After spending a very long, very glorious weekend in the Redwoods with our glorious friends (photos will undoubtedly follow), today was a little quieter.
Sylvan read a whole book this afternoon. It wasn't short; it did have lots of pictures and jokes about toilets.
Despite the fact that there were cupcakes with whipped cream for dessert to celebrate a certain 39-year-old's birthday, someone fell asleep at dinner. It's so hard to be 3.
You started the day with princess face paint...
...and you ended it with an impressive fat lip. Your mouth bled for two nights afterward, as you slept. And your nose is now bruised. It was some bar fight.
Dear Elena,
You are a tough little chickie. While your latest big injury—your fat lip, bleeding gum, bloody nose, and subsequent bruised nose—did leave you weepy for the rest of that evening, you never needed any pain medication, and your didn’t have any trouble eating the following day. We coached you to tell grown-ups that you’d been in a bar fight, which was more amusing than the I-fell-off-the-bathroom-stool-and-hit-my-face-on-the-sink explanation.
If you knew my Gramma Jo, you may have seen her in glasses like these—they probably would have been black, or maybe red, but she'd have appreciated the panache of the pink ones..
You have a very respectful sense of nighttime and morning. While you do wake us (read: Daddy) up in the middle of the night because you need water or you can’t find Bunny, when it’s nearly morning but still dark, you hole up in your room and talk to your various dolls and stuffed critters. Sometimes you sing, and sometimes you fall back to sleep. Then, when you notice light, you fling open your door and holler enthusiastically, “It’s morning!”
Elena and Grampa Tom with their Stuart Little-sized snowmen
You are currently an interesting and contradictory collection of characteristics and behaviors. Since you were born, you’ve been happy and smiling, and you still are. Life is exciting, and you sing your way through it. And you’re also very much THREE! Three is an age of strong opinions and hardheadedness, at least for children who live in this house. You feel your emotions so strongly, and sometimes you just lash out with your negative ones and they manifest as ear-piercing screaming, fake crying, real crying, hitting. or, excitingly, biting!
In the past couple of months, you’ve started doing some representational drawing, encouraged by your calm and inspirational teacher, Jen, at school. Largely you’ve been drawing people, but I’ve seen some animals too. You can now cut with scissors on a line very well—better than some adults I know, in fact. You often ask me to draw hearts, which you trace with marker, cut out, and decorate with shiny things. You like to paint, and you’ve recently been painting a piggy bank, rocks, and probably the couch cushions.
You counted to 23 the other day, when you were counting stickers on your sticker chart. I was dumbfounded, as I’d never heard you count above 13. Yesterday, you added “eleventeen” after nineteen. I smiled; Sylvan corrected you, because you have to be right if you’re the big sibling.
These last couple of photos attest to your fearless nature. I won’t be at all surprised when you join the IceAxemen at South Eugene High School and tell me that you’re climbing Middle Sister in January. I just hope you don’t mind too much if I foil your plans to kiss that cute sophomore by joining the trip as a chaperone.
Elena, I really appreciate your hugs and kisses. You never fail to be aware of other people’s feelings, and you know when mine are low. You wrap yourself around me like a baby monkey and don’t let go. Thank you.
I love you, Miss Thing.
Love,
Mommy
5/21/12 P.S. I forgot to mention your singing habit, at least more than in passing. Especially when your big brother’s annoying you with loud noises or copying your every word, you have started to sing a happy song to keep yourself smiling. It usually goes something like this: “Princesses like hearts. And fairies like hearts. And unicorns like hearts.” Repeat. It’s difficult for me not to smile when you sing it, so I can only assume that it works for you, too.
"Go, Mommy, go!" Here's you cheering for me at the marathon, mile 8. You look really old in this photo, thin and tall.
Yes, big brother, I trust you.
Some things never change.
Elena says happy birthday to someone who loves to play in the snow with us!
Two happy girls
A couple of our Valentine’s Day creations:
Heart-shaped pancakes on Gramma Jo's plates.
Elena's and Sylvan's valentines for friends
In retrospect, I would have let Elena do her art thing and then cut it up into little squares or hearts for her classmates. She has art project staying power, unlike my last 3-year-old. The “love bugs” are cute, and she loved them, but they were parental-involvement heavy (I downloaded the printable jars here.).
Sylvan’s valentines were GREAT, though. Sylvan and I were inspired by this post, so we developed some Mad Libs for his friends. They were entitled Super Pig’s Rules for School, for some reason, so he also signed his valentines ‘Super Pig.’ Each was wrapped in origami paper, as we’d seen in that blog post, so I decided that I’d print up some little twirling airplane origami instructions on the back of the Mad Libs. Sylvan was involved, but he didn’t feel overwhelmed by his jobs of developing Mad Libs and writing tags. He still doesn’t enjoy long-lived craft projects, and I never want to lose him and feel like I have to do his valentines without him. Success! We’ll do it again next year.
Eugene (and global climate change) gave us a sunny, dry Friday afternoon for a little scientific study. Recently, the kids and I were chatting about what color car is the most common. I suggested we come up with a little counting study. This afternoon, the kids made charts (Sylvan’s had some columns with colors written at the top: green, black, blue, red, brown, silvr, wite, and u for another) and hopped on their bikes to find out if silver really is the most common color car (actually, we hadn’t even ventured a guess or talked about hypotheses before we set out).
Once on the sidewalk, Miss E wanted to head west and Mr. S was hoping to venture south. Could we do both? Sylvan magnanimously suggested we go to Elena’s preferred corner first. We’d brought chairs, and, once we were comfortable and ready, I used my iPod timer to set 15 minutes. Then, the craziness began. That first corner was 22nd and Hilyard, which has a traffic light just two blocks south. When the light turned green, I’d say, “Okay, head down, Sylvan. Ready?” Then I’d call out, “blue, silver, silver, white, black, white, silver, red, blue, black, black, black,” and hope that he got it. “Can you just remember them, Mom?” Um, no.
Elena, independently, figured out her own system, and, while she didn’t really get a complete sample, she did pay attention and fill in her chart.
Then we biked to the second corner counted for another 15 minutes. While we didn’t have the same rushes of cars, the steady stream at 24th and Harris was challenging to keep up with. And we had to keep saying hi to all the folks we knew (1 in a car, 3 on bikes).
The final tally:
Silver it is. Blue may have been under-represented and counted as black in the second count (21 vs. 11) because we were squinting into the sun the second time around. We didn’t count any parked cars, by the way.
Sylvan started to make a histogram after dinner. I’m not sure he’ll have the staying power to finish it, but here it is in its nascence.
Beginning of a car color histogram, broken out by study location
If we were to do this study again, I’d suggest putting the chart together with some rhyme or reason to it to make recording simpler. I’d also add a “gray” column. Lots of gray cars were counted as black. And I’d add a bicycle column, just because I’m interested.
Happy scientific creativity
Getting ready to go to the pool two nights ago:
Elena: Mom, are you wearing a top?
Julie (holding up her bikini bathing suit top): Yeah, here it is.
Elena: No, that’s just nipples!
Yes, there is normally a photo in this space. No, there is not a photo in this space today. The reason you can't see the photo here is because I like being married.
Elena playing a giant drum with Eugene Taiko on Friday night.
I was making dinner in the kitchen, and Elena was looking at a book at the dining room table. She had been pretty quiet for a while, which is sometimes a sign that I’m going to have to clean up a big mess later, so I went in to check on her. She was out cold. I’m surprised she didn’t fall off of the chair.
Notice that she got to the last page of the book before "resting her eyes."
This, of course, is better than the other thing that sometimes happens when a three-year-old forgets to take a nap – a nice little meltdown about an hour before her usual bedtime. Not that my three-year-old would ever do that, but I’ve heard it happens.
It’s almost Christmas in Oregon, which means it’s time to go cut a Christmas tree!
It hasn’t snowed in the mountains for weeks, but it has been nice and cold, so I figured there would still be some snow for sledding. We decided to gather some friends and make a day of it.
We cut the tree first, while we had lots of energy. Since there was only about six inches of packed snow on the ground, we were able to walk into the woods after the tree in our regular snow boots. Much easier than snowshoes!
Shoveling it (in).
It took us a little while to find a tree that was short enough and full enough to make a good Christmas tree. Wild-grown trees are necessarily a little Charlie Brown-ish, but they always look great with lots of lights and ornaments on them.
The kids practiced their saw safety:
Like this?
Big brother shows how it's done.
Cries of “Timber!” rang through the woods, and we heaved and pulled the monstrous beast back to the van.
And then it was time for:
Sledding!
Sledding!
The kids loved the hard, fast snow. They are fearless. I, on the other hand, got jounced around hard enough that two runs was enough for me. I was happy to be the designated photographer.
After a peaceful ride home (Sylvan read aloud to himself from chapter books during the whole ride there and back), we took a quick break to go down the street and watch a little Thomas the Tank Engine with Señor Cupcake…
Señor Cupcake's mom says that Elena can come hang out with him any time. That sounded good to Elena.
… followed by putting up the tree!
No ornaments yet. Just a really soft tree skirt to rub our faces on. Did we mention that it was really soft?