Nora Evelyn

Jen: “hey nora, how about if, instead of going to school today, we go get on an airplane and go see Papa and Baba?”
Nora: *thinking* “hrm… what are my friends having for lunch today?”
Me: “arroz con pollo, broccoli and salad”
Nora: “some of those things are not meat.”
Jen: “it’s true, some of those things are not meat.”
Nora: “let’s go see Papa and Baba!”
Me: “how about if we go to Florida to see them?”
Nora: “and Mickey Mouse?”
Jen: “yes, and Mickey mouse.”
Nora: *grinning widely* “okay.”

Here are (from left) Ursula, Nora and Zoe hard at work at their new jobs with Centerpoint Energy (sifting through sandboxes for possible oil sands). It’s a difficult job, but the petroleum industry is important.

We were very excited to learn that our Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum membership could get us into the really quite wonderful Children’s Museum of Houston. There are puzzles, climbing puzzles, a blood-sucking insect display, a recreation of a Mexican village, a large outdoor water play area, a puppet theater, and even a pretend bank where kids can pretend to be the loan officer or the head teller and a bike shop where kids can pretend to be the cashier or a wrench. I couldn’t get Nora to put on the polyester sportcoat that would have made her the loan officer but when I do I swear I’ll post it.

Teeter totter or seesaw. Call it what you want, Nora is a menace on these things. The last time she used one she ended up jettisoning her pal (and hostess) Harper a couple of feet into the air and the poor girl landed face first in the woodchips (she was fine after some 1 on 1 time with her mom). This time no one got hurt, but this was due to the industrial-grade playground equipment and not for lack of effort on Nora’s part.

You know to always click on the pictures for enlarged (and often different) versions, right?

A sad postscript: the hale balloon animal shown in photo 4 with its entire life laid out before it and, seemingly, with the world in the cup of its little, inflatable paw met an untimely demise in the car on the way to dinner. It seems Nora decided to play Ozzy Ozbourne with the poor, inanimate creature and bit its nose off. No Noras were harmed in the ensuing unraveling and deflation, but the balloon kitty quickly became, like the great dirigibles before it, nothing but a sweet memory of a simpler time.

We were invited to go play at the park near Nora’s friend Ursula’s house. The neighborhood was having a giant picnic complete with food, live music, the mayor of Houston, and a bouncy castle. Nora found the ice cream immediately upon entering the park and charmed her way into one. :)

We’ve come a long way from the time Nora first started napping in her crib. Back then she was this tiny little bean who was essentially lost on the vast sleeping surface of her crib mattress. It’s even been 2 years since we first introduced her to sleeping in her toddler bed –which was really just the crib with the mattress lowered and the front more or less removed.

Now we’ve converted that bed one last time. The front of the crib makes its triumphant return and now the sides have been replaced with runners to give Nora her very own full size big kid’s bed! We’re back to “essentially lost on the vast sleeping surface”, but she still manages to fall asleep with some part of her hanging off the side.

You can still see, in this last picture, the places where baby Nora gnawed away the finish on what is now her footboard.

Nora started swimming lessons yesterday. She’s in the ‘turtles’ class at this awesome indoor-but-also-sorta-outdoor swimming school not far from our house. She did wonderfully. When I have taken her swimming she’s been like a little koala who wouldn’t stop clinging to me. Here she kicked, paddled, dove to the bottom for rings, jumped off the edge into the pool, and paddled on a giant foam train floaty thing).

Last Saturday we declared our first-ever official Nora Day. Nora Day is a surprise, special day that isn’t anyone’s birthday and isn’t a holiday, but is a chance to do as many of Nora’s favorite things as we can and generally celebrate our bean.

Just north of Rice University there is a lovely little park with old school playground toys (bouncy animals, actual metal slides, climbing things to fall from, climbable trees!).

So a few weeks ago (before we’d unpacked, even) I was practicing speech sounds in our living room in preparation for one of my classes. One class of speech sounds involves using your tongue, rather than your lungs, to move the air necessary to make speech. I complained to Jen that my vocal tract (throat, tongue, epiglottis, larynx, etc.) hurt because I’d tired myself out. Out of nowhere, Nora took it upon herself to teach me how to teach my students to produce these sounds. Unfortunately, the camera wasn’t rolling for the best part of the lesson (one hand on her hip, finger wagging in the air), but you get the gist from this, I think.