drawrings

Keeping our funny bone alive, this one. I keep a cube note pad & pen by my bed (you know, for all those annoying middle-of-the-night-emergency-thoughts). Emma likes to doodle on it while I change the sheets or put away my clothes. After she finishes her masterpieces, she starts stashing. She likes to stash them between the pages of my book, tucked inside my shoes and inside my underwear drawer. She gets a big kick out of me finding them. As soon as I show her my discoveries - I kid you not - she usually asks me if I want her to 'sign her work'. Where did that come from?!

Anyway, thing is, she's getting pretty good! She went through a period of anal retentive circles (think reeeeeeallly small circles, hundreds of them on a sheet of paper). Then a letter "T" phase. Well, now it's an astronaut/alien hybrid. I think it's pretty darn hilarious. She's awesome.

daffodils and a cane pole

I felt a little bit like a country song yesterday. Daddy's gone fishin', baby's pickin' flowers. You get the idea. It was just too nice out, and since we've been feeling cooped up this winter, we decided to break in Emma's fishing pole. A Barbie fishing pole. That she LOVES. She is so enthusiastic about everything, it's just so darn cute. She was thrilled to go fishing with her dad, so I offered to take pictures.

It must have been our lucky day, because Roger caught not one, but two fish. (cue the Dr. Seuss rhyme). Emma had a great start - casting and reeling, and even calling for the fish to come. But as all three-and-a-half-year-olds do, she lost interest, and found greater pleasure in the daffodils. The best part for me was breathing the warm fresh air, hearing the woodpeckers and seeing my family together, enjoying the outdoors.

focus

This was one of those events that you picture going a little.....differently. I don't know why I expected everything to click the first time. Emma was SO excited to ride her bike. I found the bike last year at a consignment sale, but her legs weren't long enough to reach the pedals, and she just wasn't that into it. She got her basket and her streamers for Christmas and this year, has been patiently waiting to bedazzle her bike with them and go for a spin.

Yesterday was gorgeous outside and she was so pumped. I could hardly stand it. She had seen other kids riding their bikes, and she wanted to learn so badly. She kept telling me, "Mom, I'm not going to give up!" Ugh - melt my heart!! Within five minutes though, it was clear that this was hard work - for both of us. I am usually so good about explaining how to be safe, what to do with this hand, and how to move that leg. I was totally unprepared and more importantly, totally unrealistic with my own expectations. I was trying so hard to balance encouragement and praise with letting her learn by herself. I didn't want to do it for her, but it was so hard to see her struggle to turn the wheels. It's one of those experiences that we adults take for granted. Keep your eyes up, steer with your hands, pedal with your feet, push back to stop, stay to the right. That's a HECK of a lot for a little brain to process. I think it was an epic fail on my part as a mom, because I did get frustrated (mostly with myself) and by the end of the lesson, she was yelling at her feet to focus. :( I let dad take over, and he did much better, being the natural cyclist that he is, with a seemingly endless supply of patience. XO. :)

With the weather being so nice, the lake path was crowded, so our efforts were compounded by the fact that we had to stop every 2 minutes to let the fasters go by. In the end, it was a good experience for all of us. I think the highlight for her was having a basket on her bike. That was more thrilling than anything else! She enjoyed the snack breaks we had every 30 seconds, "Hold on mom, I need a drink. Hold on mom, I need a snack. This is a lot of work". Yes it is my dear, but we're not going to give up! :)

blast off

FINALLY getting out to do things. We are enjoying the good weather and our proximity to the wonderful slew of museums in D.C. Gigi and I took Emma on her very first Metro ride. Hard to believe it took so long to get her on the subway, I practically lived on the Metro growing up. I think at her age though, she'll actually remember it. The hard part is doing it in a stroller. I thought about just walking it, but it's a lot of walking, so I knew she'd get tired. Plus, I get really nervous around those platforms! There must have been 458 elevators for us to take in order to get to the right platforms. Small, stinky elevators. And each of those elevator rides add an additonal 2-3 minutes to your trek. She expressed her own wariness: when I told Emma that we would be going underground into a tunnel, her response getting onto the first elevator was, "I don't know about this". I swear she's 3 going on 30.

The Air and Space museum was our choice for the day. It wasn't a long visit, since the ride to get there was effort enough and we were tired upon arrival. She loved the astronaut 'costumes' and asked to see a real alien. She got to fly a plane and look through a telescope at the moon. We stayed about an hour, and celebrated afterwards with an ice cream (if you can even call it that!) Gotta love those bright colored snack vans perched directly outside the museum doors. Brilliant child advertising. :)

I love my Gigi!
The picture below is Emma and I on an infrared/night vision camera. That's her little head in the middle! :)

No idea what Powerpuff Girls are, but this is the one she wanted. Isn't it freaky looking? She enjoyed the musuem, but couldn't wait to get her hands on this!

And yay for tulip magnolias! Spring is here!

sweets

Click on the pic below to go to my photo blog. Check out our pics from Tia and Baby Margot's visit!

the stasher

Emma is a busy 3.5 year old. She was born busy. She's always moving things, stashing them here, stuffing them there. She's always finding a bag to carry her things in, and when her bag is full, she adds stuff to her doll's purse. Some people call her the "hoarder". We'll find stuff stashed inside drawers, hidden under pillows, and shoved between doors. I'm not sure where this falls developmentally. Is it spatial recognition? Fine motor skills? Precursor to being a cat lady?

I finally decided to document the randomness I find on a daily basis.

When she does slow down, she loves to build hot dog bridges.

these are dog days

We have two sick popsicles here - Em is the only healthy one. One sinus infection and one Type-A flu is really cramping our pre-spring style. This is pretty much how we're feeling these days.



Luckily, the medicine is helping and everyone is napping. We are SO ready for sunshine!!

we love Love.

In preparation for Valentines Day, her teachers at preschool asked the kids to list one thing they love. They posted the list outside the classroom for all the parents to read. Lots of love on that list - I love my brother, I love my mom & dad, I love my bed, etc. Emma's answer? "I love the whole, wide, everything".

We love Love!

Em the cooking gal

Lots of love this week! We cook in a tiara, do you? :)



P.S. the weird flatulent sounds come from focusing my camera. got to remember than next time! heh!

Brotherly love from P-funk:

Woman.....Woman.....who do you see?

I FINALLY got the HD video on my mark ii figured out and thought I'd give it a shot tonight. It really is pretty fun to know that I can take a video and stills using the manual features of my camera. In other words, I can adjust the aperture, ISO and shutter speed of the video settings too! So, for tonight's example, I had really low light, but I just adjusted a few things and was able to capture what my point-and-shoot video probably wouldn't have. Kinda fun!

There's always a price to pay for technology, and in this case, the HD videos take up an ENORMOUS amount of space. The clip below takes up almost 600MB of space. Compare that to one, unedited jpg coming straight from my camera at 2MB, you can see how I will eat up hard drive space fast! It seems I have to go through an extra step of converting the video in order to upload it to my smugmug...and in the process of converting/compressing it, I think the quality got reduced, bah!! I'm not sure I'm doing it right, so I'll keep trying.

It's still pretty cute. Here's Emma's rendition of "Brown Bear, Brown Bear". Some of you probably know this book by heart, but if you don't, the "woman, woman" part is funny, because it's supposed to be a teacher. :)

oldie but goodies

Happy New Year!

You can expect to see some changes around here, since I'm doing a lot of consolidation. Despite my track record over the last year or so, I love having a blog. In fact, more nights than not, I lie in bed thinking of funny and clever things to write about (this is usually whilst trying to fall asleep. Isn't that always the way it works?!) I want to get back into making regular occurences, but I think I'm going to stick to one blog (my photo blog) for the clever wit, and use our neglected smugmug account to fill in alllll the gaps. You see, I got to a point where I was taking SO MANY photos, that to stop and pick a few, edit a few, and come up with something interesting each time got to be overwhelming to me. And if I got behind, the perfectionist in me wouldn't allow me to just skip over stuff so I just did nothing. I know, brilliant plan.

Anyway, to anyone who might still be reading this blog, just know that there is tons of stuff to check out still. I am in the process of backing up allllll my photos onto our Smugmug page (you can check them out here if you have a *lot* of free time). This solves my problem of having to pick anything in particular or 'significant'. It's our day-in-day-out pictures, so that I don't feel like I am missing anything. I am combining photos from my camera, photos from Roger's camera, photos from 2 video cameras and from my cell phone. This way I can get the whole shebang to document our life. It will serve as my virtual scrapbook, with this one thrown in for variety.

Shamefully, I have been walking around with over 300 pictures and videos stored on my Blackberry. Sometimes, the phone is just easier to grab! It never really occurred to me to do something with them. I kinda forgot about them, but OH! I can download them onto my computer! In about 2 minutes! There are some great stories in these files. Weeding through the last 18 months of crackberry pics/vids, I came across this little video from last March. It's hard to believe this was almost a YEAR ago but it's a classic. Tia (my sister) and Margot came to visit us, and Margot had just turned 6 months old. Emma and Margot took their very first bath together (first of many) and it was one that neither Anna nor I will ever forget. These cousins are exactly 2 years apart in age so it's going to be fun using these videos as blackmail when they get older and even CONSIDER stuffing pillows under their covers and sneaking out...

I'll set the stage for you. Picture it, Sicily, 1941....ok just kidding (a little Golden Girls reference for ya). Since they were bathing in the big tub, Margot used the bumbo to keep her stable. Well, the bumbo was also Emma's bath "toy" and she wasn't real interested in sharing it. But she did, and Margot got to sit next to her in the bath. However, every time Emma would get upset and raise her voice, it would scare Margot, who would then get upset and start to cry (and raise her voice). Emma finally got to sit in it at the end (yes, she still fits into it!) We made this little video to send to Gigi so she could see them interact. You might want to grab your volume controls so that you can adjust accordingly. It starts out really loud and then quiet and then loud again. Hope you find it as amusing as we did! :)

PS - Check. out. those. rolls.

PCS

hop on over to my photo blog to learn more about the phenomenon known as "PCS". :)

I know, you're beside yourselves that I've actually updated the blog. Nice of you to join us again, Erika! :)

You'll be double excited to know that my piece de resistance, after a 3 month hiatus, combines two of Emma's favorite things: rubber duckies and being a complete goofball.