Nora Evelyn

Liz & Kevin gave Nora a veritable forest of “Happy Birthday” balloons. She adores them. She plays with them. If she had a giant peach she’d fly away with them.

Being as today is both Thanksgiving (U.S.A.) and Nora’s Birthday (Universal), Nora’s Papa & Baba were gracious enough to let us turn their fabulous Thanksgiving dinner into a 2 year old’s birthday party. Many thanks to Papa & Baba, Granny, Aunt Christine & Cousin Kacie, and Kacie’s grandparents. It was just too bad Uncle Eric couldn’t be there (but someone has to keep Thanksgiving safe).

Nora enjoyed her cake, got to open a bunch of great presents, made a good show of opening the cards and looking at them first, had great fun with her cousin Kacie, and used a grown-up potty chair for the first time. It was a big night! Everyone’s happy & exhausted.

Good night.

We made Nora’s 2nd birthday cake following a recipe on whisk-kid. Ours is whole wheat, 8″ in diameter rather than 9″, used about half as much buttercream and used vanilla rather than lemon flavoring. The lettering is semisweet chocolate. It was rather more complicated than last year’s cake. I already know what next year’s cake will be and I can’t wait. :)

In a climate like Michigan’s one can never be too prepared for inclement weather. An important strategy for dealing with rapidly varying conditions is to remember to dress in layers. Here we see Nora wisely implementing this potentially life-saving strategy by adding the following to her base layer of longsleeve t-shirt and overalls:

1. blue butterfly sweatshirt
2. the green & white sweater granny knit her
3. a pink vest jacket (good for the core body temp)
4. and the pink sweater granny knit her

not pictured: she took off her hooded towel before I snapped these. It’s important always to know where your towel is.

Terribly sorry about the radio silence around here lately. I had the H1N1 flu last week but am feeling much, much better now. This is an exciting week in the Purple House (what with Thanksgiving and Nora’s 2nd birthday being on the same day) so watch for plenty of updates.

Back before I got sick, though, we snapped this picture of Nora coloring her placemat at the Guernsey Dairy restaurant in Northville, Michigan. Their food is pretty much uniformly beige but the ice cream is phenomenal — highly recommended.

We tried this once before and it worked about as well. Nora can’t go to IKEA. Something about the place drives her absolutely crazy; they must pipe in baby catnip. It’s like a manic energy bomb goes off at the center of her brain and she just goes berserk.

Nora decided Mickey Mouse’s ears were cold and needed a hat so, generously, she gave him hers. I think this picture officially marks her first ever self-conscious pose-and-smile for the camera.

Nora gets to spend 1 afternoon per week with her maternal grandmother, grandfather and granddog. She spends the other 6 asking for them. :)

Nora and I were at the park watching a man play frisbee with his two border collies on a hill. He was taking turns throwing to each dog, though, so we could only ever see one at a time. Nora was terribly, terribly excited and kept calling out “doggie! doggie!” and making the sign for ‘more’ and saying “more doggie!”. Until they got out of phase and both dogs came bounding up the hill together and Nora called out, in an amazed little voice, TWO DOGGIES!”

I nearly fainted. “two doggies”. She got the number right, she differentiated 2 from 1, she used the English plural inflection properly, she did the voicing assimilation on that morpheme properly… I’m still kind of amazed. It was a glorious moment to be alive; I’m still kind of buzzing.