Status report: Chloë, 3 years 8 months, and Maia, 23 months

The girls are impossibly cute and impossibly annoying and impossibly smart and entertaining and impossible, in general. In fact, logically speaking I don't have children. Then why am I so tired?

Chloë and I have spent the last few nights' "I get to stay up late because I had a nap" times looking at Youtube videos of the digestive, skeletal, and circulatory systems. She's been especially interested in her My First Body Book lately and has been asking questions about it. A couple of days ago she asked Eric to draw her the outline of a body, and proceeded to color in the organs and veins just as they suggest in the book. (The heart was below the stomach. Otherwise, it was pretty accurate.) "The video on digestion is my favorite," she said this morning. "Can we watch them again?" I am the proudest parent of a three-year-old ever. Even if the next thing she wants to watch is the Hemaway ad so she can watch someone pooping.



We got Chloë a math-based game for her LeapPad for the trip. She's already played every level and won every badge, and still plays almost daily. I venture to say she likes it.

She made a snake out of clay at preschool, and shortly after she brought it home I opened up the modelling clay they got at Christmas. I ended up making most of the things that first session (including a puppy for Maia that she was enthusiastic about, even as she slowly squished it into nonexistence), but a few days ago Eric let them play again and she made her own nest and eggs:



She is the most talented girl ever.

Maia has decided that limit-testing is a great pastime. "Don't do X," I say sternly. She stops and says, "I not doing X any more." Then, as soon as I've stopped eyeing her, she does X again.

She's also very fond of ordering me around. When she greets me when I get home in the evening, she says, "Hug, Mom? Hug?" Then, as soon as I pick her up, "Take your jacket off!" She likes to take hold of my cheeks and move my face around, probably for the faces I make while she's doing it. "Open your knees," she says when she wants to stand between my legs when I'm sitting on the couch; and if she wants to be enclosed in them, "Close your toes."

She knows most of her letters and some of her numbers. She persistently forgets about the existence of the number five, but otherwise is doing pretty well on counting, too. She now calls Chloë "Chwoë" instead of "Toë." It's still very cute, but I kind of miss Toë. Her voice is so small and high and articulate. She's the funniest thing.

She enjoys playing the "I'm your blanket Mama" game, meaning that she stretches out on top of me and I pretend to sleep (complete with snoring noises), and then she gets up and walks away and, if I don't do anything, prompts, "Where your blanket Mama?" whereupon I say "Hey, where's my blanket? Come back, blanket!" And she does.

She's not in pain. She's just sleeping. Can't you tell?

The girls have been doing a lot of "sleepover" and "make a nest" playing in their rooms. After bathtime they get their hair combed--Maia, too, now, and I just adore the little curls at the ends of her hair--and Maia gets a diaper on, and they romp around and try to jump on the bed when we aren't looking. Then they fight over whose book is whose and whether the kitty belongs to Chloë or Maia (it's Chloë's), but on the whole we're still glad we have two instead of one.

They had a good time on Easter. I hadn't planned on doing an egg hunt for them, but Chloë remembered last year's and asked after it, persistently, so I hid eggs around. They picked them up. And, true to form, if they missed one we'd say "There!" pointing, and they'd say, "Where?" while looking right at it. When do young children learn to see?

Chloë keeps asking about going back to the skating ring (where her cousin's birthday party was more than a year ago) and they were both terribly excited about their return to the park when the weather turned (briefly) warm a few days ago. So am I, for that matter. We've got some seedlings started that they helped plant, and I hope to get the garden in shape to plant more things outdoors soon. They'll love it.

Let's make Candy Land better

Chloë enjoys playing games, which is of course really awesome.  Unfortunately, as we all know, kids' games tend to be... well, hardly games.  The games are entirely luck-based; at best, they teach counting and taking turns, though some may involve a "learning" element--teaching letters or number or whatnot.

She loves Candy Land, but it's a horrible game.  So the other day, I spent some time with her trying to make it better--but it still needs a lot of work.  Let's consider the "alternate" version given in the Candy Land rulebook, which actually integrates an element of thought, though no reduction in luck.  This variant is to draw two cards, then use just one.  It is useful for teaching how to determine which of two cards is best--a great skill for gaming!--but it's a true baby step.

Next try:  Draw a hand of three cards.  Play one, then draw one.  Again, it adds an element of thought, though the game is still mostly deterministic; the only difference is that the cards that could set you back now simply become dead cards in your hand.  OK, we're getting better.

Next try:  Same as before, but add an attack.  On your turn, if you're not in the lead, you can spend a card to move the leader backward rather than moving yourself forward.  We didn't finish this game--Maia woke up and that was the end of that--but I think that, once you figure out how to play, this version turns into a complete slog where no one advances significantly.

I think the next step is to take the "special" cards--the doubles and the picture cards--and give them some sort of alternate special power.

At this age she's not ready for a complete strategic overhaul of Candy Land, but hey, it's worth starting now...

And how we would give her the moon

Chloë and I have this little thing we do. I must have started it, because where would she come up with it on her own? I say "Hmm," when I'm considering something. She hears me and says, "Hmm," mock-serious, and taps her lip thoughtfully with her finger. So I say "Hmm," more emphatically than before, and purse my own lips and tap them, and she says, "Hmm!" more emphatically than me, still tapping.

Yesterday evening she was still asking for the moon. So Eric found a window where it could be seen, a slender crescent with Jupiter nearby, and stood her up on the window seat so she could see it. "Moo'," she said, looking up. "Dahr." She reached up, touching the window, and commented, "Gohl (cold)." She gazed more. She wanted to be picked up so she could get closer, which was heartbreakingly cute but only cut off her view. So she returned to the window seat and stayed there, watching the moon.

After a bit I decided to show her the "Moon" segment on her Baby Galileo show, to make the connection between the pictures there and the night sky she could see. She came to see, because the turning on of the TV is always an important event, but I realized as it started to play that this was awfully stupid of me. Why had I pulled her away from her first foray into astronomy to watch a TV show she's seen dozens of times before? Besides, the moons on the show were mostly full, not crescents, but I tried to tell her they were the same moon. We'll watch the sky in the next couple of weeks as we can so she can see it change. But really. Disney admits Baby Einstein isn't educational, so why would I think it would be? Hmm. Hmm!

Books

Yesterday we moved our science fiction and fantasy books from the nurserary downstairs to the dining room. This involved several iterations of filling up laundry baskets with books, hauling them downstairs, unloading the books, and sending the laundry baskets up again; putting all the books on the shelves to see if they would fit; stacking the books in twenty-two stacks, one for each letter of the alphabet (we had no E, Q, U, or X authors); and placing them back on the shelves in alphabetical order. (Eric was the one who wanted them alphabetized, incidentally. I was okay with just making sure books by the same author were together.) It was quite a bit of work, but the dining room seems much friendlier now.

In the process we pulled out some books that can stay with L.E.O. (like Alice in Wonderland and some picture books I own from when I corresponded with a children's author, though those will have to come out again when L.E.O. is likely to deface them) and a few doubles we didn't realize we had. Some will go to Goodwill or friends, and some will go back to the nursery (a nurserary no more) to wait until L.E.O. can read, or until we start reading to her. A six-month-old can't really tell the difference between Goodnight Moon and The War of the Worlds, can she?

Weight matters

We got back from Penguicon yesterday. Technically L.E.O.'s first conventions were in 2009, though I doubt she'll count them as she gets older. I wore the Geek Inside shirt that Eric got me (unfortunately, we decided that the next size up from my usual would be best, but it's still way too big for me--we'll see how it fits in two months) and we were able to share our plans for L.E.O.'s world dominion with a few con friends.

Today's milestone: I am wearing maternity pants for real. Mom gave me three pairs and I tried out the jeans a couple of times, because I miss my jeans. But they felt like they were going to fall down, so I put all three aside. But today I discovered I've grown out of another pair of pants ("From this angle you're huge!" Eric said last night. "Huge!") and decided to give this pair a try. They're still slipping a little but not bad at all--mainly, I think, because they're much lighter than the jeans. However, I've been popping out rather a lot the last few weeks (despite not having gained as much as I did last month), and I'm pretty sure that before long I will also be able to defy gravity with the jeans.

Did you realize...

This came up Friday night from one of our commenters: Did we realize that L.E.O. will actually be born under the zodiac sign Leo? To which the answer is:

1) Yes, but
2) We didn't notice it until a month after the blog started (and therefore several months after the project started), and
3) We take pretty much zero truck with astrology, at least partially because
4) The sun won't actually be between the IAU boundary of the constellation Leo and the earth when L.E.O. is actually born.

The sun will actually be pretty close to Asellus Australis, the central star in Cancer--assuming due dates stick appropriately. I suspect Jenny will have been induced long before the sun gets near the Cancer-Leo boundary (9h20m, or about 10 August).

Interestingly, it appears that Hindu astrologers use a zodiac that more closely resembles at least a vague match with the actual ecliptic. One wonders if the Forer effect would hold just as well for horoscopes produced by both sets of astrologers, or if people would actually be able to differentiate between the two. My bet is, as always, on Forer.