Archive for July, 2009
Oh, the words. The talking. The absence of quiet in the car, the house, the everywhere.
I worried. I thought she wasn’t talking enough or that she should be a little further (verbally) along by now.
Not so much worried anymore.
She’s stringing words together into real sentences. A grammarian she is not (“you sit me pease, Mama” translates to “Can I sit on your lap, please?”) but I’ve no doubt she’ll be there in no time – but I hope not too quickly because her phrasing is so darn cute right now. She sometimes gets in such a hurry to speak that the words tumble out incorrectly and and I become Dada before she realizes she’s made a mistake and corrects herself (“UH-OH, no Dada you Mama!). She knows that “pease” will get her almost anything. She knows that potty (“pot-pot”) makes the world come to an abrupt halt which means that she tries it whenever we make her do something she doesn’t want to do – like sit in her chair and eat or ride in the stroller. She asks me every single morning if Dada will pick her up from daycare and and we play our version of I Spy for the entire duration of our morning commute (“I see trees, I see sky, I see cars, I see truck, I see dog, I see poo-pul (people), etc.”). Every siren is a fire truck and I never realized how many airplanes there actually are in our skies (duh – since we live near an airport and an Air Force base) until she began to point them out to me every single time she spotted one. It goes without saying that everything in our house except Daddy’s truck and Mama’s car are “mine.” Speaking of seeing…if she hears a car horn or the microwave beeps then she doesn’t hear it – she “sees” beep-beeps.
She’s learned to say yes, finally. Well, really she says yeah – which drives me nuts. She does a long drawn out “uhhhhhhh” before answering when you ask her a question that she has to think about. Cute, but slightly annoying. Dada is becoming Daddy and she tried to turn Mama into Mommy which I nipped in the bud by refusing to answer her and then asking her what my name is about 9 million times. She’s knows that Daddy’s other name is J and she will call him that if she’s yelling at him from another room. (Oops, guess I should watch that.) It’s a bit surreal to hear your own verbal foibles repeated back to you by the sponge-y 2 year old – as evidenced by her saying “Huh?” every single time we speak to her. I blame that on J as he’s half deaf anyway and this is his standard response to being spoken to. He’s even gotten annoyed by it and has in turn quit doing it too. Thank heavens. Now we just have to break her from doing that and the “Hmph” under her breath that she picked up from me.
Her speech is very clear most of the time although there are still words that we don’t get – which then turns into a game of 20 questions while we try to figure it out before she gets angry about our lack of toddler language translation skills. She amazes me with some of the words she says. She can say and identify a number of geometrical shapes but still can’t fit them in the shape sorter easily (nor can I do this either – spatial relations are not my strong suit). She knows her color names but mostly wants everything to be called pink.
Did someone say pink? Yep, she’s an all pink girly girl. Loves nail polish on her toes, hairbows for about 30 minutes, gives herself a swipe of powder on the nose anytime she can get hold of my makeup brush, and covets chap stick above all else in the world. Purses and shoes are her thing – and she has plenty of each. Oh, and she loves swishy skirts.
Not only is she talking…but she is SINGING. All the time – loudly – and insists, no – make that demands, that you join in. She sings her ABC’s all the way through, she sings Baa Baa Black Sheep, she sings – well, let’s just say she sings everything since it would take me too long to list them all. She sings in the car, in the store, in the house, in the shower, outside, inside, at the beach, and anywhere else she feels like it. Thus J and I sing a lot more now, too. In public and with no regard to how bad we sound or how silly we look doing the hand motions to Twinkle Twinkle Little Star in the middle of T.arget. I think singing like this is good for the soul and I’m glad Ava has freed us up to do this even if people do look at me like I’m nuts sometimes.
She’s 90% independent toddler with just the right amount of mama’s baby mixed in. What a great age the 2′s have been for us so far.
Day 6:
I won’t belabor the point. We drove. A long time.We were on the road early – around 7AM, I think, but still didn’t make it home until very late in the afternoon.
I can tell you where every rest stop is between SC and home (the nicest ones are in NC, I think) and that there are a lot of vegetable markets between here and there. And fireworks.
We’d hoped to get back in time to catch Little River Band in concert that night but by the time we got in and settled we were all too wiped out to rouse ourselves to get back in the car again. I was a little disappointed but hey, it is what is is.
Day 7:
Don’t be jealous but we finally broke down and joined the ranks of our pool owning neighbors. Theirs might be a tad fancier, what with the 10 foot slides, fancy tile work, and the shooting jets of water, but ours felt pretty darn good in the 90+ degree temperature. Besides, we have a whale slide that doubles as a backrest AND a pink dolphin that shoots water from her (gotta be a girl since it’s very, very pink) nose and they certainly can’t say that about their fancy in-ground pool. We even have 2 levels to our pool. They just have one, you know.
She couldn’t decide which side she liked better so she had to test the waters in both.
And then she spent absolute AGES moving the water from one side to the other…
and watering the palm tree (yeah, baby – our pool came with its very own built in palm trees!).
After all that work she opted to lounge a bit and enjoy the tropical fruits of her labor.
We took advantage of the warm weather and (superb parenting move here) bathed her in the pool before bribing coaxing her to come inside with the promise of the beloved towel.
It worked like a charm.
P.S. Pictures not shown are the ones where I kicked my kid out of one side of the pool so I could join her in there. I took the whale side (ack – that sounds bad) and she proceeded to near drown me with the dolphin for the next 45 minutes. I’m pretty sure my neighbors were writhing in jealousy as they watched me sprawl out with my pillow-y whale backrest.
P.P.S Joking about the neighbors – we pretty much have free rein to use their pool whenever we want to. Sometimes it’s just easier to head out into our own back yard than it is to deal with the combination of concrete and tile + running child and the worries about the depths of a real pool.
After getting a late-ish start to the day, the three of us headed out for a drive down the tackiest part of Myr.tle Beach. Since it’s been 20 or so years since I was last there I wanted to see if it had changed much. The best I can tell it’s only gottern sprawl-ier and tackier but everything else is pretty much about the same. A co-worker (who is a SC native so can say such things with some authority) calls it K-Mart by the sea. I think that’s the best description I’ve ever heard.
We were planning to meet up with J’s family at a beach club they frequent but ended up arriving late due to traffic and the need to feed the little hungry one so by the time we arrived a gigantic storm was brewing and our time on the beach was cut short (like to about 3 minutes). I’m kind of funny about being near the water when electrical storms are in the vicinity so we bailed out rather quickly and headed for some indoor recreation. We went to the Ripley’s aquarium where we quickly discovered that they have the best military discount I’ve ever seen anywhere. Our admission would have been around $40 without it but it ended up being only $12 ish. I’ll give ‘em props for that but I would have been really angry if we’d paid the full price since the line to see the Babies exhibit was about an hour’s wait and the mermaid show was canceled due to a private party. Since Ava could have cared less about either of those things anyway we just moved on into the morass of people and pushed our way through using our gargantuan stroller as a crowd clearing device.
Ava thought the experience was just okay, I think. The rays scared her to death, whereas it just puzzled me that people pay lots of extra money to swim with them (thanks – but no). She screamed when she saw the jellyfish (we were so proud – like father, like daughter, you know) and she had a potty accident when we were on the people mover in the aquarium tunnel because people wouldn’t easily step aside to let us through despite Ava yelling “Potty, potty” at the top of her lungs.
BTW, we decided that the worst job in the world has to be the mermaid at the entrance of the building. People were queuing up to have a picture taken with this gorgeous girl with long, flowing hair wearing a teeny bikini top with mermaid non-legs. Kids climbing on her, men leering at her, and she’s having to fake smile and wave at everyone coming in. I can’t imagine they pay nearly enough to make that worthwhile.
We stayed long enough for the rain to stop and then took a walk ’round the Pavilion Nostalgia Park. This was definitely one of the highlights of the trip. Ava was terribly excited because she got to feed fish and pick up ducks. Two more firsts for her.
First, the fish.
There were about a million of them and they followed us everywhere we went. First we fed them her leftover bread from lunch and then moved on to the tourist rip off fish food that you could purchase – 10 or so tiny pieces for a quarter from the strategically placed vending machines. Ava LOVED this and would have done it for hours had we not run out of pocket change.
Maybe it was a gazillion fish. And ducks.
Then she picked up ducks. Not the ones above, of course, but the kind that you find on the midway that are like 3 for $1. Oh wait, that was in the 70′s when my parents would let me pick up ducks at the fair. Now the ducks are $2 EACH.
Good thing I only had 4 bucks in my wallet. Otherwise we would have been there all night and would have been forced to take out a second mortgage on the house. It really was that cute watching her furrow her brow while deciding exactly which duck to pick up…
or deciding that maybe she’d rather just splash in the water instead.
Being my daughter means that her gambling skills are nonexistent so she, naturally, picked the cheap-o ducks and won the smallest prizes imaginable.
Size notwithstanding, she was quite chuffed to have won something and toted them around proudly for at least 3 minutes until she completely forgot about them.
We would have loved to have ridden some of the kid rides with her but the storms were still out and about and we ended up having to make a mad run for the car when the downpour started again. After a quick dinner with J’s family at a BBQ place (food was good but it was a buffet which we tend to avoid when the kid is with us since it means one person is always up getting food while the other stays with Ava resulting in dinners eaten separately because we’re unable to actually eat at the same time) we headed back to turn in early in preparation for the early (long) drive home the next day.
(Almost) nothin’ but pool.
Ready:
Set:
GO!
Splash Landing:
Again, please.
Life jacket off – swimming with (and near drowning) Daddy:
Holding her breath:
Holding Daddy’s breath…
right before pushing him underwater…
and holding him there.
Thank goodness Uncle Michael* was there to save his brother since Mama was too busy taking pictures of the potential carnage to intervene.
The other notable event of the day was a visit and dinner with old family friends, Yvette and Roy. They brought Ava a gift – a cute butterfly towel set embroidered with Linus her name. May as well have been Linus since she wants to carry it EVERYwhere and screams, “My Towel, My Towel” every single time she spots it. We’ve got it hidden right now as it brought on quite the tantrum when we wouldn’t let her cart it around with her in public. We do bring it out for water day at daycare and whenever we hit the nearest water park (big or small).
* Unfortunately in the water was pretty much the only time she would really let Uncle Michael touch her. He was okay at a distance or as a floor playmate but that’s about all. Since it was only a short trip she really didn’t have enough time to acclimate and open up to him like she has in previous visits.
On our third day we headed south – out of town to visit J’s parents.
Memories of the day? We drove for a long, long time. We stopped a lot. We drove more.
It’s tough driving long-ish distances with a two year old who is barely out of diapers. We can’t yet completely ignore her when she says she has to potty, but at the same time she’s already learned that the use of that phrase gets an automatic response so we’re constantly trying to gauge whether she really has to go or if she’s fibbing. Bottom line is that we didn’t want to risk it and pretty much stopped every time she said it…plus a few other times on top of that just to make sure. That meant a 6 hour road trip took us over 8 1/2 hours and even though Ava is a great traveler (for a 2 year old) it isn’t an experience that I will look back on fondly. Add to this that we were traveling with dogs who also had to go potty – just never on the same schedule that Ava was on.
It’s also hard to stop and eat when you’re on the road with dogs. We certainly would never leave them in the car with the high temps so we’re pretty limited for food breaks. Our first meal stop on this excursion was at a somewhat seedy gas station that happened to have a sort-of Subway and a sort-of DQ inside. We grabbed a few things from inside and ate out back – a pseudo picnic near the dumpster. Nice. My blizzard melted in the time it took me to get Ava to settle down to eat her shrink wrapped Pimiento cheese sandwich so it was kind of a FAIL for me.
After the first few potty breaks we gave up on actual bathrooms and just pulled out her potty for use wherever we could find a place. I think that I will never travel without one again. It made life so much easier for all of us. Well, maybe not for J since he was the one usually cleaning it out.
We stopped at an abandoned gas station situated next to an open field. Great place where we let both our 2 and 4 footed little ones run to their hearts’ content.
What? All this space for me? Whatever shall I do?
Oh, right. I’ll RUN!
And then I will glare at you sullenly when you make me stop and do what we originally stopped for in the first place.
Ultimately we made it and had a fantastic dinner waiting on us almost as soon as we got there. J and I also were able to leave Ava for the first time with her paternal grandparents for a (very) few minutes so we could run to Wal-M*rt to pick up some of the things we’d forgotten for Ava (like a CD player since she falls asleep listening to music, a booster seat to lock her down for meals, and a white noise machine which we didn’t find for our first night there). She did great while we were gone – although our youngest dog didn’t do nearly as well then OR for the remainder of the trip.
First night was good for her once we got her down to sleep (a little lot rough) and good for us since I was exhausted after the long day on the road where the major entertainment involved trying to deduce from the many billboards what J`R didn’t sell since it appeared they were the largest store for EVERYthing (dolls, cigars, western wear, and boots among many other items) and exactly how many billboards were there for Pedro’s South of the Border (“Pedro’s fireworks, does yours?”).