Jump Roping

"Hey Mama! Hey Mama! I wanna show you a fing!"

Photo and video editing at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Bluetooth?

While we were at dinner this evening, Shrike gave Peeper this pretty blue caribiner to keep her entertained. Later, at Target, for some reason, she decided to stick it on her ear. As you can see, Peeper found that quite entertaining, too.

And, before you ask, the scrape by her eye is from falling at the park. We think she hit it on the black rubber landing mat at the bottom on the slide, when she fell off her own two feet for no apparent reason.. It was not an incident of almost hitting her eye on something pokey.

House Call

Sometimes you just don't have time to stop and put on clothes.

Monkey Dance

Peeper and I went to First Friday this evening. We got there late, and didn't do much, but we did run into T and her girls, and went for ice cream with them.

Peeper and K (age 5) were having a great time running and dancing around. After they'd left, I stripped off Peeper's ice creamy dress, and used the relatively clean back of it to clean up her ice creamy hands and face, and then let her run off a bit of the sugar rush before loading her into the car.

The other patrons were quite entertained. As was I.

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Letter of the Week: R

~ Peeper is 33 months old ~

A Note To My Regular Readers: I may be repeating some photos or stories that I've already published, but I want to put all our learning activities in the one post that's part of the Tot School link-up.

Tot Schoolers: Welcome! If you enjoy this post, please feel free to stay for a while, and have a look around. I'll give you a fair warning that much of my blog is PG-13, but my Tot School link-up posts will always be G-Rated.

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Letter Crafts: R is for Rabbit, r is for rainbow. (Thanks to No Time for Flashcards for both!)

Our ABC box was much easier than last week, as you can imagine! Here's what we came up with: R magnets, r bath foamies, Rr book, R is for rooster card, rattle, race car, rainbow, ribbon, ray, ring, rhinocerous and Mr. Kittie there actually starts with R, too. He wandered in while I was taking the photos, but I figured I should let him stay. BigGaloot is another R, but I guess he can't read as well as Boy Cat can.

When I was brainstorming about what to put in the box, I said to Peeper - rhetorically, I thought - "Rhinocerous! Wait, you don't have a rhinocerous, do you?" and she replied, without even pausing to think about it, "Got a puzzle."

Sure enough, as you see above, her zoo animals puzzle includes a rhinocerous.

Her "letter pages" this week included the 1+1+1=1 Tot School Printables R is for Rainforest and Confessions of a Homeschooler's R is for Rainbow.

She used to be really into coloring the tracing and coloring pages, but she's not so much about that these days.

What she does love, though, are the "matching cards" and the puzzles. I really like the ones that have the Montessori-style matching pages with the blank spaces and labels, as you see below, but when they don't, I just print one color copy of the card page (for laminating and cutting) and one black-and-white copy, to put in the folder, and she puts the cards on top of the matching pictures on the page.

One of the rainforest cards was a parrot. When she first looked at it, she identified it as a cardinal (its body is mostly red), but when I told her that it was a parrot, she said, "Oh, I met a parrot before."

I asked where she'd met a parrot (Actually, she has met one, at the pet store a long time ago.) and she said, "Right there in the back yard." (She has not, to my knowledge, met a parrot in our backyard.)

She told me that several times over the next few days, and I just went along with it, figuring that she's seen many kinds of birds out there, so sure, why not a parrot?

Shrike thought she was talking about a stuffed parrot that the dogs have carried out there.

A few days later, though, we were outside playing and she pointed at the sky and said, "Wook, Mama! Pawwots!"

Mystery solved. There is a sky diving school near us, and on any given clear day, they make several jumps, and we can watch them from our backyard, from the time their chutes open (we can actually hear the fwoop-fwoop of the opening chutes) until they disappear behind the neighbor's houses on their way down.

Parrot = Parachute.

Which is almost as cute as last summer, when she did not yet speak much, but did sign. I was pointing out some parachutes and as they disappeared, I thought she was signing "more" but then between looking more closely, and maybe something else that she signed or said, I realized that she was actually doing the sign for "shoes" because (I assume), when I said "Parachutes" she heard "Pair o'shoes."

Or, several years ago, when we pointed them out to our niece, who was then about five, and she said, "What pirate ships?"

Evidently "parachute" is a very hard word when you are a small child - but Peeper has it down, now.

One of the R is for Rainbow activities was a set of capital / lowercase matching cards, with the letters in little clouds and a rainbow going between them.

Because there were six pairs of cards on each page, the set ended with four blank pairs, so I decided to customize those for our family.

Obviously, she didn't get the whole "match the photo to the word" thing at first, and wanted to do things like put Mommy and Mama together as a match (awww) or put Mommy next to the family photo and point out "Mommy. Mommy. Dat's a match!" (When she did the same with my card, she pointed to each card and to me, in real life. "Mama. Mama. Mama!")

When I showed her the words, though, she got the idea, and with some prompting, and reading the individual letters out to her, she was able to find her name every time, and if I said "Which word says Fffffffamily?" she could find it, and well, probably got "Mommy" and "Mama" right about half the time, as would be expected.

I think I'm going to make some more cards like this, with words and photos, for our extended family and pets, and maybe some other things. I'm also thinking about labeling things around the house, down the road a bit.

Do I really think she's going to be reading and speallnig "refrigerator" any time soon? Well, probably not, but you can't pick up sight words if you never see them, so why not give it a shot.

I'm a little embarrassed to admit it, but Peeper made probably her third trip to the library this week, and the first that she remembers. Shrike took her while I got some work done at home, so I don't know the details, but I think there was much reading of books involved.

I also told her that our MOMS Club is going to be collecting books to donate to the library's upcoming used book sale, which will raise money to buy new books, computers and other materials and equipment.

(This was, in part, to prepare her for getting rid of some of her "baby books" (and "baby toys" and "baby clothes") and giving them to "some babies who need them.")

She put those things together (with, I assume, the Sesame Street game in which you help Grover and Elmo make and sell lemonade to raise money for, among other things, new books for the library) and came up with a new favorite game, "I selling books for the li-bewwy!" which involves stacking up several of her "letter books," carrying them across the room, throwing them around on the floor, picking the up and starting over again.

And this is just freakin' cute.

Sleepy Girl

Mama's camera card was busy all day, dumping its stash of photos into the computer, so this is all I've got.

Duck on a Train

Okay, so she says "God dammit mess" and "jackass" but she also says "Does it stick very well?" and "He's on the train without falling down." And "also."

The last time she sent one of her toys to Texas (a horse, riding a duck, so he didn't burn his feet) she reported that he saw AuntiKay and Frappa and "watched Wizard of Oz in Grandma's lap."

She did not want to repeat all that today, evidently.

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Dining Out

Shrike was on jury duty yesterday and today, so she was off work this evening. We went out to Ruby Tuesday for dinner, and when I mentioned that I was considering the salad bar, Peeper just had to have some, too. She said "yes" to every item I offered, as we were filling our plates, and actually ate many of them. She also had one of those incredible cheesey garlicy biscuits, and a good bit of macaroni and cheese.

This was after the waffle and bacon for lunch!

Oh, and that slash on Shrike's cheek? Courtesy of Peeper's nails, which I trimmed a day too late.

Dental Disappointment

Don't worry, her teeth are fine. Well, we assume they are, but I guess we really have no way of knowing . . . .
I noticed a couple of weeks ago that the one filling that she has, on the front of one of her top front teeth (the one that's not capped) seems to be chipping off again. Even I (without my reading glasses) can see the edge of it, and food is getting caught underneath.

She's not due for a checkup until September, so we figured we'd better go ahead and take her in to get it fixed up.

She and I were on our own for the appointment, because Shrike had jury duty today, so I wasn't thrilled about that (mostly because of the hour drive each way) but she loves our dentist, so she was all excited about going.

About half way there, though, we ran into a big ol' traffic jam (I assume there was a wreck up ahead) and by the time we worked our way up to the point at which they were diverting the traffic off of the interstate and onto to the highway that runs parallel to it, it was time for the appointment.

So, I pulled onto the shoulder long enough to look up the phone number and call, then switched to speaker phone (that state - next door to ours - has a no-handheld-cellphone law) and called to let them know.

I was hoping they could fit us in after lunch, but her afternoon was full, so we had to reschedule for next week.

Peeper was crushed.

I was put on hold while the receptionist checked on openings, and while I was waiting, I told her that we weren't going to make it there today. By the time the girl came back on the phone, Peeper was wailing, "Deeeennnntiiiiissssst! Deeeennnntiiiiissssst!"

I told her, "I know this isn't going to change anything, but I just want you to know that my two-year old is in the backseat crying because she can't go to the dentist."

By the time we were back on the interstate, she was also crying for goody, so I pulled over at a Waffle House, because I'd seen a sign saying that kids eat free on Tuesdays.

In fact, I'd let our MOMS Club activities director know that, and we've got a "breakfast bunch" scheduled for at local one later this month.

When I asked what it is that she would get for free, I found out that it's only 2 - 6 pm on Tuesdays! Who eats waffles at 2 - 6 pm?

So, I had to send out a correction and apology to the MOMS Club folks. "Hi, I'm an idiot. Love, Your President." Just love when that happens.

Peeper did get her money's worth out of her paid lunch, though. We shared a breakfast combo, and she ate an order of bacon and about 3/8 of a (plate-sized) waffle, plus a bit of toast crust, the rest of the little tub of butter, some milk and a good bit of my decaf coffee. And nursed before and after.

That is a ton of food, for her.

Water Baby

For the second time in a row, a MOMS Club pool party was on swimming lessons day, so we figured we'd better not go - but, as luck would have it, Shrike's nephew's birthday dinner (14!) was this evening, right at lesson time, so we went to the pool party for lunch, out for dinner with the family, and will make up swimming lessons on Wednesday.

It's the first time this summer that we've actually swam (swum?) in the outdoors and sunshine. I bathed Peeper in sunscreen (as I do everytime she plays outside) and reapplied about four times.

Myself, not so much. I sprayed down, but evidently did a kind of crappy job of it on my back. I'm not sore, just a bit red and a little itchy. Next time I will ask one of the other moms to help me out. Another advantage of spray-on sunscreen!

In other news, Peeper had a great time!

The Michelin Baby!
(Courtesy of our friend D who gave us this floaty suit, plus two or three others, and a ton of clothes!)