Lots to say . . . .

Natalie is definitely becoming more verbal! And she's moving on sentences, too. She cracks us up a million different ways a million times a day.

The picture above was taken at our local sushi restaurant (don't worry, that's sake - not soda - in the cup!). I ordered a fancy roll, and it came out with all the very colorful pieces separated and on a nicely decorated plate (think something sort of like a tea cake). Her first response? "I eat cupcake!" When that didn't work, she stared intently at my plate and then quickly switched to "I eat sushi"; I did end up giving her a piece, but she didn't much care for it.

In addition to being a chatterbox during the day, Natalie keeps it up at night - both with some sleep-talking and with a pretty good wake-up call. Regarding the first, the other day at 3am, she started singing "Happy Birthday" (or "Hah-pee berfday") in her sleep. This went on for a few minutes, and then she fell back into a deeper sleep.

Also, on Sunday morning, we were awakened by something a bit like this over the baby monitor:
Raspberry / fart noise (made with her mouth)
Hilarious peals of laughter
Raspberry / fart noise (made with her mouth)
Hilarious peals of laughter
Raspberry / fart noise (made with her mouth)
“It’s funny, ha, ha, ha, ha”
Hilarious peals of laughter

It was 6:30 in the morning, but it was pretty funny.

Her vocabulary is really expanding, too. She's been asking for kleenex for weeks ("Nani need tissue") for all sort of reasons, real and imagined. We never stressed to her what a tissue was. Likewise, we may have pointed out a grasshopper and helicopter, but I never expected her to remember them. But she did! Randomly, over the past few weeks, she's pointed those items out to me, unprompted.

We went to a TCU women's club soccer game this weekend. It was a totally perfect scene - TCU won, the weather was finally nice enough to be outside during the day for a sustained amount of time, and the scene was just chill enough that no one minded a little girl running around on the sidelines. As an aside, I didn't know that there was a mercy rule in college club sports. There is.

In baseball news, Mike and Alex went to game one of the Tigers - Rangers series. There was some rain. Runs were scored. And I suppose there is sort of a mercy rule in professional baseball, too. It's called game six.

Here, look, don't be mad, Detroit people, just focus on this Natalie picture! (An astute observer will note that she's doubled down on the bubble containers. That's the only way to go, folks.)

I also made some pumpkin bread this weekend. A few months ago I got this great cookbook: Whole Grain Baking: Delicious Recipes Using Nutritious Whole Grains. The recipes all seem good, but some take more advance planning than I'm really to able to do (Barley flour? Who has that on hand?). Anyway, the pumpkin bread recipe just relied on whole wheat flour, which we do have around, and so my sous-chef and  I went to work.

(As a side note, she's a very enthusiastic and committed whisk-er. So much so that the part where you add the whisked items to the other items almost didn't happen.)

And, voila: Whole wheat walnut chocolate chip pumpkin bread. A total keeper of a recipe!

(Online version of the recipe - not my blog, or one I read, but, hey, seems worth checking out.)


So this morning, Mike was cutting up some pumpkin bread for Natalie and she was barely keeping it together as she waited. Her narrative was something like this: "Nani want pumpkin bread. Okay, okay, Nani want pumpkin bread." And then - more plaintively - "Nani be patient . . . Nani be patient."

In other tales of deliciousness, Natalie's school sent her home with little ziplock bag of snacks for a post Yom Kippur treat.

There were several things we didn't realize about this snack mix:
1. How excited Natalie would be about pretzels.
2. That the Cheerios were Honey Nut Cheerios.
3. That there were chocolate chips in the bag.
Regarding the last point, she actually brought the chocolate chips to Mike, in a very excited way, saying "Candy, candy." She obligingly handed the chocolate chips to Mike for inspection, but she definitely needed them back.

Natalie still loves her baby.

 Natalie's fine motor skills are also improving. Here are two Cheerios she's managed to insert into the back of the baby monitor. Points for creativity! (And we wonder why the ants seem to like us so much . . . Actually, we don't wonder at all.)

Also, I got a little make-over. What do you think?

Let me know if you'd like Natalie to come over and stick stickers on your face, or if you are just gorgeous all on your own!

Snuggles to all!

Weekend at Oma's

Last weekend Natalie and I got out of Dodge and headed for the coast (I mean, of course we leave now that we've - hopefully?! - seen the last of the 100 degree days!).

No matter! It was still great to get out and see Oma. While daddy headed to San Antonio for a conference, Natalie and I headed for the airport.

(I love the picture above, with the light shining down on her.)

Our flight wasn't too bad - as I mentioned to some friends, I don't think we made any friends, but we didn't make any enemies, either. You know, when you're flying alone with a two year-old, that's, like, a pretty serious win.

Natalie got right down to business playing with Oma and Puhppa in the "yiving woom".

(Regarding the picture on the right: Yes, that is a mid-tip picture. No, given the rugs, carpet, and low height of the chair, she wasn't at all harmed.)

We did spend a fair amount of time at the beach, and at the park just adjacent to the beach.

In between all this, we saw a few old friends (for a time so good that we totally forgot to take pictures!) and did our best to relax and spend time with our San Francisco family and Los Angeles family who'd come down to see us! We're popular - and we appreciate the effort everyone made to come and see us!

As a side note, I know that San Diego is two hours earlier than Texas. What this means in practice is that an early 6am wake-up in Texas becomes oh-so-early at 4am in California. 4am is just so . . . dark.  As I'm ever so unpleasantly reminded every time we travel west, knowing this and having to experience it are really, really different things. Big props to Puhppa who was a super help on these early mornings!

Natalie LOVED her cousin Emilia, but Natalie's heart still belongs to kih-kah.

(Natalie loved to take that toy phone that she's sitting with in the photo above, place it on the kih-kah's belly and then declare "Kih-kah call Aunty Jenji" and laugh uproariously.)

And here's the picture you've all been waiting for (photo credit to the prize-winning cousin Emilia!):

Routine

The semester is a month old, meaning that Natalie's been going to school for a month and we've been in our new routine for a month. So far, things are going great!

Well, there is that small matter of being at work ultra-early in the morning just so I can leave to make a 1pm pick-up. I've learned that I am not a morning person. I desperately want to be, but, alas...I just can't wake up as happy as Natalie! Note that while she is happy to see me in the pics below, what she really wants here is her Daddy. Her basic rule seems to be to demand the other parent, no matter who shows up. It's like she just wants, sheepdog-style, to keep us all together. That does not actually make for weekend mornings where we can take meaningful turns sleeping in.

That's three (count 'em!) tote bags!

She's gotten sooooo much more verbal. She loves to hear Mike's lullaby about the events of the day, and she loves to recount events to herself. Her sentences are short, but she definitely gets the point across! The other day when I wasn't departing fast enough, she started telling me: "Mommy get sweater, Mommy get baby bag, Mommy get shoes, Mommy get magazine, Mommy go car." Two year-olds: rigid and demanding? Nah.

She's also learned the power of the words "too tight" and "too hot" in terms of getting us to react. So we often hear that the bathwater is "too hot" (before she's even touched it) or that her shoes / pants / hat / shirt are "too tight", even though said items were fine yesterday and will be fine in five minutes.

She still confuses "how" and "why", so if you ask her why she's crying, she'll give you a demonstration of what crying sounds like, sometimes complete with the phrase "Nani cahwhying, Nani cahwhying". Her other big point of confusion (which is also totally adorable, and I gather totally normal) is pronoun confusion. So she'll ask to be picked up by saying "Mommy hold you."

Here she is coloring - possibly on Daddy's syllabus! But, hey, at least it's not the chair! So far (knock on wood!), we've been able to confine the crayons to the kitchen and we haven't had too much malfeasance with them. For other forms of repeated mischief, we have resorted to the time out - which just involves Natalie standing in a corner for a minute. Fine, right? Except kid has really embraced the concept - she'll, like, play the "time out game" with herself and give herself time-outs. So, yeah.

School fashion (the hat, actually, didn't make the final cut, but she loved running around with it in the morning before we left).

It's only cooling down a little, but we are trying to go to the park more. Here are some park pics. She LOVES the park. One of her favorite games is to get a woodchip from the ground, pretend that it's a key, and use it in conjunction with the toy steering wheel on the play structure.

 And here, for my grandmother, are some pictures in which I appear!

In this picture, Natalie is trying to "feed" me my necklace. She's definitely got pretend play down: earlier today she was playing with Mike in her toy kitchen and decided she was making pasta, Mike asked for a bib, and she totally got that he was pretending to be the baby. She then gave him two helpings of pasta and some apple (her dinner the previous night), gave him a bath - complete with "washing" his hair, and then gave him "giraffe" to snuggle. Hilariously, the giraffe was actually toy bacon from her kitchen!

Smooches, friends!

Puhppa's visit

So last week, Mike went to Seattle. Natalie and I had originally planned to join him, but after all the travel this summer and just getting Natalie adjusted to preschool, it seemed like too much.

So off Daddy went. But all was not totally lost, as Grandma Pat (Puhppa) came in for a visit (we actually discovered that now Natalie can say "grandma", but she still prefers "Puhppa").

(Note that's neither her car nor her sippy cup.)

I was grateful for her company and her help - clearly we had our hands full!

Natalie also had her hands full, clearly.

Puhppa was kind enough to take Natalie to school on Wednesday, and to pick her up on Friday. Since Puhppa was in town for a Friday, she also got to go to shabbat at Natalie's school; neither Mike nor I have been yet, but, by all reports, it's quite the scene.

We were lucky enough to get a bit of cool spell here recently. We've even had the windows open a bit (first time since April, I kid you not!). Of course, the state seems to have traded cooler temperatures for savage fires, so it hardly seems like luck at all. However, the fires are actually quite far from us - the worst ones (the Bastrop complex) is close to Austin, which is 3 hours from here; the one closer to us (the Possum Kingdom fire) seems to be contained. I know the news is bad (all bad) out of Texas, but I just want to share with you a picture of our local walking trail, nary a forest fire or a nutty governor in sight.

So, taking advantage of the cooler temps (and a very early wake-up time in our house, thanks to one particular short family member), we were actually able to hit the park with Puhppa.

After the park, we went to Starbuck's for breakfast. Pumpkin bread was a big hit.

We spent a lot of the rest of the weekend playing inside. Attempting to help Natalie get over her oh-so-screamy baths, Puhppa suggested that she and Natalie give the doll a bath.

Natalie also cooked for us in her new kitchen. In fact, "play kitchen" is often the first thing she asks to do in the morning!

(In the picture above on the right, I think she was making "ice tea". She and I had a comedic moment earlier this week when I tried to tell her that "hot ice tea" was actually just called . . . "tea". I promised her that this fact would "blow her mind". Instead, she just wandered around the living room announcing "Nani blow mind, Nani blow mind . . . hot ice tea."). 

(Iced tea is, as you might have guessed, kind of a big concept in our house these days. But the second most-cooked item in the kitchen? Dried cherries. I kid you not.)

Here are few more inside shots, mugging for the camera, and then with her own camera ("Nani take a picture, Nani take a picture.").

And, yeah, Daddy was missed. Quite a lot.