tawbubby

Aunt Melissa missed having an update, so here are two. 

Amelia is painting her own nails with $0.33 pink sparkly nailpolish (3 for $1!). She loves it.

Here she is admiring her work last weekend.

Daphne’s hair is long enough for a pony tail now!  Here is some glee while playing dollhouse.

She says a very loud and unemotional “Ow!” when we brush her hair, mimicking her sister, who can’t stand when we brush her hair.  She is very cute.

Daphne figured out that she can say “no” to us.  This morning I had sunscreen all over my hands to put on one of the girls before we went out the door.  I said “Daphne, come here and get your sunscreen.”, and she looked at me, paused, shook her head, said “No”, and walked into the other room.  Ethan said she did something similar to him yesterday too.  Time to get tough, I guess. 

Amelia and Daphne’s daddy got a gigantic tent for father’s day. We spent a Sunday running around inside of it, and then resting.

Daphne learned to run that day. Amelia would call out “1-2-3-Blast!”, and sprint across the tent. Daphne copied, and now it is our family running mantra. She’s getting pretty speedy.

Here’s D swimming (?) with some help from Ethan.  We help her find toys on the bottom or push her towards the wall so she can pull up out of the water.  She likes finding the toys, doesn’t like the wall so much.

Been too cool for the pool this week, but apparently we are all too tired for it anyway. Some virus? Ethan went to bed at 6:30 tonight, beating my Tuesday bedtime by an hour and a half. Amelia asked to rest and lay down all evening, not even lured by the bikes and bubble mower. She helped me put Daphne to bed, reading, kissing, the works. Then Daphne kissed Elmo and said “I wuv you, belmo”.  We heard a big pucker on our way out the door.  Amelia picked one of her short books, and went right to sleep.
She did notice than an equal sign would be “11″ if you turned it on the side. (Little Quack adds up the ducks on every page)

Night night tawbubbies everywhere.

Splash!

Amelia does this over and over and over. A few times in the past week, I have tried to remember being like that. I was older, I am pretty sure, but it must be exhausting. Apparently it is because we have to wake her up most mornings lately.

Amelia just finished a two week swim class and she has become a little fish. By the end of the class, she knew she had some new tricks and enjoyed herself. The big step was enjoying herself. She likes to go underwater now and she’s a different kid. It is very cool for me to not hang out at the baby pool anymore. She can jump in and get back to the wall (over and over and over), jump in and swim a little to us, swim from us to the wall. She can float by herself, (mostly when she doesn’t realize you took your one supporting finger away from under her head), do a very wiggly crawl stroke, and go through the motions of backstroke though she doesn’t go anywhere. She can get toys off the bottom of the pool if I push her head down to give her a downhill boost. She can’t swim headfirst downhill yet. And she went off the diving board a few times at her lessons and twice with me. I told her she couldn’t do it again with me until she could jump in AND swim all the way to the wall. It made me too nervous to have that precious girl depending on me in very deep water.

A couple times a day she asks me to tell her all about lifeguards.

Tonight she asked “Can I swim through your legs?”. I don’t know if she did that at her lessons, or saw someone else do it at the pool, or came up with the idea on her own. But she did it half a dozen times- went under, I pushed her head a little lower, and she swam through. (Grandma- I remember doing that with you at Tibits!) She asked a 5 year old if she could swim through her legs too, and just took off and rammed into the other girl’s tummy. It was hilarious. I am cracking up right now thinking about it. Amelia can be very in-your-face. The other girl was very confused.

Sorry grandfathers and great grandfathers. I really thought Father’s Day is next weekend, not in two days. So this is for you.

Daph figured out how to get the caps off of markers (not easy!) this morning while the girls were decorating cards.  The cards are on the way. Amelia picked out and colored the cards and Daphne did the envelopes.

Swim pictures of Daphne coming up next. Our camera battery died after a few pics tonight.

We’re trying to teach Amelia how to keep a secret. (We know we will regret this eventually). Today was the Father’s Day picnic/Celebration at Amelia’s day care. And all week, they’ve been working on a surprise. But Amelia’s not very good at surprises. For instance, she still announces pretty loudly when she’s going to give someone a Sneaky Hug, which consists of her nonchalantly walking to the person and surprising them with an out-of-the-blue hug.

So this week Amelia has been bursting at the seams about the gift they were making. I tried to teach her how to give hints, without giving it away.

AMELIA: Daddy. On Friday, you will get a surprise.
ME: Don’t tell me.
AMELIA: I won’t. But you will put it in a player. But the surprise is not the player. You will be so excited.
ME: I can’t wait.
AMELIA: And it’s a circle.

PS. She got better through the week, though.  Yesterday on the way home she said “If you look in Art [a station in her classroom] you can see what I made for daddy.  And when we get home, we can have daddy go in the other room and then I can show you where his present goes.  I can point to it so he won’t see.”  (posted by Allison)

Tis that time of year, and Amelia can stay up late enough now.

Amelia and I were reading a book of classic children’s stories tonight that Uncle Michael gave her for her first Christmas. Admittedly, we’ve read it a lot, but not for a couple months. We started reading Sleeping Beauty and there is a picture of SB with her cat on the first page. Amelia told me there are three cats in the book, one is black and white, one is black, and the other is brown and white, and here they are. And she flipped to all of the pages with the cats. In a 222 page book containing pictures on every page, without any searching.
She then told me she found all of the cats when she was taking a nap a long time ago.

She also read the word “foot” in Jack and the Beanstalk, and then said “boot”, from her memory of the word, realizing they look like they should rhyme, but they don’t. So we read Puss in Boots, but Puss in “but”.

And then she asked me if lifeguards are nocturnal?