Three years old today! I can’t believe how fast the years have gone!
Evie wanted cupcakes for her birthday, but she wanted 3 candles on each cupcake!
Evie Update
Hamburger Sausage
As is often the case when manipulating raising children, it all comes down to how you phrase things.
As any parent of a toddler knows, getting them to eat things is tricky at best. Especially when it is something new. I don’t know how many times we’ve had something that I *know* she’d like, if only she’d try it. But getting her to even try it is a huge chore.
Well, one of the obvious tricks is to change the name of something to sound more toddler friendly. For example, Evie would not try hamburger. What kid doesn’t like hamburgers? On top of that, she loves ketchup and anything with ketchup on it. So we knew she would like it, but she would never try it. Never, that is, until Sara got the brilliant idea to form the hamburger into “sausage links” instead of patties (like when you make a snake with play doh). Evie loves breakfast sausage, so when we served her “hamburger sausage” one night, and told her she could dip it in ketchup, she was hooked. Now she LOVES hamburger sausage and chows down like crazy on it.
The same thing worked for falafel. Of course, falafel is not even meat, but it does kind of look like sausage. Call it falafel sausage and you’re in business.
I could go on and on with examples. It’s so funny how framing a thing properly changes her attitude entirely.
The little men who live in your stomach
I don’t remember how this first came about, but we have somehow stumbled upon a very effective technique to get Evie to eat things she might not otherwise eat.
The story goes that there are little men in your tummy who take the materials you send down to them and use them to build things, which help you grow big and strong. For example, if you send down broccoli, they might make trees to line the roads. If you send down some tomatoes, they might add apples into the trees. Milk might turn into clouds or little white bunnies.
Dessert doesn’t help you grow big and strong of course, so the builders can’t use that for materials. However, it’s still okay to eat dessert because when you send some down, the little men take a break, sit down and enjoy their dessert.
This works great as long as you can keep thinking of things that the little men can build. If you keep building firetrucks, red is going to stop being interesting. This is harder than you think, especially when you have to play this game day after day after day. (I had to make a rule that I would only be a little man during meal times) You know things are getting desperate when white materials are being turned into things like toilets and toilet paper.
The other problem is that, the first time I was a little man in her stomach, I instinctively used the fake I’m-shouting-from-a-long-ways-away-but-I’m-actually-quieting-my-voice voice, as if I were shouting up to her from down in the pit of her stomach. Of course that became the default little man voice, and she gets upset if I forget and talk like a regular person.
So the good news is that we can get her to eat almost anything. The bad news is that dinner time just became a high pressure situation for me!
She’s trying to make me cry
Parents worry about things that kids just don’t think about. “Am I making the right decisions for my child?” or “Am I raising this kid right?” Being a parent involves a lot of uncertainty. I don’t know if children pick up on this, and thus know the weak points to prod at, or if they just ask so many questions that some of them are bound to hit below the belt.
For example, one thing on my mind a lot is the fact that raising our kids in Chicago, they are having a much different childhood than Sara or I had. In particular, we yearn for some sort of yard where the kids could go out and play.
Evie: “This is silly, but for the house, for my birthday, I wanna ask for a yard.”
Ouch.
However, lately it seems like Evie has been going for the jugular. It really seems like she’s going out of the way to try to make us cry.
Evie: “When I die, I want to bring mommy with me.”
Evie: “When I die, I want to die close to the house. Can you make me die close to the house?”
Sara: “Why do you want to die close to the house?”
Evie: “So I can see you again”
Evie: “When I die, will you let me take Oliver with me?”
Cue daddy with a lone tear dripping from his giant cartoon eyes while his bottom lip starts quivering.
She hasn’t really had any personal experience with death yet, but I assume that thinking about death probably normal at her age. It’s not like she thinks about it all day, but it does come up probably every other day or so.
The thing is, you just never want to think about death in conjunction with your child. This seems pretty obvious, but I can definitely say that, although you might think you understand, its something that you can’t really know until you have a child. How absolutely terrifying it is. And also strange to think, “I guess that means my parents felt that way about me too.”
Well, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about these things, since Evie keeps bringing it up!
The Bird Restaurant
For our anniversary, I got Sara a bird feeder. Exciting, right?
Well, as I had hoped, it was exciting for at least one person. At first, Evie wasn’t too excited about it. But once we got home and started explaining about how we would hang it on the porch and watch out the window, she started to get very excited. In fact, she was concerned that we get it up as soon as possible, since the birdies “didn’t get any breakfast so they’re probably hungry!” As if birds hadn’t been able to find any food to feed themselves before our bird feeder was created.
Sometimes, however, she would get a little confused on the difference between a bird house and a bird feeder. She kept asking where we were going to put the beds. So I explained that what we had was a bird feeder, which was more like a bird restaurant than a bird house.
Evie was concerned that the birds that ate at our restaurant wouldn’t have a place to stay. She wanted the birds to come live inside our house. Obviously we said no, but she tried to guilt us into it: “Some kids have the birds come into their house and then the mom opens the door for the birds to go outside and eat.”
So I hung it up outside Evie and I took a trip to the hardware store to get some seeds. Evie wanted to sit outside and wait for the birds to start coming, but we tried to tell her that we didn’t know how soon the birds would come. We were worried it would take a couple of days before any birds located our bird feeder, and we didn’t want her to be disappointed.
I happened to mention to Evie that maybe we should make a sign, so that the birds would know our restaurant was here and open for business. She really got behind that idea and immediately began working on a sign. The sign included many things, such as “a bird with two wings”, “a man with two very long arms putting bird seed in”, “seed on the ground”, and finally, signed “love (heart) birds”.
No joke, about 2 minutes after she put the sign in the window, we had our first customer!
Since then, we’ve had lots of birds (in fact, the seed is going down at a sort of alarming rate). Evie set a stool by the window permanently, so she can check several times a day to see if there are any birds.
Even when she was at the park, she was chasing the birds around shouting “We have a bird feeder at our house! We have a bird feeder at our house!” She’s a good promoter. She even has a name for our bird restaurant: “It’s the Bird Cheetah”, named after her very favorite restaurant name ever, the Electric Cheetah.
All in all, I have to say, the bird feeder was certainly money well spent!
Shane Halbach 