CA

You might think CA stands for California, but in fact it means "Chocoholics Anonymous," or perhaps in this case, "Chocoholics Announced."

Evi has been sick, so this morning while we were both dealing with Evi, Sierra sort of disappeared downstairs. After awhile she came back up and let us know, "I just ate a lot of chocolate!" Sure enough, she had discovered the chocolate stash in one of the far corners of the kitchen counter, and her face was living proof. We proceeded to clean her up... and secretly move the chocolate to a less conspicuous location. I think she was rather smug about the whole thing--although it would have been slightly more humorous if she had tried to act like she hadn't eaten any chocoloate when her face was all smeared up with it. I don't think we're quite to that phase yet, which is just fine.

Birthday Numero Uno

Evi's birthday was this past week, and we got her an ice cream cake. Apparently this was a mistake because she tried to eat it herself and just started crying because it froze her little fingies. We felt so bad! We hadn't really thought about that factor ahead of time. Then she didn't even want the cake part--I think she was scared of the whole thing, so I ended up pulling out her "sweet potato puffs" which are her favorite little finger snack on the planet, and then she was happy as a clam. We did manage to get at least one picture of her with cake on her face--the requisite duty of a parent of a kid turning one!

Fling with the phone guy

After two or three excruciating weeks of unbelievable static on our phone line, the Verizon guy finally came out today to fix it. Jonathan was on the front porch thanking him as he left, and Sierra, not wanting to be left out, shouted to him, "Bye bye, I love you!"

Webster get some whimsy, will ya?

Everything is cutsie-poo right now. If Sierra is hungry, she wants a snacky-snack-snack. If she fell down, she most likely has a scrapey-scrape, or perhaps a bonky-bonk. In the morning she puts on her pantsy-pants, and a shirtsy-poo, and maybe even her flippy-floppies. And my alltime favorite, when she has to pee, she needs to use the pod-pod.

Surfing the floor

A few days ago, Evelyn actually successfully got up onto her feet in the middle of the floor without holding onto anything. The way it looked was exactly like a beginner surfer actually getting to the point where they could stand up on their board. She stayed up for approximately .5 seconds before she was down again, and I haven't seen her do it since then. But she is definitely into pushing around the block cart that we have in our living room. Actually, she'll push anything that moves: chairs, endtables, the playhouse, strollers, whatever.

Bike, a girl's best friend

We now have a bike-riding, helmet-wearing girl. Hard to believe!! Yes it has training wheels and all that, but it's so amazing to look out the kitchen window and see Sierra riding a BIKE!

The story of how the bike was acquired is worth recording for posterity. Last summer we were walking down our street when we saw a bike parked near the sidewalk ahead of us. Sierra went running up to it and we were trying to explain to her that it was somebody's bike and that she couldn't get on it when we noticed that there was a huge sign taped on it saying "FREE". Uh, well.... I guess it is your bike, Sierra! So we pushed the thing home and she was much too small for it at that point, so we put it in the basement figuring that she would forget all about it and we would bring it out later. Well, she never did forget about it--in fact if anyone referred to her trike as a "bike," she would say, "Oh, I have a bike, but I can't ride it--it's in the basement!"

Well, a couple of months ago we were at the symphony and we saw a colleague of Jonathan's so we went over to say hello. They introduced us to some friends of theirs who were just that week moving from one house to another. Their old house was on our street, so Jonathan's colleague was commenting about how we had been neighbors. I asked which house was theirs and for some reason it sounded sort of familiar.... I asked if the summer before they had put out a little pink girls' bike with a FREE sign on it. In fact, they had! Their daughter, who the bike had belonged to, was there at the symphony and we got to meet her and tell her that we were now the proud owners of her little bike! It was pretty wild!

Back to the present: since it has started getting nicer this spring, Sierra has been talking about the bike nonstop and I didn't think she was big enough for it yet, so we were still waiting to bring it up. Then Grandpa figured out that the seat could actually be lowered another 4 inches or so and bingo, now she can actually reach the pedals and propel the thing by herself. It's pretty cool!

One giant step.... backwards

Now that Evelyn is proficient with going down stairs, she has deduced that if you reach an impassable location, all you have to do is go "toes first." The funniest instance of this is when she is at the back door. We have a french door so she can see out from the crawling position, even without standing up--so she crawls up to the door, but obviously stops there. Then she invariably turns around and backs into the door, and cannot figure out why it's not working. After awhile she gets bored and moves on.

I've also noticed that sometimes when she is on a rug, she'll use her "toes first" stair method to proceed onto the regular floor--I guess better safe than sorry! The funny part of it is that as she pushes herself backwards, she doesn't feel the drop of the step, so she just keeps pushing herself backwards with an increasingly perplexed look on her face. After about 6 or 8 feet of this, she'll swivel around to try to figure out exactly what is going on and when she sees just bare floor behind her she sort of shrugs and crawls off!

But on the topic of self-propulsion, Evi is now able to push various wheeled vehicles around, if they are heavy and stable enough for her to pull herself up on. She walks back and forth across the living room pushing the block cart as long as someone will stand with her and turn her cart around at the either end of the room. She especially loves it when Sierra comes and sits on it and she can push her big sister along. The first time she did that, both girls were laughing hysterically! She really wants to push the baby stroller, but it is so light that when she tries to pull herself up on it, it usually crashes over. Not popular.

Critic

This morning I told Sierra that it was Tuesday, and so we would go to storytime at the library (as is our usual custom). After a bit of a pensive moment, she announced that she didn't really want to go to storytime today, that she would like to go the Art Museum. We've taken her to art museums elsewhere, but for whatever reason, we haven't really gone to the one here (I think every time we go to the Carnegie with her, we end up in the dinosaur exhibit, probably). So I'm not sure where she got the idea, but I figured hey, let's strike while the iron is hot! The Carnegie International is going right now, which is an extravaganza of contemporary art from all over the world--this year's theme is "Life on Mars"--and I really wanted to see this exhibit anyway, so I was excited about the prospect.

I explained to her about art museums, as it has been awhile since she went to one (I don't think she really had a firm grasp of it at all) complete with explaining that although we would enjoy it very much, it was not a place that she could just run around and be noisy and play. She still seemed very keen on going, so we packed up and headed out. And true to her word, she was absolutely as good as gold while we were there. Some of the installations that involved walking into darkened rooms were freaky to her, and so we didn't see everything in the exhibit, but she had definite opinions about everything we saw and it was really fun to see it from her perspective, as much as I could.

At one installation I had picked her up so that she could see better, which meant that I had to park the stroller for a second. Evelyn had been totally content up until that moment, just soaking it all in, but she did not like her vehicle to stall like that and she let out a bit of a piercing shriek. In response, I said something to her in a voice that was probably a bit louder than I had been using to speak with Sierra. Sierra immediately looked at me and said, "Shh... you can't talk in here!" I admitted that I had probably used a louder voice than I needed to, and that we should probably keep our voices down in the museum. Sierra said, "Well, baby is not keeping her voice down!"

Main Man

Jonathan is away, and Sierra is missing him a lot--she wants to see pictures of him on the computer and keeps asking to see pictures of the plane that he flew on, etc. (Thank goodness for Google images--you can easily pull up hundreds of pictures of Airbus A319 planes at the stroke of a finger!!)

Tonight, though, it was Evi who put in her two bits about her Daddy MIA. We were eating dinner on the patio when the next door daddy pulled up into the driveway to unload something from the car. The neighbor girls came running out shouting "Daddy, Daddy!" and it was a bit of a commotion. Evi was craning her neck around as far as she could in order to see what was going on, and then she turned back to me with a big grin on her face and said, "DADA!"