Archives for January 2007

From the Mouth of Babes

Two very appropriate remarks came today from our daughters when Steve and I turned on the presidential speech tonight.

Allison’s reaction: “Monkey” She may have been trying to tell us to change the channel to Curious George, or maybe she just thinks George Bush is a monkey.

Katherine’s reaction: “His face looks red.” We explained that with our new TV we would see things that we hadn’t seen before and that the red was from his makeup.

What Else is New?

Over the course of four weeks, we’ve had a 8 night power outage followed by Christmas, New Years, The Flu (Christine), and then The Snowstorm. Newspaper articles claim this is because of El Nino and not global warming…I think it’s all of the above and plus some bad karma.

1) The 8 Nights Without Power. Outside of family in Duvall, we seem to have set the dubious record among friends for the length of time without power before Christmas. In a nutshell, everything was fine except for no laundry, oven and no high-speed Internet connection. Oh, and Allison had a nasty cold and couldn’t breath or sleep without a humidifier, which we couldn’t run at night (since we tried to turn off the generator before 10PM each night). So we shipped her off to my mom’s for a couple nights. We were starting to get a bit worried when we STILL didn’t have power as we headed to bed the Thursday before Christimas. Thankfully all was restored that evening before Sharon and Jamey arrived the following Friday night. One last aside: we lost a rather large pine tree in our back yard which didn’t hit anything.

2) Christmas. We have many stories which I’ll take the time to writeup later.

• We only broke four cheap and one really expensive glass ornament this year putting up the tree. I view that as rather a pleasant surprise – but then again we put all the ornaments in the top half of the tree!
• Katherine was extremely disappointed that we didn’t have lights outside the house. Given the state of our power and having just watched “An Inconvenient Truth”, Christmas lights just didn’t happen this year.
• The girls had fun playing with their pink advent calendar, wrangling over candy for the gingerbread house, and going to Seattle to see the Christmas sights. It may have been day 6 or 7 of the outage when I told Steve we needed some holiday spirit. We bundled up the kids, dragged them to see the gingerbread houses built by architects, the Teddy Bear Suite (“where are the sweets??”) and the holiday carousel.
• Sharon and Jamey stayed in town for 3 days. We made pies, took the kids for a long walk, had hot pot, watched a Seahawks game, made oatmeal cookies for Santa and generally played with Christmas toys and gifts.

3) The Flu. I also managed to come down with a mysterious 30 hour flu. There were no symptoms otherwise – fell asleep in the playroom while the kids were running around and then started to feel chilled. Steve had just shipped Katherine to my mom’s house for a sleepover. When he came home, I gave him Allison and then went into quarantine in the bedroom for 2 days. The kids were great. Katherine wrote a get well card (mom, we will take care of you!). Allison charged in whenever she could find the door open. I would see her bounce up on to the bench and shout “Mama!” with a big smile. Steve took care of the kids (with help from my mom and Patty) and provided bus service for Tylenol, water, etc. All is well now. Fingers crossed no one else gets this very strange bug.

4) The Snowstorm. Tonight we learned a valuable lesson – to not procrastinate before snowstorms. Steve and I had an errand that had to be completed before dinner. Well, we didn’t head out until 4PM, just as the snowstorm started to hit. We had some difficulty coming home, steering around cars stuck in ditches, accidents, cars parked on the side of the road. And, this was all on a 1 mile stretch of Union Hill Road! We were very glad to pull into the driveway unscathed. I suspect tomorrow will be full of snow day activities – snowmen, food dyed snowballs, tromping around the neighborhood.

“I’ll get it”

Allison’s development continues at a rapid clip; she’s now 20 months old. Rather than editorialize, I’ll just give some sample conversations from the last day or so…

Mom: “Allison, I think some of the missing puzzle pieces are in your sister’s room. Shall we go upstairs and get it?”

Allison “I’ll get it.” (crawling up the stairs)

———-

Dad: “Allison, did you go pee-pee or pooh-pee?”

Allison: “I did.”

————-

Mom: “Katherine, would you like apple juice or orange juice?”

Allison: “apple juice”

—————-

Dad: “Allison, what comes after sixteen?”

Allison: “Sefenteen”

———-

Other items of interest

• Regularly we hear 2 word phrases like: “Daddy’s coffee”, “Sister backpack”, “Get it”, “Coming!!” She can repeat almost any word reasonably well. She also has been heard to holler for her sister, “Sister…Sister…Kathfrine!!” or the dog “Bico!”
• She can count up to 20 in English now and tries to count all sorts of things including pieces of food, stairs…anything!
• She also intersperses Chinese in her conversation, letting me know “maola” when she’s finished her food or “hi yow” when she wants more or “diowla” when she’s dropped food. Hopefully, our little conversations will have affect with Katherine too.
• If I had to guess, because I’ve totally lost count, I’d say she easily has a 250-300 word vocabulary. She can sing the ABC song start to finish including “LMNOP” and is trying to learning the Leapfrog alphabet song from Katherine and me.
• She visits the little potty seat in the downstairs bathroom once or twice a day with clothes on. She will also get herself a bit of toilet paper and pretend to wipe herself when she stands up.
• Allison loves to play with the alphabet wooden puzzle. She can put all the letters in their correct spot and say a few of the letters unprompted and correctly.

All in all, the girls are doing really well. Katherine continues to love full day at Eton. Lots of works fall out of her backpack each day – and the stories are really too precious.

I’ll sort thru pictures tomorrow night and post before the weekend.