child safety lock

sophia does things her own way. she can't be bothered to exert much energy on closing her car door when she gets in, so it doesnt get securely latched. it just is not a priority. but the days of her trying to open the door while the car is moving are still a sufficiently vivid memory to keep the child safety lock on. so she can't fix the poorly shut door problem herself, which means someone else has to unbuckle, get out and re-shut it for her. the remarkable thing is that she has so much upside that this ostensibly exasperating experience, as many times as it's repeated, still mostly just makes me laugh at the truly idiosyncratic and strangely enjoyable sophia-ness imposed on my world. i remember being little and doing things that made people laugh and not having intended to be be funny, and finding that quite unpleasant and confusing. i see this happen to sophia all the time. we're only laughing at her delightfulness, but she's not convinced.

Cold Feet

Sophia is such a funny little monkey. After going ice skating with the school she was determined to become an ice skater. She would ask me, with almost as much frequency, if we could go ice skating (and go to the beach and have a sleep-over at Nana's, and have a snack). I was amazed by her perseverance and finally at the beginning of this year I signed her up. Elias decided that he wanted to be an ice skater too so they both have class Saturday morning. The first class went well. We arrived 15 minutes late to a half hour class.

The kids were excited, they skated and then class was over. We started to unlace our skates with many a tear in Sophia's eyes when somebody informed us that the kids were allowed to skate for two hours with the lessons. Yippee all was well. The kids got back on the ice and remarkably Sophia's cheeks didn't freeze from crying. After such a wonderful first experience I assumed the kids would be enthusiastic every week but it got a bit colder outside and that means that the inside of the ice skating rink is colder too. Sophia has not yet put on her winter padding and she has the bad idea that if she is cold she should stay very very still. Elias has some animal instinct that keeps him moving the whole time and he therefore stays warm but Sophia tries to huddle into herself and warm her core by shivering. This was not so much fun. During the lessons Sophia seems fine and afterwards Elias is happy to skate but Sophia just stands in one place whimpering because of the cold. So now we are back down to sleep-overs, the beach, and snacks. Oh, and legoland.

infant-'stache

babies, at least our babies, have this funny little ridge on their upper lips that is revealed when they make a certain kind of smile.
it's a subtle line across the musculature in their upper lips where a thin john waters-type mustache would go, and that itself would be quite amusing on an infant, but instead they have this adorable little dimple across. it seems to function as a marker of a particular kind of pleased, but not unrestrained, almost a bit smug, happiness for them. eventually, and somewhat sadly, their faces change and it can't be seen anymore. cybele still has it and i love looking at it and making her smile in the right way to see it. see if you can find traces of it in the pictures of her.

The meaning of Nan

Can you see what Cybele is doing with her mouth in this picture? She has her tongue on the roof of her mouth so that it is always ready to cluck.

She runs around like this a lot of the time clucking and babbling. The only other thing that she is likely to be doing while she is awake is eating. It seems strange to me that she doesn't have a lot of words yet but I think it's mostly our own fault. We are all waiting on the edge of our seats just like she is already ready to cluck to give her her hearts desire. Her hearts desire continues to be called "Nan". However, she does differentiate somewhat between her Nans a little by pointing and sometimes accentuating different parts of the word. Nana is what she calls all the main females in her life. Kathie, Jen and myself are the main Nanas but really anyone that pleases her at the moment (boy or girl) may be referred to as Nana. Na-na is only one thing and that is a banana. Banana is her go to food and it may be the reason for her multi-use Nan word. Then finally we have nan. Nan means water, toy, food, remote control, milk, chocolate, cheese, book, whatever. Where we are all implicit with Cybele's lack of learning words is that when she says nan we all jump. we offer her anything and everything. She really has figured out a new word and it means I want and I want you to figure it out without me saying anything else. She really is quite clever and sometimes she proves to me that she knows more than she lets on by nodding when we finally guess the right thing. What a spectacular game we play.

kneez

i took elias downtown last night. we needed to get a pizza for family movie night, but first we needed to get himself some new pants. he had earned a hole in both knees of his jeans, but had managed to outgrow them first, so we couldnt really blame the manufacturer. he really is only getting about 5 months out of pants these days. it amazes me. i am reassured and pleased that he will still come 'shopping' with me without too much bribery. i fear the day he will decide/realize that it bores him to death and that he'd rather stay home and floss. es war mach spass, and now we can start timing how long these ones last him. they used to make boys pants with knee reinforcements, what ever happened to those? do i need to shop at sears more? tough-kneez i think they were called. little help here.

sixty in January?

We are having some bizzaro weather in Indiana which means that it was in the sixties at the beginning of the week and in the forties and rainy at the end of the week. The warm weather got me excited to do some bike riding while we had the chance and I was not disappointed. Elias joined me for a bike ride this last Monday and I was amazed by his progress. I don't know if time away gave his body a chance to figure out how to balance and everything but he is amazing. The only thing that Elias still has trouble with is starting up. The bike that he rides is Tristan's old bike from when he was a kid and although it has been adjusted down to its lowest seat level, it is still too big for Elias. The bike that I bought for him is the perfect size but he will not ride it. So riding a bigger bike means that the initial couple seconds when you take your feet off the ground and balance without moving forward are a little longer for Elias cause he cannot sit on the seat with both feet on the ground. He can balance one foot on the ground and lean slightly to the side but that means that he needs to over-correct his balance and start moving at the same time. This he hasn't quite figured out. Instead what we do is line up our bikes parallel to each other and I help him start. Then I catch up with him and we ride together until a stop sign. He does fine stopping (except for a couple hilarious crashes into the garage) and then I just get him going again. He has also improved his ability to stay in a relatively straight line. I used to find riding next to Elias a little bit terrifying (and you may remember running next to Elias earlier on in the learning process) because he did a lot of weaving from one side of the road to the other. But lucky for me, he doesn't weave around the block, except on purpose and he can even pass cars safely. But the nicest part of my bike ride Monday was the end. After crashing into the garage (I swear he does it on purpose), high-fiving each other and a big big hug, Elias told me that it was the funnest bike ride he had ever had.

"h"

School has brought out a side of Sophia that I did not know existed. I knew she wouldn't have a hard time at school cause she is charming and she makes friends easily, but I always assumed that she would be lazy with her work. She is not. Tristan has described some of her recent antics, spelling off the tv, but she also writes letters in the air. This can be difficult considering that she is still learning which direction letters face and she is tracing it in the air so depending on which side of her you are on there are all sorts of things that need to be considered before you can say with certainty "h".
"h" does happen to be a favorite of Sophia's. Yesterday she came with me to buy some new scrubs for work and as we were paying the cashier wrote payck (paycheck) in cursive. Sophia watched her as she wrote this and then told her, "You wrote your h upside-down". The cashier and I looked puzzled for a minute and then I glanced at the receipt. "No baby, that's a y"
But if she were tracing it, upside-down on the couch, it would be an "h".

doe, a deer

'Phi-phi", which is what i call her when i want her to call me "poppy", is growing her intellect very rapidly. she loves sounding out the phonetics of letters. she went up to the tv today during an infomercial and pointed to the numbers in the ph.# to call to purchase the fine merchandise,
and read them over and over till she could recite them from memory. and right now she is singing the doe-a-deer song from sound of music. she sings this line: "ray, a cup-a-doerlen sun!!!" so much better than rogers and hammerstein ever envisioned.