Evie Update

RIP Greenie

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Evie has been sort of obsessed with insects for awhile now. We went from butterflies to caterpillars before finally settling grasshoppers. I said at the time that the grasshoppers seemed a little sturdier than the insects she had captured before, but I never thought we’d still be hosting them 6 1/2 weeks later.

However, all good things must come to an end, and Greenie eventually succumbed, most likely to grasshopper old age. A few tears were shed, and he warranted a burial in the rocks behind the building, which was more than any of the butterflies ever got. Her other grasshopper, Jumper, is still going strong.

I have to give it to her, she did a pretty good job of taking care of them. I never would have thought they would have lived so long. It’s true that she did lose some interest towards the end there, and had to be hounded a little bit to keep getting them food, but what other 6 year old could keep up her enthusiasm for 6 weeks?

Don’t mourn for the grasshoppers though. Grasshoppers are so 5 minutes ago. We’re now the proud owner of 2 new (yet unnamed) snails that Ollie found and Evie immediately adopted. Unfortunately, they’re nocturnal and much less interesting than the grasshoppers were. Other than an initial investigative crawl around the jar, they mostly just stay in their shells hiding under a leaf. Still, it’s something to collect leaves and sticks for, and that’s practically the national pastime around here.

Anybody know how long snails live?

A new chapter in the no-sleep saga

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Sigh.

It’s rather unfortunate that when it comes to Evie, the no-sleep saga is a never ending story. I can’t even begin to tell you the number of times we’ve “solved” her sleep issues. It’s quite clear that it’s something that’s never going to BE solved, it just is what it is at this point.

So once again we arrive at the point where Evie is waking everybody up in the house. Our room shares a wall with theirs, so we would frequently be awakened at 5 a.m. or so to singing filtering through the (very thin-seeming) wall. Worse than that, she would wake us up a million times per night, usually to tell us that she “had to go to the bathroom” or “needed to be tucked back in”. All of this was frustrating in the extreme, but we could live with it.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was poor Ollie. It’s one thing to wake us up, but he would literally cry in the morning asking to go back to sleep. The final straw was waking up one morning to him screaming at her to stop singing so he could get some sleep. Poor guy. We just realized that it wasn’t fair to him, and something had to be done.

So Evie is back where she started, downstairs in her own room.

Of course, she’s still terrified to be down there all by herself. The first night in particular was a rough one. The thing is, I know that she has a very vivid imagination, just like I did, and often terrifies herself, just as I did. So my heart just absolutely goes out to her when she’s crying and scared of the dark, and it’s really difficult for me to resist her pleas in a situation like that. But I knew it was the best thing for all of us.

And so it was. By the morning she was already over it, and Ollie has been sleeping like a rock. We’ve been waking him up in the morning, he’s been sleeping so well. And even then he doesn’t want to get up. Evie has broken the rules a few times and come upstairs to wake us up, but far less overall than she had been.

She’s still not exactly comfortable down there. Every night after I tuck her in, she pushes things in front of the door to block it. But there are perks to being down there as well. Now that she’s not going to bed with Ollie, we’re letting her stay up a little later to read in bed. She suddenly seems so much older now that she’s reading in bed, turning the light off herself, and then getting dressed before she comes upstairs in the morning.

I am a little disappointed that they won’t be sharing a room anymore. But I will drown my disappointment in 8 glorious hours of unbroken sleep tonight, and I suppose I’ll get over it.

Missing: One Tooth

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Missing Tooth

Oh, my friends. I cannot tell you what a big day this is. Evie has been *DYING* to lose a tooth for years.

Partly because she tends to make friends with older kids, and partly because she seemed to be a little late to the table as far as losing teeth, but it seems like every single kid she knows has lost teeth. She’s the oldest in her class and there’s only one other person who hasn’t lost one yet. It’s gotten to the point where even her friends’ little siblings are losing teeth now. And it’s not like she doesn’t notice these things; she has been pining for this every minute of the day since the time a year and a half ago when a classmate had a tooth fly out at school, during music class.

Perhaps the long wait was worth it though, because she was flying pretty high. She literally could not be any more excited. And that was BEFORE a visit from the tooth fairy!

Evie’s Race

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If you recall, last year at this time Evie was preparing for her first race. As you also may recall, Evie was intensely disappointed with her first race. She had taken the race preparation very seriously, and the race organizers very obviously had not, and Evie is not one to miss something like that.

Well, Evie obviously wasn’t the only one who felt that way, because this year they introduced a “real” race for kids, and Evie was much obliged.

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It was a one mile race and it was for real. There was a course laid out, and a biker in front to clear the path. The kids had timing chips in their numbers, and entire legions of fans cheering at the finish line. In other words, it was everything Evie hoped for. After all, these are kids of runners, and they know what a real race should look like.

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(Look at that runner’s stride…she’s a natural!)

Unfortunately, Evie wiped out on the final turn, skinning her knees and hands. I hadn’t seen her fall. Right at the finish line she was all grins and I was hugging her and telling her how proud of her I was. “I fell down, but I got right back up and finished the race!” she proclaimed. I gave her another big hug, but slowly her face crumpled and she started crying. “It huuurts!” she said. She was just feeling all the feelings – pride, pain, happiness, adrenaline – and it was just too much for her little 6 year old body to contain.

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(She made me take this picture)

This was the race I was hoping for last year. I have to admit, I got a little teary eyed seeing her recognize that this was the real deal, and seeing how proud she was. She finished her mile in 11:08 (about the same as the average 12 year old according to some chart Sara found online). She looked so grown up drinking her after-race water with her medal around her neck and her number pinned to her shirt (you know, despite the Monarch butterfly on her face).

She did so great, and it was a great moment in her life. I’m glad I could share it with her.

2013_10_06_9999_45(Yeah, Sara ran a race too or something)

 

Butterfly Girl

/ Shane / 2 Comments

There is a new predator in the garden making a significant dent in the insect population. Evie has taken a keen interest in bugs.

It all started when my dad gave her a little butterfly net and plastic bug cage. It didn’t seem like much at the time, but I don’t know if Evie has ever been so enamored with a toy. She went from whining and complaining about having to go to the garden to begging to go. She’s deadly with that net, and she basically never goes without catching at least one butterfly. She wore that bug cage clean out, and had to buy a replacement, something so dear to her heart that she actually spent her own money on it.

Her usual pattern was to catch between one and three butterflies, give them flowers and sticks until they died, then dump their corpses on the back porch and go fill her butterfly house of death with a new crop. We tried to convince her to let them go while they were still alive, but we were never really successful with that. She’s very patient and very good at catching them (although not necessarily as good at getting them in the cage).

Evie: “What’s a talent show?”
Me: “Oh, Evie. You would *love* a talent show. It’s like at a school or something, when you get on stage and perform. You could act out a skit, or sing a song, or do a ballet dance.”
Evie: “Or for my talent you could release a bunch of butterflies on stage, and I’d catch them!”

The butterflies were relatively cool, but the whole thing really went to the next level when she nabbed a couple of caterpillars.

These were big fat green ones, with yellow and black spots on their backs. We identified them on the computer (Eastern black swallowtails, as Evie was fond of pointing out to everybody all of the time) and identified what they liked to eat. Evie carefully collected all of their favorite foods and the caterpillars quickly responded by chowing down like there was no tomorrow before crawling up and making some nice big cocoons.

I’m a 33 year old man, and I’m not going to lie, it was pretty cool. We all spent a decent amount of time watching these little guys crawl around, but I never thought they’d make cocoons. It was a pretty exciting event around here. They’re fun to watch when they’re crawling around. They’re fun to watch when they’re eating. And don’t even get me started on how much fun they are when they poop! It’s like christmas morning at the Halbach house. Luckily for Evie, those caterpillars pretty much did nothing BUT poop.

For a while, Evie was taking these things everywhere she went, especially school, and every person she met, kid or adult, was fascinated by them. They were so cool! Evie seemed to get a particularly big reaction, though I’m not sure if that was due to 1) her general enthusiasm for the subject, 2) the fact that she was a girl that was into bugs, or 3) the fact that we live in Chicago and seeing living creatures is something of a novel concept. I mean that for real, I actually saw people on a bus stopped at a light pointing at her caterpillars as we walked by on the sidewalk.

Things somewhat calmed down now that all the caterpillars are chrysalises (chrysali?), except that now she’s captured a big, fat grasshopper. It’s got to be at least 3 inches long, and just as hungry (and full of poop) as those caterpillars. My only problem with the grasshopper is that there’s no end point, other than his death. So we’re kind of back to the butterfly situation again, except the grasshopper seems to be quite a bit sturdier than they were.

In the meantime, our chrysalises are wintering on the back porch. It turns out that they won’t turn into butterflies until spring! So we’ll see if the enthusiasm can last that long (to say nothing of the actual chrysalises). But if they do, then Evie will have shepherded these little guys through their entire life cycle, which is pretty dang cool.