Taking the initiative (Anna)

The other day at the library, Emma went over to the DVDs, picked up a few and looked at them, then handed me a Bob the Builder DVD and said "I want this one. Please." As far as we know, she has never watched Bob the Builder before, and borrowing DVDs is not a routine part of our library trips, but she seemed pretty sure that that was important. So we borrowed it.

She's watched it once or twice. And then tonight, she said, "Mumma. I need to watch Bob the Builder." I looked around for it, and then I said, "Sorry kiddo. I can't play it on my computer since I don't have a DVD player. We need Mummy's computer for it and I'm not sure where it is. Maybe later." I went back to cooking dinner. Emma said, "Where Mummy's computer?" I said, distracted, "Um. Not sure. Maybe it's upstairs. I don't know. We'll find it later, ok?"

A few minutes later, Emma pottered upstairs. Caroine was up there and Emma regularly floats between the two of us, so I wasn't too worried. A few moments later, I heard a bit of a thud and I called, "You ok, Emma?" She replied, "It's a bit too heavy, Mumma. You carry it?"

I went to find her halfway down the stairs, carrying Caroline's computer, which she had successfully found and dragged down half a dozen steps. "You carry Mummy's computer down the stairs 'cos it's heavy, and then I watch Bob the Builder," Emma instructed me. It was on the tip of my tongue to scold her, but I didn't. We just walked down, started up the CD and she is now watching her DVD.

Theoretically, I suppose, I should have been annoyed at her for trying to carry the computer (which she could have broken) especially down the stairs (which is potentially unsafe), but actually I was kind of proud of her. Without any fuss, she pragmatically used her own initiative to solve the problem I had identified so she could do what she wanted to do. She did what she could, and then enlisted my help when she needed it. And not once did she sqawk, cry or have a tantrum to get what she wanted.

Personally, I think it's a good example of why we shouldn't always be supervising and micromanaging our children's every move. Would I ever have given her permission to go up the stairs and retrieve a computer by herself? No, I would not have. It could have been a disaster, I suppose, but it wasn't, and I probably should have been watching her more closely, I suppose, but I wasn't, and she technically shouldn't have tried to do it by herself, I suppose, but she did anyway.

Kind of, strangely, *sniff* proud of her.

For sale- revised (Anna)

Ok. So maybe not for sale, exactly, maybe just for loan when she's refusing sleep even though she's exhausted and when she's exerting her toddler power. You know, when we're at the end of our ropes and she just keeps going and going like the Energiser bunny. The rest of the time, she's sweet and we like her. There are just those moments. You know what I'm talking about.

Toddler for sale (Anna)

You know what I'm talking about.

Balloon lives to 31/2 months (Anna)

Three months and two weeks ago, Emma turned 2.

For her birthday, she was sent a bouquet of balloons from Granny Heath and Grandad. They were warned at the time that the balloons should arrive on the day of the party, since they were only guaranteed to stay inflated for a day or two.

Today, we are preparing ourselves to say goodbye to the final balloon. It is down to around the size of a tennis ball, and we expect it to shrivel up and breathe its final breath in the next day or so - at the extraordinary age of four months.

During its lifetime, it has entertained over twenty children between the ages of 3 months and 7, as well as many adults.

The balloon - know affectionately in our family as "yellow balloon" - will be sadly missed.

Pushing her luck (Anna)

This is one of those cute but exasperating stories that would be so much sweeter if it didn't come as part of a long battle to convince a tired toddler to sleep. (She's actually still not asleep, but she's singing This Old Man to herself in bed and is reasonably quiet, so I'm in denial for a few minutes.)

A good 25 minutes after the last recorded sighting (or audio evidence) of the little monster after bedtime, she suddenly appeared in the living room, having sneaked down the stairs quietly, and announced happily: "I've had a very good sleep. Now - playtime?!" I picked her up, put on my stern Mumma voice and told her it was bedtime and that twenty minutes of lying in bed does not a very good sleep make. Or, you know, words to that effect.

She grinned at me happily on the way back upstairs, looked up into my eyes with love and said, delighted, "Mumma, I pushing my luck." (no idea where she picked up that phrase from. Ahem)

So what did I, stern mother bear, do to reinforce my authority in the face of this asute, highly accurate, observation? I burst out laughing. "You certainly are," I agreed. Still grinning, I cuddled her close, put her back to bed and said, "Oh, Emmy-baby. What are we going to do with you?"

Now Emma has not quite mastered the idea of a rhetorical question, and a few minutes later, before I left the room again, she asked, joyfully and with great anticipation, "Mumma! What ARE you going to do with me?" I think she had images of us feeding her chocolate for a week, or buying her a puppy, or letting her stay up and play all night. Or at least lots of raspberries on her belly.

Of course,what was in my head at the time wasn't quite so congenial :) But, you know, I don't want to give her nightmares or nuffin' - so I decided that some questions are better left unanswered.

Let's just say, though, that if she doesn't go to sleep sometime this century, she's in danger of finding out...

Visiting sheep and then reading about them (Anna)

Back from a wonderful week on Salt Spring Island. We hiked, played on the beach, looked for crabs, visited the markets, spent lots of time on the playground overlooking the harbour, watched the boats go by, admired artisans' work, discovered the local second-hand bookshop, watched the deer, played with the caterpillars, hung out with special people, ate good food, read lots and enjoyed local gelati, organic produce and homemade bread and biscuits.

It was a lovely week and we actually took a few photos. Of course, let's be realistic, the chances of us actually posting them here are pretty slim, but at some point in the far distant future we will correlate this blog with our photo albums so that at least Emma can see how they go together. But that, dear reader, is a project for another day.

In other news, tonight when Emma was going to bed, she asked for "Where is the green sheep?" - a kids book that goes through a great diversity of sheep to find the elusive green one. "Here is the thin sheep, here is the wide sheep, here is the band sheep, here is the clown sheep, but where is the green sheep" etc etc.

A while later when she was tucked in, she suddenly hit me. I stopped her and then asked, "Are you angry, Emma?" "Yes," she said. "Why are you angry," I asked. She thought about it for a moment, and then said, "I don't know. Maybe I am an up sheep. Maybe I am a down sheep. Maybe I am a blue sheep. Maybe I am a red sheep." Apparently, our daughter is angry because she is beginning the long and treacherous existential journey towards self-knowledge and the self-doubt and questioning that goes along with it...

Yes, you can (Anna)

A while ago I posted about how sometimes it's the small things that make you swell up with pride as a parent. Today, it was Emma's inner monologue (verbalized out loud) as she tackled a particularly difficult challenge at the playground.

"A bit high. A bit scary. I can do it. I can do it."

And she did.

That's my girl.

Hide and....(Anna)

I'll try to stop laughing long enough to write this.

Some context: Emmy has been figuring out a lot about language recently, and often gets words mixed up. So, for example, tonight she was staring at a picture and saying "Carrot. No. Carrot. No, it's not, it's not carrot" and getting increasingly frustrated. Eventually, she turned to me and said, "Mumma what is it?!" And I looked at the picture and told her it was a "parrot", much to her relief.

So when she wanted to play 'Hide and Squeak," we thought it was the same kind of thing. She closed the door on me in the bathroom and said "We play hide and squeak". So I dutifully "hid" in the bathroom. But a few seconds later, Emma started shouting at me. "You have to squeak, Mumma!"

And because she is tolerant and patient with her oh-so-slow parents, she condescended to demonstrate how to play the game. She came into the bathroom, closed the door and said, "Now squeak." And then she started squeaking in a high-pitched, "Ee-ee-ee-ee-ee-ee," just like a little mouse.

I was pretty much rolling around on the floor in hysterics by this point, but apparently it wasn't so funny to her. She frowned at me, instructed me to stop laughing and hide, in that order, then closed the bathroom door on me. "Now squeak, Mumma," she instructed me in the bossy voice she's developed recently. So there I was, locked in the bathroom, hiding and squeaking. When I wasn't giggling.

I must say, it's a much more fun game than counting to twenty and tryng to find people. I don't completely understand the rules, yet, but my daughter apparently has faith in me than I can learn. You know, with enough instruction.

Cutey (Anna)

Emma put my hat on for me today and as she pulled it down over my forehead, she said, "There you go Mumma. You look very cute."

Saturday afternoon shenanigans (Anna)

A beautiful afternoon spent in the sun at the Vancouver Children's Festival.

Emma was keen to have her face painted, and when we asked her what she wanted to be, she immediately said, "A wolf," and then added, "And I want pigs on my hands."

When she requested that, the face painter said, "A wolf! I don't know if I can do a wolf! I'm not a professional face painter or anything!"

(So much for going with the flow. I felt like saying, 'Look, she's two. She's got a good imagination. She wants a wolf. Draw something on her face that resembles a wolf. She'll do the rest. She's really not going to be picky!"

And anyway, while we're on the topic, is there such a thing as a professional face painter? Perhaps the face painter's union mandates that only profesionals can do wolves, and that their non-accredited counterparts should stick with butterflies.)

So she tried to convince Emma to change her mind.
"I could draw a lady bug on your cheek," she suggested. "Or you could be a cat. What about a butterfly?"
"Wolf." Emma said, shaking her head. "And pigs."

(We were very proud of her. Who wants to settle for a butterfly when you have a fully articulated vision for an entire cast of story book characters?)

And so Emma had her face painted as a wolf. To her credit, the face painter rose to the ooccasion, and asked Emma to help her to figure out what to draw.
"Do wolves have noses?" she said.
"Yes," said Emma.
"What colour is the wolf's nose?"
"Pink," said Emma, and so she got a pink nose.
"Do wolves have ears?"
"Yes. Brown," said Emma, and so on and so on.

And then Emma asked for a pink pig on her hand, and the face painter complied. And then Emma asked for another one on her other hand, and soon she had two pigs. And then she pulled up her sleeve to ask for another pig (because of course she needed to - ahem - go the whole hog and make sure all three of them were represented), but by then there was a queue and the face painter was showing clear signs of having been stretched well past her artistic comfort zone, so we moved on to the next thing.

Her creation would have made a lovely photo.

Other photos we would have taken had we been living less in the moment and thinking about taking photos:

-The glee of going over to Granville Island on the little boat - a family tradition

- Emma with an icecream (well gelato) in one hand and a teddy bear in the other....licking the teddy bear's head ("I spilled icecream on the teddy!" I licking it off!")

- Emma wrapped up in a blanket in her stroller (at her request) surrounded by people in shorts and t-shirts celebrating one of the hottest days so far this year (no accounting for toddler's internal thermometers)

and lots of others.

Oh, and one other amusing story, in which Emma had to defend her frog family.

Emma was playing with three plastic frogs - 2 big ones and 1 little one. She was saying things like: "This is Mummy, and this is Mumma and this is Emma. They leap onto the lily pad. Splash." One of the frogs landed near a random mother who was hanging around, and the random mother started to talk to Emma.
Random mother: Do you have a family of frogs there?
Emma: (holding up her frogs happily). Yes. Family!
Random mother: Mummy, Daddy and baby! That's a lovely family.
Emma: No. Mumma. (holding up one of the frogs to correct her.)
Random mother: Oh! That's what we say in our family, too. Mama. Mama, Daddy and baby. Great job.
Emma said "No" and gave the random mother a gorgeous and decidely scathing look as if to say, "Isn't it blatantly obvious that these frogs are from a two-Mum family? What sort of moron are you?" And then she gave up and went back to playing. It was quite funny to watch.

Kangaroo cuddles (Anna)

Emma's very sweet way of asking for a cuddle tonight:

"You Mumma kangaroo and I baby kangaroo. I get into your pouch?"