Nora Evelyn

Nora’s new BearHands mittens arrived today and she has been fiercely trying them out. Astonishingly, she seems to like them?!

Nora’s been helping in the kitchen again lately (but we’ve managed to make food anyway). Here she’s helping make some multigrain walnut pancakes. We make them exactly according to the recipe except that we substitute vanilla yogurt for the buttermilk and use 4 T of walnuts. The oats are always McCann’s instant oatmeal, the flour King Arthur white whole wheat, the oil is normally peanut oil, we use skim milk, and, as always, brown sugar. Like I said… exactly like the recipe. ;)

UPS dropped off a large box and before I could deal with it Nora decided that she really, really needed to climb it. Sadly, the picture doesn’t really show how incredibly tall this thing is compared to her.

Why did the baby climb the box? You might just as well ask why birds fly or why fish swim.

Nora has figured out that CDs go into the front of the computer* and is determined to figure out how to do it. Here she’s holding a CD and making an innocent “no, daddy, I have no ill intentions whatever as regards that computer you’re standing next to. none. nope. not me. say, have you seen my big, blue eyes recently?” face at me.

Moments later she managed to get the CD-rom drive to eject but couldn’t quite get the disk in.

* we don’t actually have any desktop machines at home, but the linux machine attached to our television (running mythtv) has a front-loading CD-rom drive that is surely doomed.

Lately Nora’s favorite pastime has become hugging, kissing, and making me kiss things (her ducky, a stuffed flower, scorch the dragon, anything [+face] [-clock]). One of her daily reports from baby school even reported that she’d spent the day hugging and kissing her teachers. We’ll need to break her of this –certainly before college– but for now it’s pretty cute stuff.

She responds to three general requests:

1. May I have a kissie? evokes either a wide open mouth pressed against you or what can best be described as an unrounded bilabial velaric ingressive (aka a bilabial click, a gentle popping sound with the lips).
2. May I have a hug? gets a very nice hug indeed.
3. Touch heads? and she’ll gently lean her head in for you to touch yours to it. I have no idea how we/she learned this behavior. It is very strange.

She will also throw her arms up in an unmistakable “hug me!” request but this behavior defies photography.

By the power vested in me by the Department of Linguistics at the University of Michigan* I hereby declare and certify that Nora has produced her first word and that that first word is… “ducky.” Specifically, this ducky:

I am totally not making this up. She also says “dada” [dɑdɑ] and “mama” [mãmã] and ducky actually sounds like “daduh” [dadə].

*disclaimer: the Department of Linguistics at the University of Michigan has, in fact, vested no power in me. I’m lucky to have a key.

We got Nora a non-puffy fleece snowsuit for cozy warmth without compromising carseat safety. It’s easy to put on, makes her look like she’s ready for renfair and, even better, she seems to like it.

The hand coverings may tend to diminish her spell casting abilities but hers is really a melee attack anyway. We don’t call her “Nora, maker of chaos” for nothing.

Here’s a picture from Nora’s 13 monthaversary*, spent opening the giant pile of presents at Granny’s house that she didn’t have the energy to open on Christmas day (originally an even more giant pile). When did she get so big!??!?!

* actually, this is the day after her monthaversary, but she looks pretty much the same on the 27th as she did on the 26th. :)

May you tackle the coming year with your spoon firmly gripped in one hand and your other hand free for scooping.

For the record: that’s Jennie’s mac ‘n cheese she’s eating. This after chowing through her own dinner. :)