Happy Birthday

Happy Birthday to Tray! I plan to post again after the fact with a full wrap up of the birthday activities over the last few days, but I wanted to post something today to commemorate the occasion. Happy, happy birthday! We love you!

On the water

I can't speak for everybody, but I do know several people who have had the following experience: You plan on taking your child out on the water and purchase them an appropriately sized lifejacket. You get out on the water and the child screams bloody murder about having to wear said lifejacket. So, in a desperate attempt to salvage your planned first boating you allow them to go without. In none of my friends' kid's first boating photos are they wearing lifejackets (unless they were a lot older at the time of their first outing), and I always sort of chuckle knowing what happened. Anyway, we've been working with Penny on getting used to hers. One day Tray wore his around the house so she'd think it was the cool thing to do, and then she let him put hers on. Last week she asked me to put hers on for her several times. So, this morning we took a boat ride for about an hour. We all three wore our lifejackets and had a really nice time. Here she is gazing at the water:

Ghost cows

And one more thing before I log off to go to bed: she now thinks cows say "boo". Sheep say "baa" and cows say "boo". It's almost too cute to correct!

Oops! Teeth.

Penny is now cutting three teeth at once. She's getting her first molar on the left side, her lower right lateral incisor, and her upper left lateral incisor. I think the lower left one and the lower right molar are not far behind. Poor kid. She's really struggling at night time going to sleep. She's soooo sleepy, but just can't because it hurts. So she's getting lots of snuggles. :)

Also, for the last three days she's been saying "oops" all the time and using it appropriately. Some of the things she says oops for are just downright hilarious (and really good embarrass her when she's a teenager stories). Let me see if I can list a few other words she has picked up (sorry if I've already listed some): boo-boo, pants, Penny (but, sadly, not yet Penny-pants), kiss, gate, and please. We swear she said "read please" when she brought Tray a book on Saturday, but we have not gotten her to replicate it, so it was probably just us hearing things. However, she says please all the time now when she wants something - usually for us to read a book. Oh, and on that, she's also pointing to words in her books and on bottles and things. She knows where the word "baby" is on her lotion bottle, but I know that is just from memory not actual "reading". Anyway, I think it is neat that she is noticing print and not just pictures.

Toys

A week or so ago our next door neighbors who make and sell toys (seriously, that's what they do for a living) gave Penny this:



It's a push toy duck and she looooves it. It is hands down her favorite toy right now. And we like it too - because our neighbors made it for one thing and for another it does not light up, talk, vibrate, or otherwise require batteries and is not made in any way of plastic. Grandparents take note. Wood and fabric.

For a good several weeks now Penny has been getting more and more into playing by herself for periods of time with her stuffed animals and things. She can spend what seems like forever arranging and rearranging her animals and baby doll on her rocking chair jabbering away at them the whole time. The other day I took some pictures of her putting Mr. Bear into her rocking chair. She kept sitting him down and picking him back up and re-placing him again.



I took several pictures of this because I remembered this photo of me:



Same rocking chair, different kid. I'm several months older than she is in this photo, but I thought it was nice continuity. Also, here's another photo of me from the same day. This should give some indication of what Penny's hair will look like in another few months:



Finally, for maybe two months or so (I can't remember exactly) she's been able to stack blocks, but usually only two at a time - maybe three. Two or three days ago I was doing something else and looked up to discover she'd stacked four! And then a little later I went to feed Mullet and came back and found:



I had to take a photo because she'd picked out all the yellow blocks out of the bin and only the yellow blocks (she'd had red and green ones earlier). Plus, I liked the architecture of it. :)

Nice Fall Weekend

We had a really great weekend the last two days. On Saturday we took Penny to the annual “Blessing of the Animals” at the Mission at San Luis. Unfortunately, we arrived after the blessing part was over, but we still got to walk around and check out the living history stuff and all the booths with pet related paraphernalia.
Penny wandered around all over the place carrying with her a hickory nut and a stick. At one point we met a sweet dog who very much wanted Penny to pet him, but she could not decide which of her trinkets to put down in order to do so. It was very funny to watch her think about it. She’d go to sit one item down and then decide against it and try to put the other one down and decide against that and so it went for a good minute or two. She finally decided to hang on to them both and just walked off away from the dog! So, off we wandered stopping every so often for her to exchange whichever hickory nut she was carrying with a new one she spied on the ground. Then, over by the chicken coop we saw this guy:



He’s a Hickory Horned Devil caterpillar and even though my car keys are in this photo, it is hard to get an idea of how massively huge he was. Biggest caterpillar I have ever seen. Luckily, Penny got interested in Lindy and Jake’s leashes around that time (see above) and did not attempt to pick up the caterpillar. After that, a nice lady in a golf cart offered to give P and me a ride, so we went for a golf cart ride back to our car. I love going places like this with Penelope, but I would love it if we lived closer to the places that we went so that she wasn’t stuck in the car seat for 45 minutes plus each way. I’ve often wondered if we lived more like 10 or 15 minutes from places like, oh say, the grocery store, that perhaps she would not mind being in the car seat. Who wants to be confined in a car seat for an hour and a half to go buy milk?

To that end, yesterday we took a ride in the opposite direction from our house and went down to the coast. In this part of Florida we do not have beaches, per se, but instead miles and miles of wetlands. It’s very beautiful in its own right though. We rode down to the lighthouse at the St. Marks NWR (which took approximately 20 minutes). The water there just sort of gently laps up to the coast and is perfect for wading. Before I get into that though, I have to tell this small anecdote. On the way down, I was doing my best to keep her entertained and she wanted to read “But Not the Hippopotamus” over and over again. Well, I would shake my head from side to side as I read the phrase “but not the hippopotamus” and she would imitate me with a very serious look on her face, like, “No Mommy. Not the Hippopotamus.”

Anyway, we stopped at the visitor center so Tray could buy a duck stamp, and they have a small exhibit area and gift shop. The exhibit contains several dioramas of animals and Penny enjoyed looking at those. Then, in the gift shop they had several shelves of kid’s books that she briefly perused and then, then!, she found a bin full of those stuffed birds that chirp the real bird call if you squeeze their talk boxes. You should have seen the huge excited grins she would give us every time we squeezed a different bird.

Once we got to the coast (and all requisite bug spray and sunscreen had been applied) she had a ball walking around in the water with her pants rolled up. I wish so much that we’d had a swimsuit for her (or, technically, myself since she could have gone nekkid) because she kept trying to go out deeper into the water. She loved it! The thing that just melted my heart though was every so often as we walked around she would look up at me with this look of just total adoration. It was like there was so much love in her face when she looked at me that I thought my heart would just stop beating right there. Everyone deserves to be looked at like that at least once in their lives, and she kept looking at me like that over and over again!

After we’d been there a little while, we decided to leave the Refuge and head over to St. Marks to eat a late lunch at Riverside. Riverside is an open air restaurant right on the St. Marks River. You can even boat to it (which we have in fact done before). This is going to sound bad, but Penny had never been to a restaurant before. Well, technically she went on my birthday when she was 6 weeks old, but not since. In our defense though, we don’t eat out and didn’t before we had her so it’s not like our habits changed. Anyway, I was a little anxious as to how it would go. I wasn’t sure if she’d sit through a meal, but it was great! They had those restaurant high chairs and we got one for her, but she freaked out and got all clingy when I tried to put her in it, so she sat in my lap instead. And she didn’t squirm even once. She just sat there and ate and pointed out the seagulls and people watched. I was greatly impressed. It was a big day and she took a nice nap after we got home. We all had a really fun weekend. I love doing stuff as a family!

Behold! Pictures:

Waving Hi

I keep meaning to mention that I re-taught Penny how to wave hi pretty much the next day after I posted that about how she wasn't doing it anymore. It only took a couple minutes because she copied me right away. However, I made the error of waving in a somewhat exaggerated manner trying to get the point across, so now her wave is pretty exaggerated too. It's really cute though. She often will say "hi" or "hey" when she waves too. And, now when Tray asks her, "What does Mommy say?" she replies, "Hi". (insert eye-rolling here)
Oh, and we've just about got her saying her own name, although it isn't very clear yet. Something that is clear though is "baa". If I ask her, "What does a sheep say?" she says, "baa" clear as a bell. Sometimes I wonder though what she thinks of us going on about all these farm animals that have no meaning to her everyday life. I mean, she's got to be wondering why we seem to think it is so important that she knows what a sheep or a cow says. Crazy grownups.