Sign Language

Since before I was pregnant I said that if/when we had a child I was going to teach them sign language. All of the books say that it helps children who aren't old enough to talk yet, tell you what they want, thereby there's less crying. How awesome is THAT? I'm totally sold. Sign me up. My baby's going to sign. Yep.

Ok. So it's not that easy. We're trying. So far Katherine knows maybe three signs. Allow me to elaborate.

Sign #1: Waving. Check... got it. We wave to ourselves, wave to others and generally think waving is just fun.

Sign #2: Clapping. Okay, so it's not quite a sign but if you say YAY!!! She'll clap. With a big goofy grin, just like her Daddy. Who wouldn't melt at that?

Sign #3: The bird. No, not as in cute tweet tweet, birdie. I'm talking - THE BIRD. As you can imagine, this is not one we're proud of. Not one I'm even sure is a "sign". At least we hope not. You see, Katherine points with her middle finger. And she likes to point. Particularly at people. Last weekend we were running. Katherine in her sporty new stroller, Mommy pushing said sporty new stroller with my cool Nike+Sport... woohoo... Diggin it... Can't breathe... but we're both happy. Then it happens. Katherine starts pointing as people go by. The lake we were running at is quite busy on a Saturday morning. There were lots and lots of people to "point" at. UG. Reactions ranged from looks like "did that kid just give me the finger?" to laughing to "I'm reporting that mother for sign language abuse."

I've tried to show her how to use her pointer finger. She just sticks the middle finger right back up. I've decided now I'm going to ignore it. I'm enacting the age old parent rule of - if you pay attention she'll continue to do it because you're drawing attention to it. So I ignore (and pray) that she'll learn to point with the appropriate (pointer) finger.

In other news, Katherine had her first sleep-over!!! So I may be stretching that a bit. Her big cousin Kyla (19months) stopped by to catch some zzzz's on the way to Florida from Pennsylvania. Kyla brought Aunt Betsy and Uncle Ron with her. The girls had a grand time playing. I didn't get pictures of the "play" as I was busy trying to teach Katherine to share. Apparently, we need to do a little more work on that. She is doing better sharing at school but her toys at home... She had a look like, ah, maybe you don't know it, but that's MY toy. Especially the Top she got from Grandma for Christmas. Both girls wanted to play with it. And they both took turns grabbing it from the other. Katherine again giving the look like... Hey, that's MY top. She did invoke the I'm going to put it in my mouth so you can't have it rule... (Mommy taught her this so the next time we're at the Coach store we can invoke said rule). Kyla didn't much care about the slobber rule.

Things we know we need to work on:
- Stop flipping people off
- Sharing
- Continue sign language efforts

And all I wanted to do was teach her to sign things like Mommy, Daddy, bottle, more...

Pictures for the week:
http://picasaweb.google.com/daleksza/Playing#

PS - Yes, I did give the blog a new look. I thought it needed some sprucing up! :)

Oops, it's been a while!

I seem to be quite behind in blogging. I was looking at my last post and it was two weeks ago, but then I read what it was about and realize that was really three weeks ago. Oops. I’m not sure I can remember that far back?

Three weeks… I find myself in a Winnie the Pooh pose of “think think think…” Let’s see… Start off with memorable events!

We celebrated Stephen’s birthday on April 7th. Daddy chose not to open his presents in the morning (first time in history) in favor of waiting till Katherine could sit and open them with him. I know. I felt his head. He didn’t seem fever-ish. Stephen had his pick for dinner. Eat home, eat out – whatever he wanted. He chose Thai. I DID say ANYTHING he wanted. I know I’ll get myself in trouble for this – but really, it wasn’t so bad! I had pineapple chicken rice. Pretty yummy actually. And we shared some kind of chicken with peanut sauce for an appetizer. I know. You’re stunned. Quite frankly, so was I! Now don’t get ahead of yourself and think we’re making this one of our recurring restaurants. It was good – but don’t push it.

For dessert we had Stephen’s favorite – Strawberry Shortcake with whipped cream frosting. Katherine was a fan of the whipped cream and the cake. The strawberries she could have done without. The mess, I could have done without. :P
RC Easter Weekend my cousin Cheryl and her boyfriend Jay came to visit. We spent RC Easter morning with them. It was so great to spend time with them. And Katherine was in love with Jay. Little flirt. Katherine got dressed up in her first Easter finest and we all went out for Brunch. Well for Katherine it was her 2nd meal of the day. Fortunately she was far from the only child in the restaurant and the cheerios on the floor were kept to a minimum.

Last week seems like it was very busy. Doing what I’m not quite sure. I know we had one trip to urgent care, a painful trip to the pharmacy thereafter and multiple days/nights of me being unable to breathe. Curse the pollen! Yellow slimy stuff!!! Made for some sleepless nights and exhausting days. We’ll blame that on the reason I don’t remember the week.

I do recall our weekend events, with some clarity! Saturday Katherine and I went with our friend Meredith to a 5k Run/Walk. Okay – so when I signed up I thought – 5k… Hm. I haven’t done 3 miles in oh… 18 months. Maybe I sign up for the one mile. So I did. When we arrived however, I somehow found myself doing the 5k. With a stroller. And a Katherine. I wouldn’t have felt so bad about my time had there not been this man who really RAN the 5k and did so with a stroller built for 3. Yes. THREE!!!! The kids ages must have ranged from 2-5. Seriously, the man was a rock star. I thought for sure the stroller built for three was there to cheer someone on. Until he strapped up. Stroller attached to wrist he headed up and down the hills of the course. And I say hills when really I mean small mountains. The whole course I was thinking, I thought this was a catholic school? What SATIST picked this course? I tried to take a picture of the man with the stroller built for three, but clearly my camera was in awe too because it didn’t SAVE the picture. I’m pretty sure he completed the 5k in less than 30 minutes. Disgusting I tell ya. Disgusting. We won’t discuss my time. But I’m holding the stroller and mini mountains responsible for it.  What? I ran with a GRACO! Come on – give me SOME points for that!!

I really thought Katherine would nap as I ran but she only slept for about 15 minutes. She was too busy waving to people as we ran past them…. Okay, some of the time they were running past us – but you get the point. Little Miss Social needed to be able to wave to her people.

Sunday was OC Easter Sunday. What a great day! I still wasn’t breathing all that well. (Yes, I know running while being unable to breathe wasn’t my finest display of intelligence, but it was for a good cause – Pediatric Diabetes.) Stephen made delicious waffles for breakfast. Even Katherine ate them! Katherine was clearly quite tired from her run the previous day so she napped quite a bit. At one point little girl was so tired she crawled over to her car seat and stuck her pacifier in her mouth and laid down. I was able to keep her up long enough to take her outside and play with bubbles. She’s not sure what to make of them. She also didn’t know what to make of the sidewalk or grass. She was barefoot and trying to walk. She’d pick up her foot then go to set it back down again and lift it right back up as if to say WHOA, that’s not carpet! Apparently eating the grass is okay – but walking on it – the jury is still out on that one. Dinner was excellent. Ham, mashed potatoes, deviled eggs, bread and green beans. There may have been some other things on the table, but they stayed by Stephen. (i.e. beets and horseradish mixed together… There was no need for him to share THAT.)

This week was another trip back to the doctors for me and a new round of medications which, thankfully, appear to be helping. I can actually get through the day without using my rescue inhaler every 4 hours.

Now that I can breathe (better) Katherine and I are going to head out tomorrow for a run with Miss Merry and our new Schwinn Jogging Stroller.

Pictures!
http://picasaweb.google.com/daleksza/42409ItSBeenAWhile#

Daddy went away on a business trip

At least that’s what he told us. From his stories it sounded more like a sales meeting! Bars, drinking, belly dancers… In fact, now that I’m typing – sounds more like a bachelor party!!!

In any event it was 4 days of Katherine/Mommy bonding time. What fun!!! Of course, there were instances during the 4 days that Katherine was yelling DAD DAD DAD – as if to say “COME SAVE ME!!!” And so the story begins...

On Tuesday at lunch I was mentioning to some friends that I recalled buying a Thumper costume last Spring, before baby was born. It was something crazy like $3 from the Disney website. I thought – how cute!! A costume that we can use for Easter! On Tuesday I remembered said costume and told my friends that I was going to put it on Katherine that evening. Apparently they had a different image of the Thumper costume than reality. Ahem. Oops.

Instead of just trying on the Thumper costume we turned it into a bit of dress up. What outfits fit Katherine that she could wear for Easter/Spring pictures/etc. I had two dresses and Thumper to try on. First let me say, in hindsight, I’m not sure what I was thinking, except that I thought Katherine would look cute!! We started with Thumper’s head. Katherine’s not a fan of hats, so the fact that she had this (large) Thumper head on, did NOT impress her. We moved to the body. She thought the big belly was odd and kept pressing her hand into it. I lost it when she tried to crawl. Ok. I’m wrong. But it really was funny. And hey, I refrained from putting on the hands/feet that went with the costume. SEE, I did show restraint! It was during the Thumper dress-up session that Katherine began yelling for Daddy. Poor baby. I’m chalking this up to a case of the crazy mommies. I can’t be held responsible for my actions in this instance.

Putting on the dresses went well. She looked gorgeous.

Wednesday night we went shopping. Not shopping as in the – we went to Target for a bit – kind of shopping. We bought new family room furniture. Katherine loved it. We had to buy it. Surprise Daddy!!!! (For the record, he’d agreed to the purchase before he left – whew.)

Thursday evening was dinner with Ms Merry!! We had a yummy dinner and enjoyed Ms Merry’s company!! We were home in time to see Daddy on the webcam!
Friday, Daddy’s homecoming day, I took most of the day off. We played, had lunch with a friend and then went to have “spring pictures” taken. You see, I keep thinking that I’m going to start digressing in the picture taking. I figure, at least keep things going for the first year! It’s the least I can do, since I’ve already screwed up the whole baby book thing. (No, I didn’t even get that right! I didn’t know there was a page for every month!! Crap! How did I miss that?!)

The weekend was a little less eventful. We were very excited that Stephen was home! We’d missed him so!!! Of course, we did think for a period of about 36 hours that Katherine was teething. She was CRAZY. Of course, still no tooth in sight, we’re ruling out the teething and just thinking she was having “a moment”.

Pictures for the week:
http://picasaweb.google.com/daleksza/DaddySOutOfTown#