Month-by-month: February

Off to Texas

Safely out of the expensive and crowded holiday travel window, I got some cheap plane tickets and took Annika and Lukas to visit the fam in Texas (on what I fondly hope is the last solo flight with both kids until they're like ten and six at least!). They were very well-behaved, but the sheer amount of crap I had to drag through airports and on and off of planes was exhausting, and if it weren't for the kindness of strangers, I might not have recovered yet. But anyway ... So we stayed at my mom's house, mostly just hanging around doing nothing, which was pretty awesome. Both kids ended up sleeping in the bed with me by the middle of the night, meaning I barely got any sleep at all, but our agenda wasn't very taxing, heh. Mom and I watched the entire second season of Downton Abbey, we got to see Aunt L, Uncle J & Aunt J, my own aunt and uncle, and some other family, we had a great day visiting a little zoo in Gainesville (Frank Buck Zoo) and then hitting a park and going out for lunch, and Annika for the first time noticed the "princess castle" on the Decatur square -- aka the county courthouse -- so we walked up there together and went inside while Lukas slept in the stroller. Good times all around! And while we were gone, R. put in 15-hour days painting the living room, entryway, and guest bedroom! The burnt-silly-putty color is goooooooone! Celebramos! (Yes, it does require that many exclamation points.) So, a very successful week-plus all around.

A near-crisis, narrowly averted

For some time, Annika had been talking about the "hundred day" party at school -- it's a big thing, they have a party lunch, they all bring 100 of something to count; it's part celebration of being able to count to 100, and part marking 100 days of school thus far in the year. But we didn't know when it was, exactly ... and when the information sheet finally went up, it was of course scheduled for the very day we were to be traveling back from Texas. I told Annika, and she was out of her mind with misery. I felt bad, and started looking up different flights, change fees, etc. -- and it couldn't be done for less than about $1000, so we were SOL. But then I thought of one more thing -- and feeling like the biggest jerk on the planet, I emailed her teacher to ask if the party could be moved to the next day. I apologized in advance for even asking, and qualified it with several assurances that of course we'd understand if it was a no go, she's only ONE student in a full class, there are disappointments in life, etc. ... and within the hour, the teacher had emailed back to say, "Sure, no problem, we'll move it to Thursday." Ridiculous amounts of happiness (plus effusive thanks on my part!) ensued ... and it does seem that the hundred-day party was a smashing success, so I'm glad she did get to go. Even if it did make me seem like one of those "Anything for my speshul princess!!" types ... oh my.)

Valentine's Day

So less than a week later, it was Valentine's Day. In a rare flash of forethought, I had scooped up some Spider-Man cards and little heart-printed gift bags at Michael's a few weeks ago, so Annika and I made heart-shaped cookies and frosted them with pink icing. She signed her name to all the cards (I usually prefer homemade to store-bought, but time and logistics were not with us this year, besides did I mention she is obsessed with Spider-Man? So I let her have it), and we assembled the treat bags with one card, one Spidey tattoo, and one cookie each. Those kids better have eaten those cookies, dammit ...

Move it, move it

Annika is getting better and better at bike riding; she's good at steering, she can go pretty fast, and she's learned how to brake with the pedals. She's less good at watching where she's going ... but that'll come in time. We hope. :-) And meanwhile, she loves to go with me to the gym; this one takes kids as young as six weeks in the Kids' Club, so on days we're home by ourselves, the three of us will often go to the gym for a bit. I'm really glad she enjoys it, and I'm also glad to get the chance to model healthy behavior; R. and I both run and work out regularly, and we've always talked about it as "getting fit and healthy," and emphasized how much better it makes us feel. We want both the kids to have good associations with fitness and physical activity, and it's never too early to start sharing that with them.

Lukas's First Mini-Sauce

One Friday in February, some email chatter led to a spontaneous Saturday Sauce. We loaded up all our crap and drove down on Saturday afternoon, rocked out Saturday night (both kids sleeping like logs -- awesome!), and back home Sunday midday. Annika did NOT want to leave -- she told me at one point, "I have an idea! I'll stay here, and you and Daddy go home to get our stuff, and come back, and we can live here!" Lukas, for his part, still doesn't really care where he is, as long as somebody is holding him ... which, with six adults to one baby, was pretty much all the time we were there. Heh. One other development was that we realized with stone certainty that we are going to have to buy a bigger automobile -- the Prius was stuffed to the absolute gills, and even then, we had to have T & D take our guitars and the keyboard and stands. We knew this -- we need something that seats six or seven -- but trying to go somewhere with any amount of equipment made it clear that we also need more cargo capacity. Uggggh.

The cirrrrcle of liiiiiiiiife

A major topic of discussion this month: Death. Going to Texas and not seeing Kelly reminded Annika that he had passed away last year, and then the good dog Wilson (M&H's Brittany) died, and so we've been talking a lot about the subject. She wants to know who we know that has died, and where they go when they die, and when all of the rest of us will die. She doesn't seem especially disturbed by it, but she's clearly thinking about it a lot off and on, which I think is pretty normal for her age. My instinct as always is to shield her from this kind of thing, but that is A) impossible and B) a bad move to even try, so we're just trying to be as honest as possible and reassure her that although every living thing dies eventually, it is likely to be a very long time -- waaaay after she's already a grownup -- until we go. She seems pretty OK with that.

The Quotable Annika

--"It's not a hoose, it's a house!"

Correcting Canadians on Holmes Inspection, laughing her head off.

--"Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of a ginger-crumb!"

Insisting that these are the words, and "Englishman" is something nutty that we made up.

--Skibbles

--Hand hand sanitizer

--Magic-trick guy

--lion-flower

--tooth-es, moth-es

Her take on Skittles, hand sanitizer, magician, dandelion, and the plurals of tooth and moth, respectively

--"These are pliers, to ply up things."

While playing with her new toolbox

--"Do dragons eat dragonflies?"

A reasonable question.

--Grandpa, to an elephant-print-pajamas-wearing Annika: "Hello, elephant!"

--Annika, to a college-T-shirt-wearing Grandpa: "Hello, Columbia!"

--R., while we listen to a song he recorded a few years ago, on which he played each instrument and sang the vocals, and combined them all via the magic of sound mixing: "Did you know Daddy played all the instruments on this song?"

--Annika, marveling: "You don't have enough HANDS to play all those instruments!"

--"Oh cool, a dolphin did it!"

Thoroughly pleased with my answer to her question about what a certain area on the title page of her Curious George book meant -- I said that was where they tell you who the publisher, aka the maker of the book, is; obviously I meant the words Houghton-Mifflin, but she focused on the tiny little dolphin logo.

--"I want curly hair like my cousints'."

[sigh] Don't we all want what we can't have? Heh.

Month-by-month: January

A new routine for Fridays

With Lukas a little older now, and Annika home as usual on Fridays, I realized I could give up that whole "trying to get anything at all done" thing for one day and just do fun stuff. So what we've been doing is mucking around the house in the morning (or getting just ONE thing done, like the time we went to the notary so I could order Lukas's birth certificate), then going to the diner for lunch, followed by the library and the park. It's been working out really well -- I focus on the kids, Annika and I get to have lunch together (that I don't have to cook) and Lukas gets the beginnings of restaurant training, we pick up some new books for free (and hot damn, after two weeks they go back, so if they're annoying, we're not stuck with them forever), and Annika gets to burn off some energy and hang out with "kids." (One particularly awesome park day, she came over to me just to tell me that "I am not leaving here until ALL the kids are gone.") Then it's home to a super-long, super-bubbly bath for her while I feed Lukas, and as often as not, R. brings home something for dinner. These are pretty great days, full of sunshine and fresh air, and I look forward to them all week.

Lukas update

Who is this little guy, with his crazy little left-cheek dimple? He's a sweet sweet baby, and he wants to be HELD, DAMMIT -- none of Annika's early independence there, y'all. He likes to be up in the mix, laughing his little toothless-headed laugh, sucking on his entire fist, eating every seventeen minutes, and sleeping like a champ at night.

The World's Most Absorbent Mind

So as usual, during Christmas, we had The Movie (A Christmas Story) running on TV a lot. Annika has never paid much attention to it, and we didn't think she was watching it this year either. But a couple of weeks into January, she was in the upstairs bathroom while I was in my room. I went into the hallway and she popped halfway out of the bathroom with her hands up like claws, laughing "Haaa haaaaar! aaaaaarrrrrgh!" It only took me a second to realize: This is her Scut Farkas impression. She was doing the scene where he ambushes the kids in an alley! I think I almost had a stroke from laughing -- she followed it up with a really challenging "Whoooo's next?" (just like the toady says it). So -- yeah. She was watching ...

Month-by-month: December

School party

December 9 was the babyschool party, and Annika's class did something different; instead of having all the kids sing a song like the other classes did, they performed a little skit. One girl was the Gingerbread Girl, who escaped from two other kids in a play kitchen and then kept encountering the other kids in twos and threes; they'd ask "Where are you going this bright and sunny day?" and she'd answer that she escaped from the little old woman and little old man, and [all the previous groups of kids, e.g. bunnies, kittens, doggies, etc.]. Annika and the other Finnish-descent girl, Ida, were "forest fairies" with green hats, about halfway through the thing. At the end, the gingerbread girl got eaten by the fox, who told her to come a little closer. Heh. It was hilarious and so cute, especially when there were spontaneous onstage hugs. Afterward there were the usual treats and a visit from Santa Claus (whom she would only stand next to, as always). Lukas came with us, of course, and spent pretty much the whole time asleep in his carseat bucket, getting made a fuss over by all the other parents, kids and teachers.

Christmas, with Grandma & Grandpa

Since we decided not to risk the germ soup of holiday-season air travel with a month-old baby, we stayed in our new house over Christmas and hosted Grandma and Grandpa. Mostly it was a festival of Annika bossing them around in various games, often with Grandma holding Lukas at the same time. Plus of course there was a big Christmas dinner, mountains of presents, the cousins coming over, all the good stuff. Annika got a bicycle with training wheels, since she's now too big for the trike (or so she says). And this year, she was finally really old enough to help decorate the tree! That was so much fun -- we all four went to pick one from the lot (Lukas asleep in the portable carseat the whole time), and Annika helped Daddy with the lights, then the three of us put all the ornaments on. The new ones this year were a craft she and I did together: Shrinky-Dink Gabba Gang! (I bought some blank sheets of Shrinky-Dink plastic, traced the characters from a coloring book, and wrote Christmas 2011 on them, and Annika and I colored them with pencils. They turned out really cool!) In general, Lukas mostly did a lot of sleeping and eating and getting his picture taken while Annika bounced off the walls, high on sugary treats and grandparental attention. A great first Christmas for us as a family of four!

One-month checkup

Lukas had his one-month checkup in December, and it went extremely well -- the doc made note of the fact that he's in the 50th percentile in weight but the 65th percentile in height, as if the two numbers should be closer, but I was like, "Yeah, do you see his dad standing here? You see what he looks like? This is what I expected, lady!"

Annika's interests these days

--Superheroes and princesses: The girl is obsessed with Spider-Man (I went to ridiculous lengths to get her a Spidey costume for Christmas in just under a week ... EXTORTIONATE SHIPPING!) and the concept of superheroes in general. She wants to know who's a good guy, who's a bad guy, what powers they have, etc. We need to brush up on our knowledge of the canon, obviously, but we are happy to encourage this interest; the thorniest issue so far has been explaining that A)Spider-Man, et. al., are not REAL real, and B)that Peter Parker is Spider-Man ... At the same time, she's very into princesses, fairies and the like. In her mind, princesses seem to be basically superheroes who wear pretty dresses -- which is why I'm OK with it (as opposed to what I think a princess is: somebody who has no real power and was born into her position, to be made much of while simultaneously being shunted aside to let princes and kings do all the fun stuff). (Overthink, much?)

--Telling Lukas about her day: She'd come home from babyschool and sit there for awhile, telling him what she did in school and asking what he did. It cracked her up if one of us would answer for him in a high, Mr. Bill-type voice, "Ohhh, you know, slept a lot, ate a lot, got a few new diapers ..."

--Asking how you make things: From towels to cars to pasta, she's very curious these days to know how things are made. It's a constant challenge to try to explain simply enough, yet in enough realistic detail to satisfy, but it's actually pretty fun, and shows you where your own limits of understanding of mechanical things, physics, materials and processes are!