We haven’t done an eating post in a while, so here’s a shot of Nora enjoying some macaroni and cheese and an embarrassing amount of branding. It’s like she’s a little NASCAR with all the logos and ads. [this space for rent]
Nora came to Northside school Tuesday night to help us vote and then to help us play on the playground. Respect for the integrity of the voting process prevented photography of the countless hordes inside the gym (there were 4 of us who weren’t working there if you count Nora), but here are some photos of the celebratory afterplaying.
what’s that they say about never appearing with animals or children? Jen’s got the right idea. :)
I LOVE when she imitates my confused/surprised face at 1:51. If you watch nothing else (a) skip to that point and (b) why did you come here? Did you expect free cheese or something?
It’s important to engage your children on an intellectual level. As such, we are strong believers in serious, structured, goal-oriented play. It’s essential to establish a goal for each play session and to keep to the agenda. Speaking of the agenda, it’s also of fundamental importance that one set onset and offset times for each play session and keep rigorously to the schedule. Children need structure to feel loved.
These cupcake pictures (surely by now you know you need to click, yes?) are from yesterday (July 10th) but never got posted. Nora’s doing a cool thing lately with references to time. She’ll say “yesterday” to mean any time prior to today and “last night” apparently means any time prior to today but I remember that it was at night. This morning she told me that “yesterday” she and her mommy went to meet Farmer Jeff to get vegetables (this happened 2 weeks ago) and yesterday (earlier this week) she told us that “last night” she’d seen a friend of ours eating dinner at a restaurant (friend has been on another continent for months).
Sadly, as she’s half Irish this may be as far as her conceptualization of the passage of time ever advances. ;)
It’s highly likely that this will turn out to have been a mistake, but when Nora found a cape recently (a lightly-used breast feeding cover up thingy) and started wearing it to school and insisting that we and others call her “super nora” we did nothing to discourage it. In fact, there may have been a certain amount of picking her up and running around with her so she could fly. It’s entirely fair to interpret this behavior as having encouraged her.
Happy 22⁄3 birthday, Nora. You are, indeed, quite super.
We may have painted our house, but that doesn’t mean we’ve given up on purple. You can’t really tell how very purple our new little car is but the Blackberry Pearl Honda Fit is most assuredly purple. This car is the USNews #2 car and had the highest-ranking price:features ratio in our database of possibilities. It was also the purplest car available for our discerning toddler car buyer.
This new car needs a name. Any suggestions?
One of the fringe benefits of giving up diapers… we mentioned that Nora is out of diapers, right? That it happened about 2 months ago? That she very, very rarely has accidents and is terribly (and rightfully) proud of herself?
We didn’t?
You should demand your money back.
One of the fringe benefits of giving up diapers is that your changing table goes away and can be replaced by a big, comfortable story chair. This chair is good for reading, singing, cuddling, mending boo boos, talking about what happened during the day (or what is going to happen), trying to fall asleep, putting on shoes, and who knows how many other uses. Nora is very pleased.
The sesame street light switch behind the chair turns on a dedicated reading light. We hope to minimize (or at least delay?) Nora’s need for the glasses her mom and I both need.
Nora didn’t quite make it all the way into bed tonight. The body pillow she’s asleep on here is in lieu of a crib side or similar toddler retention system. Let her fall, that’s our motto, but take the sting out of the landing.
Nora’s pal Salomé has been mentioned once or twice here in the past but has taken an understandably less visible role since moving so far away we can’t even see the same stars. She hasn’t forgotten her friend Nora, though, as evidenced by this wonderful postcard that showed up at the blue house this week (click for alpacas).
This is not the first mail Nora has ever received, but it *is* the first ever to be written by a friend. It is also definitely the first to feature potatoes on the postage.