Charlotte's words

Ok, I said I wouldn't bore you with a complete list of Charlotte's words, but I lied. So if you don't care, don't read! Here they are in no particular order (other than this is the order that Nora, Kris & I thought of them last night). Pronunciations are in parenthesis (say THAT 5 times fast!)
Hi, bye-bye, sock (gock), shoe (do), car, slide (ide), all right (after she "gives 5"), light (ite), mouth (mout), eye, egg (uck), thank you (dan do), milk, please (peas), dada, mama, no, uh oh, hat (at), sis (iss), kitty (titty), bear, book, dry (die), bubble (bah boat), juice, out, hello (ello), sit (it), teeth (teet), bowl (bo), hot (ot), vacuum (backoom), up, baby, all done, all gone, go, all fall down (ah na da), nigh-night, banana (nana), yogurt (go go), ride (ide), remote (mote), eat (deet), waffle (wapple), more, apple, star (tar), back, ball, truck (guck), bike, belt, bath (bat).

Take the kiddies bowling, take them bowling

Well, I thought I'd give it a try putting a video on here. For some reason, it's just a black box instead of showing the first frame of the video. Oh well, just click on the triangle and it will play. This is from December when Nora went bowling with her before/after school program. This was her second time "at bat." Most of the other times, she walked slowly up and rolled the ball (which took forever to get to the pins). Several of the other kids were running up, so I guess she thought she'd give it a try. She actually did pretty good-- got 9 pins down on her first trip up, which was more than anyone else did in her lane (even the teacher). With her height, we've always thought about the WNBA, but maybe bowling will be her sport!

We had a great Christmas: Christmas eve with Kris's family, Christmas day was just us, and we celebrated with my sisters & their boyfriends on New Years day. It was nice to have Christmas day all to ourselves. Santa brought a pop-up Dora tent, which seemed to be the favorite thing for the day, and we've already gotten our money's worth out of it-- just as we suspected, it's providing hours of entertainment.

We just made plans to go to New York to visit my parents in July. We realized that by the time we go, it will have been over 2 yrs since we went last. (Luckily, my parents come here more often than that.) This time, I'm hoping to do some more sight-seeing, especially in New York. Last time we went was in February, so it wasn't very conducive to walking around much.

Last night, we had my friend Alice and her family over for pizza. They have 2 girls too. Emily is about a year younger than Nora, and Brigid is 10 months older than Charlotte. So it worked out pretty nicely, with them playing together well (minus a few brief squabbles with the youngest ones who don't really get "sharing" yet). And I was pleased that the girls entertained themselves enough that the adults actually got to talk!

Speaking of talking, Charlotte is getting quite the vocabulary. I won't bore you by listing all of her words, but for you great-grandmas, here are a few that she says on a regular basis: up, milk, bye-bye, car (sometimes she says these together), light (her newest favorite, especially today when we went to Home Depot), apple, mama, dada (which she also says for Nora), No (of course!), bear, all done, all gone. Hmm... I guess those are the most frequent, because that's all I can think of right now. She is also seriously addicted to bananas and yogurt. We actually have to HIDE them from her because if she sees them, she'll get really upset if we don't give them to her. She calls bananas "nana" and yogurt is "go go." As for her latest physical feats, she's been climbing up her little plastic slide and going down on her own since before Thanksgiving. She's mastering the stairs now-- she does great climbing up on her own (with us right behind her, of course) and has recently discovered that she can go down on her own by sitting down and scooting on her rear. She is also climbing up on the couch by herself. This is a bit nerve-wracking, but it had to happen sometime!

Nora is still enjoying school and is starting to read words! She does really great when we help her sound out words letter by letter. She is also fascinated with writing and will often ask us how to spell something. She can do "I love mom dad" on her own, so that's her favorite phrase to write. But we had lunch at Subway today and she got a little notebook with her meal (MUCH nicer than the dumb plastic toys you get most other places). So as soon as we got in the car, she asked for a pen and began asking how to spell things. After lunch, we went to Home Depot, so of course, she wrote "Home Depot" and any other signs she could (she kept begging us to stop as we were walking through the store so she could write down the signs). She is also still loving to do artwork. Kris's parents got her an "art box" for Christmas-- a plastic 3-drawer dresser filled with markers, crayons, scissors, glue, paper & stickers-- and she is just having a ball with that. I love hearing about the stories behind the pictures she draws.

I've posted some pictures on Flickr since Christmas, so check them out if you haven't already. I have more in my camera that I need to transfer, so hopefully I'll get to that soon. Here's a photo of the girls having fun in one of our first snows, about a week before Christmas.

I hope you all had a great holiday season!

Number 5

Well, it's official. Nora can now sing "all I want for Christmas is my two front teeth."


Also, I took Charlotte on Friday to the ENT doc who took out Nora's tonsils a couple years ago because Charlotte has sleep apnea too. Hence, all the photos of Charlotte sleeping on Kris. Here's another from this morning:

Yes, she's sleeping like that.

The doc said she's too young to really do anything about it (that's what I thought, but the RN we saw on Tuesday for Charlotte's double ear infection said they do take them out this young). Anyway, I'm relieved and annoyed at the same time. I didn't want her to have to go through that (the ENT said hopefully her throat will grow faster than her tonsils, so the problem will fix itself), but I was annoyed that we paid $20 and spent 2 hours to have the ENT look in her ears and throat and say, "well, there's nothing we can do." I wish the RN had told me that on Tuesday. Oh well. Guess Charlotte will be sleeping with us for a while.

Halloween

Well, we had a good Halloween. Nora got so much candy that she didn't even notice when I took about a third of it out for Kris & I (the good stuff, of course). Here's the loot:


Nora was the Corpse Bride (corpsebridemovie.warnerbros.com/) and Charlotte was a bat (I tried to think of something that would coordinate with Nora's costume, and something I could get cheap!) Nora's costume was improvised, of course. That's half the fun. Hopefully I'll get better at improvising before Nora starts to care what her costumes look like!



We went to the high school where they had booths set up. After we made the rounds there (where the teenagers gave hand-fulls of candy), we went to a church near our house where they had "Trunk or treat." The congregants decorate their cars and park them in a big circle, then you go around to each one to trick-or-treat. You can vote for the best one when you get to the end, where they're serving hot cocoa. Again, lots of candy. Then we went to Kris's parents for a little while. A parent could get used to this-- I wonder if Nora will ever ask to go to a neighborhood to go trick-or-treating. She did ask on our way home, when we were going to go to some houses. But seemed ok when we told her it was too cold.

October

I figured since it's almost Halloween, I'd better sum up what we've done in October. This month was also busy, busy. We had a garage sale the first weekend to sell all the baby stuff Charlotte has outgrown. Friday was pretty busy, but Saturday was surprisingly dead. But, we still managed to sell almost everything. So there's a bit more space in our attic, for now. Nora had a lemonade stand:



For the record, when I asked how much she wanted to sell it for, she said "free" and I was ok with that, but Kris suggested a tip jar. So, as one of her customers put it, "Free lemonade!" and then, (cynically) "Oh. And a tip jar." Oh well.

Later that week was "McTeacher night" at McD's, where the teachers work behind the counter. We were going to skip out on that, but Nora really wanted to go because her best friend Hailey was going to go. So we made sure to go at the same time Hailey was going to be there:



Aren't their matching missing teeth adorable? Reminds me of a certain someone that I met in Kindergarten. We'll see if they remain friends for the next 26+ years too. Hailey's mom said that they hug hello and goodbye every day. (They both go to the before and after school program at their elementary school)

Then the second weekend in October, I took the girls with me to Austin for my cousin's (beautiful!) wedding. I vow never to travel by myself with them again (at least until Charlotte is 5). Nora was a perfect angel the whole trip (until the last day, anyway). Charlotte was sleep-deprived and, of course, a curious toddler. So I spent literally the entire trip chasing her around restaurants and other non-baby-proofed public spaces. I spent maybe an hour total out of the whole weekend actually talking to my relatives. But I know they did enjoy seeing the girls, so that was good. Was it worth $400 and my total exhaustion? Debatable. But, lesson learned. I'd post some pictures from the wedding, but I only managed to take a few, and I haven't gotten them onto Flickr yet.

Then, the Wed after we got home from the wedding, Nora's after school program (called Kids Country) had a celebration at Paradise park. (I don't think I mentioned that the day we left for the wedding, Nora's Kindergarten class had a field trip to Paradise Park. So in one day, she got to go to Paradise Park, fly on an airplane, got to see my mom, AND sleep in a hotel. She was jazzed.) Anyway, we went to Paradise Park (again) that Wednesday and the girls had a total ball. I can't remember if I took any photos (if I did, they're still on the camera too), but Kris took some of Charlotte getting totally soaked in the water play room. I'll try to figure out how to get them off of his phone and onto Flickr.

Then on Friday, we had a playdate with my high school friend Alice and her daughters. Emily is 1 yr younger than Nora and Brigid is 1 yr older than Charlotte. They had a fantastic time and I'm plotting when we can get together again (after I have a little bit of a breather from all these planned activities).

Well, that's probably enough to digest for now. We have a parent/teacher conference this Thursday and a kids' Halloween party on Saturday, so I'll try to post once more before Halloween. We'll see how that goes.

Sorry!!

Oh, I am SO terrible. (This is especially terrible because it is actually October 22nd, which means I started this post almost a month ago.) The last month (Sept) has just been a blur of activity. I don't know that I can even write about it all, it's just too overwhelming. So I think I'll start fresh and not worry about writing about everything. Kris has been super busy with his landscaping business. This weekend and last weekend were his first "non-working" weekends in the last couple of months. That's in quotation marks because he's still had to go out to give bids on those weekends-- but at least he wasn't out installing plants all day, so that was good.

Nora is L-O-V-I-N-G Kindergarten. 'Nuff said.



Saturday, we went to Oktoberfest at Unity Village. The girls had a good time playing games at the booths and Nora rode some rides (we started to put Charlotte on the little car with Nora, but she got scared when the other kids started beeping their horns.) The main thing Nora wanted to do was ride the ferris wheel, but once we were on it, she hid her face in my lap almost the whole time. I must admit, now that I'm an adult and hear all those wonderful stories of carnival rides not being put together very well, the ferris wheel is now MUCH scarier for me than it used to be. (I think my eyes watch the nuts & bolts more than they look out at the beautiful view). But, of course, I tried not to let Nora know that I was nervous.

Also, Nora has become QUITE the architect and played quite a bit with the Duplo blocks (big Legos) in the last month:

First Day

Well, the day has come. Nora's first day of Kindergarten was Wednesday. She was very excited leading up to Wed, and luckily, that excitement continued. I'm so glad. The story my mom tells about my first day of Kindergarten is that my teacher sent home a note saying "She had grape juice this morning, didn't she?" (As in, my breakfast came up for all to see). I still remember looking out into the hallway and seeing my mom & dad silhouetted as they walked out toward the double doors of the school. Mom, feel free to comment if I have some of these details wrong.

Anyway, Nora had a GREAT first day. She absolutely loved it, and when Kris went to pick her up at the end of the day, she asked "Can I come back tomorrow?" Thursday and today seem to have gone just as well.