(You may want to turn your volume up a little bit)
How can you not like “J K Elmomenomenomommy P”
She gets shy in front of the camera and won’t do it, hence the covert filming of the puzzle.
In addition to that song, Evie has been singing a lot lately. She especially likes “Mary had a Little Lamb” and “Yes, No and Maybe” (from her music class).
She can now count to 10. Sometimes you have to get her started, but by 3 she is ready to go. Sometimes she just starts at 3 and counts up from there. We have yet to get a video of this, but we’re still trying.
She is getting her shapes down. She knows circle, triangle, diamond, square, star, heart and oval.
Colors she already knows a decent amount of. She is really good with blue, green, pink, red, yellow, orange, white and (her favorite) purple. Sometimes she gets brown and sometimes black. She doesn’t do very well with grey.
So, I haven’t really given a life update in a while, so I’m going to throw a bunch of stuff in here.
The Saturday a week before Thanksgiving, we participated in a parenting first: taking our child to the emergency room. It wasn’t really an emergency per say, but Evie was showing a lot of signs of an ear infection which she had just gotten over (so we thought) and we were supposed to leave that day for a week of vacation. I thought this was a rite of passage because when I was little we had to go to the emergency room like a million times (mostly due to ear infections), but Sara said they didn’t go very often when she was little. Anyway, it took a while but everybody was nice and it wasn’t the horror story I was envisioning. The doctor said the ears were a little pink but she couldn’t say for certain that she had an ear infection. Luckily they gave us the antibiotic anyway since her eardrum ruptured less than 24 hours later! They also gave us a handy sheet with information on it such as how to say some of the tougher medical words (in FECT shun in case you were wondering). The second antibiotic gave her bad diarrhea for a week (“thanks dad!” – future Evie) but seemed to clear things up. However, at her follow up it looks like there still may be a problem, we were referred to an Ear Nose and Throat doctor. The result of that appointment was yet another round of antibiotics and the possibility of tubes in her ears come January. Everyone in my family has ear trouble. Apparently we have small ear canals which makes fluid sit longer which is a breeding ground for bacteria. So it looks like she has a legacy to live up to, unfortunately! 😦
So we went to MI where I deposited Sara and Evie for the week before coming back to work (hence the temporary bachelor-hood). I thought I would have lots of time to relax, but I had quite a list of things to do, so it went pretty fast. I did catch up on a lot of sleep though. While she was gone, Sara got her haircut really short and donated it to Beautiful Lengths. She’s super cute. 🙂
I caught back up to them at my mom’s house where everybody (including Sara’s family) came for Thanksgiving. Good times, good eats, and Evie learned a new religion:
We also managed to hit up my dad’s, where Sara collected many sticks and pine cones which can be hard to come by in Chicago, and Science Central. Science Central suffered an unfair comparison since we had just recently been to the Please Touch Museum, but it was actually a pretty good time. We spent longer there than we expected to.
Evie tried her first taste of bacon, which was a momentous occasion! She liked it of course. She also tried something else:
You probably can’t tell from this picture, but she really liked that as well.
Although she is still sleeping through the night, she has had some setbacks after vacation. She has woken up once a couple of nights and also seems to have decided that 4 a.m. is a pretty good time to get up. Although we don’t let her get out of her crib until 5:30, sometimes she just stays awake and plays or cries. Which means I am back to sleeping on the floor sometimes. Hopefully we are done with that and back on track though after just a few nights. Last night she slept until 5:30 (whoever thought I would be happy to “sleep in” until 5:30?!)
She knows well over 200 words now and she’s making 3 word sentences. She is especially into Christmas words at the moment like pistmas tree, santa, snowman, angel, reindeer, snowflake, sled, etc. She can recognize about 6 colors; blue, green, pink, orange, purple and brown but she doesn’t always get those right. She can “read” (i.e. recognize) about 6 written words; stop, zoo, Evie, mommy, daddy and taxi. That part is the most amazing to me. I know that she’s not really reading per say, but it still seems like you aught not to be able to recognize words by 16 months. The doctor said she is speaking somewhere between a 2 year old and a 3 year old level.
I try not to brag about my daughter or get too excited about things, especially since I don’t have any frame of reference about how much a kid is supposed to be doing, but I suppose writting all of that on my blog is bragging a *little* bit. 🙂
I hate when people say literally and don’t mean it.
Literally.
It is probably my biggest pet peeve. And I’m not the only one either, there are entire blogs dedicated to the topic.
I would say “Man on Fire” was probably the biggest offense to my sensibilities. They had a commercial which played about 10 bazillion times which said, “Denzel Washington literally sets the screen on fire!” Literally? Like he flies all over the country attending every screening and burns down the theater? And if that is true, that is supposed to make me want to see the movie?
Holy crap, as I was typing this a weight loss commercial just came on T.V. and Chris Berman just said, “I was bigger than life…literally!” How is that even possible? Ah, Chris Berman, I had so much respect for you!
Well, there are a million examples. Anyway, in the spirit of literalness, here is literally one of my favorite songs of all time! Ah ha’s “Take on Me”, literally. I don’t know why this struck me as so funny, but it really cracked me up. I would like to see some more songs given the same treatment!
Yesterday Evie learned a very important word: Pirate! So, maybe it comes out like “Pie-rop”, but she can still say it when she points to a pirate (thanks Uncle Nate for the bath toys!) Too bad she didn’t get it out in time for Talk Like a Pirate Day.
You can also see the video of her saying “exercise” which I think is an impressive word for a not quite 14 month old.
There is also another video of her in her favorite new shirt. This was the first time she’s worn it, but every time we open her closet she says, “Cat! Cat!” and points to it. She was very proud to wear it all day and kept showing it off to everybody.
Everybody loves an acappella band. When they are really good it is just amazing to think that the sounds you are hearing are coming only from someone’s mouth. Fork is especially interesting because usually an acappella group consists of a lot of people and they are only four.
They have some of their own music as well as covers anywhere from Queen to Bon Jovi to U2. Some are funny and some are so haunting they send chills down my spine:
So continue to look here, your source for all Finnish acappella bands!
Shane Halbach 