Evie Update

Why?

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Everybody knows this stage of development. “Why? Why? What? Why?” All day long we get these questions. Evie asks why so much, that it has become a sort of default response to every statement. She says it even when she doesn’t want to know why. We’ve even gotten in the habit of ignoring her first why, because if she really wants to know, she’ll ask again. This saves you from a lot of pointless question answering.

Now lots of times these are questions she really wants to understand, and, of course, lots of times these questions are questions that nobody could ever be able to answer.

Evie: “What time is it?”
Me: “5 o’clock.”
Evie: “Why?”
Me: “…”

She likes to ask things about total strangers like, “What’s that boy’s name?” or “Where is his mommy?” She also asks questions in other strange circumstances. Let me give you some examples.

Evie: “He doesn’t wear a hat.”
Me: “This one doesn’t wear a hat?”
Evie: “Why?”

So, she makes a statement, you repeat it back to her, and she asks you why. Or, another example, she asks you why to something that only she could know:

Me: “You don’t like to eat those ones.”
Evie: “Why?”
Me: “You’d have to ask yourself that.”
Evie: “Why? I was asking myself.”

(Yes, if you ever say ‘you’d have to ask yourself’ she almost always answers this way, out loud)

And lets not forget about “What?” As part of this sort of voracious information gathering, she really hates to miss out on anything, or not understand. If you try having a conversation around her but not include her, you will regret it. She will interrogate you on every aspect she doesn’t understand. Of course, once her questions are satisfied she doesn’t really *care* about the balancing of the check book, but she wants to understand what you are talking about, to be sure she doesn’t care. For example, she frequently asks me what time it is if she sees me looking at my watch, even though the time is essentially meaningless to her.

All in all though, the questions really aren’t as bad as you see on T.V. or whatever. I usually try to answer her as much as I can. And she doesn’t get too frustrated with it, so it’s not that big of a deal. But lets just say there are times where it is a bit trying.

And that’s sort of the point of having a toddler, isn’t it?

Now with less robots!

/ Shane / 4 Comments

Lately, Evie has been a little frightened at night time. Every time she mentions something like that, my heart really goes out to her. I wish she never had to be afraid of the dark. So lately her fear has been centered around robots.

See, all the doors in our house have like 6 panels in them. Evie decided a long time ago, that they kind of look like robots. The two smaller top panels kind of look like eyes. Evie has mentioned this for a long time, but only recently has she been afraid of them. And her room has not one but three of these doors, because the closet has two.

So this is where her brilliant daddy stepped in. I suggested we cover up those robots with old art projects. This killed two birds with one stone, because it used up some of these art projects. You kind of hate to throw them away, but what do you do with them? Well, you wallpaper your doors to hide the robots, obviously.

So the other day, I hung up around 30 pictures all over the doors. In addition to hiding the robots, it looks pretty good! (if I do say so myself) I hung them sort of randomly with all different mixtures of orientations, painting, markers, white paper vs. colored paper, etc. I almost wish I would have done it a long time ago, even without the robots. The room looks cheerier, and it is a good display place, over space that wouldn’t have been used by anything anyway. Plus, I don’t have a big stack of art projects sitting around anymore.

So, I guess if your kid has a problem with robots in their room, I would recommend hiding the robots with art. And if all else fails, there’s always robot insurance.

The Cookie Police

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Evie has become somewhat dessert obsessed lately.

As part of this obsession, she has developed some sort of super-6th-sense about dessert. It’s kind of not her fault. Everybody is always trying to sneak dessert all around her. She kind of has no choice but to be suspicious. But even still, she amazes me with her powers of dessert perception.

We hid some cookies on top of the fridge where she couldn’t see them. Shortly after, we sat down for dinner. She knew instantly that there was something different in the room. About 2 seconds after she sat down she said, “What’s that over there?” “I don’t know,” replied Sara innocently. “It looks like cookies.”

Again, this is not necessarily her fault. I don’t know how many times I’ve stuffed something in my mouth as she came into a room, before she could catch me. Apparently I wasn’t being all that stealthy.

Evie: “What do you have in your mouth? What are you eating?”
Sara: “Nothing.”
Evie: “I smell something. I smell…cookies!”
Sara: “Maybe our neighbor was eating some.”
Evie, still suspicious: “Yeah, I guess so.”

So don’t try to pull anything over on her, especially if it involves cookies.

Writing Her Name

/ Shane / Leave a comment

I did that!

And I’ve never even seen her write a single letter before, much less a word!

We’ve already found an excuse to make a trip back to Joy Yee. This time, as promised, we were a lot more adventurous. Almost too adventurous. First off we had some duck egg rolls, which were pretty good (Although really, it was mostly due to the awesome sweet and sour sauce they have). Not too crazy. Then I ordered a red bean freeze. If you’ve never had red bean ice cream, it’s really good. It’s pretty much like cherry. This, however, had real red beans that I had to eat with a spoon (except for the ones I was able to suck up with the straw). It was weird, but good. Like sweet pinto beans. Finally, was my super good, suuuuuper spicy Korean soup. I know that Korean food has a reputation for being spicy, but yowza. And that wasn’t even the worst part of it. I’d say the worst part were the enormous squids floating around in there. I like calamari now and again, but something about the way that the two long grasping tentacles hang down longer than the other ones. And 6 inches is just a little over the line for me, size wise. I ate a smaller one, but that’s all I could manage. Still, despite all of that, it was super delicious, and I was extremely happy with the meal as a whole, which I didn’t even come close to finishing.

Maybe my valiant effort is what prompted this:

::Evie sticking out her belly::
Sara: “Who’s belly is bigger, Evie’s or Mommy’s?”
Evie: “Daddy’s!”

Potty Tickets

/ Shane / 2 Comments

Overnight and during naps, Evie got the brilliant idea to start taking her diaper off before falling asleep, which inevitably led to a wet bed. Washing her bed-clothes multiple times a day started to get pretty old. In an attempt to fix this problem, I told her if she needed to go potty, she could call me, and I would come help her. This was one of those instances where the cure was worse than the affliction. Pretty soon she was calling me down every few hours, all night long, even though she hardly ever really had to go. The frustration with this situation led me to utter a statement that I immediately recognized as a mistake:

“Evie, I’m not coming back down here again.”
“What if I have to go potty?”
“Well then, I guess you’ll just have to go on your own.”

Hoo boy.

After that, she was coming out of her room constantly, always taking off her clothes, always crying when she got her shirt stuck on her head or dropped her pajamas in the toilet. In other words, this was the worst, least manageable stage of all.

I should say that all of this was combined with (and/or responsible for) Evie starting to not take a nap anymore. She’s in sort of the awkward, in-between stage where she sometimes goes without a nap, but then has an extremely cranky, sleepy, rest of the day.

I have a theory on parenting. Lets call it the “sine wave of parenting difficulty”.

Basically, every 6 months your child goes from reasonably easy to parent, to reasonably difficult. Not necessarily naughty, though. It could be they change their sleeping habits, start teething, reach a stage where they are whining, or pushing boundaries, or potty training, whatever it is. The tricky part is to remember to appreciate the peaks, so you can get through the lows.

So anyway, a perfect storm of not sleeping, mischief, potty issues and a push for independence is sort of making this one of those parenting troughs. I wasn’t sure what to do. On the one hand, both Evie and I were losing sleep for no particular reason. On the other hand, I didn’t want to tell her NOT to go to the potty, because I would eventually like her to be able to go the night without a diaper. So how to break the habit while simultaneously not encouraging and not discouraging?

Finally, Sara came up with the answer – potty tickets! Evie gets two potty tickets per night (one for naps) which she can use to go to the potty. When she’s out of tickets, she has to go in her diaper.

Evie loves it. She is so excited to use the tickets. By the time I get down there, she’s dancing on the bed, waving her ticket around and saying, “Daddy, take my ticket!”

At first, the tickets were just little scraps of paper. Sara had a second stroke of inspiration when we were on the train the other day, and now the potty tickets are actually old Metra tickets

It’s still not ideal. She uses the first potty ticket within 5 seconds of being put to bed. After I put her into bed I close the door and wait, so I can go back in immediately. She rarely has to go that soon, so she’s still stalling there. Consequently, we have had to move her bedtime up to compensate for this.

Other than that, though, it works out pretty well. It’s a tolerable balance between what I would optimally like to have and where we were just a few days ago.

And that’s all you can really ask for, isn’t it?