Trail Blazer at Hershey Park
12.) Got a super-cool hair cut

Latest Hits, by E.

"Row, row, row your boat/ Get me down the stream!/ Mewily, mewily, mewily,...[unintelligible] butta....sketty!" followed by hysterical laughter, because the joke is that instead of saying the thing about life being a dream, she's saying life's a bowl of spaghetti.  It's a mash-up of "Row Your Boat" and some song from Dora.  There's maybe a certain philosophical truth to it, too.  Another one: "Knock, knock!" [you say "who's there?"] "Rupping...moooo!  Get it?  Mooo?"  It's her take on the "interrupting cow" joke.  I like the part where she asks you if you get it.

Then there's:
"Spicycle" (bicycle)
"Smustache" (mustache)
"Bace" (her friend Grace)
"Don't pie." (don't cry.  Alternative: "Baby pyin'?")
"I'm really hummy!" (I'm really hungry)
"Ice keem" (tough one to guess)

She has trouble with some words that start with double consonants, as most kids her age do, but Avery never did.  It's delightful, though, seeing the language development the way it typically happens.  It was delightful the other way too, don't get me wrong - there's nothing like a toddler who speaks in full, extremely clear sentences before her peers are even saying "Mommy" to give a parent a swelled head (even though it has very little to do with you).  A friend of ours who's a language buff pointed out that language develops in kids the same way it developed in the human race, so as a language gets older, words shrink and consonants that were formerly separated by a vowel get scrunched together.  Little kids have to develop the physical capacity to say those compacted words.  Interesting.

Questions

"How do fish take a bath? In air?"
"What if someone's name was Cheese Toast?"
"What if it snowed but it was warm snow and we could play in it without coats and gloves?"
"Why are there so many kinds of tomatoes?"
"Do cats have lips?"
"Why are butts funny?"

-Avery

Bellefonte (borough) QuickFacts from the US Census Bureau

Bellefonte (borough) QuickFacts from the US Census Bureau

She's Two!! (Oh, Sh*t)

Recently E. is unstoppable.  In the best and worst way.  A few examples: insisting on helping make dinner every night, knowing where her shoes, socks, and coat all go after we come in the door, fighting tooth-and-nail with Avery over something she's decided is hers, talking in four and five-word sentences, climbing on anything and everything, breaking and entering, burning scrap wood in a bucket out back....okay, kidding about those last two.  But she's a "pistol," as they say.  It's the second-child thing.  They want to do everything the older one does, and they're not as closely supervised.  So it's scissors, scotch tape, toilet paper, tissues, hand lotion, baking soda, oven mits, loose wires, old cell phones, underwear, out-of-season clothes and junk toys from Chick-fil-A....these are the tools of toddlerhood, and they are powerful. 

Concrete Operations, With a Dash of Precocious

Avery is learning the joys of reading oneself to sleep, and is currently into "One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish."  Normally she wants me to be her audience for the first few pages, after we've finished whatever chapter we're on of whatever chapter book we're on, then she's content to have me leave her alone to finish the rest.

Tonight we get to the page that reads "From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere!"  And the picture shows two road signs: the one pointing right says "There" and the one pointing left says "Here."  Avery asks me why those signs are there.  I say it's so people know which direction to go to get to "Here" or "There."  She was incredulous. "What do you mean?  People already know how to do that!!"  "Really?"  I said.  "How do you know where 'There' is?"  She looked at me like I had sprouted three more heads.  "What?  You just turn around and WALK!"

I burst out laughing. 

"Mom, why is that funny?"

I think about that for a minute.  But all I can say is, "We'll talk about that in a few years, and we'll see what you think then about why that's funny."

"But we'll never remember to talk about it!"

"I'll write it down."