Udder Domination

As mentioned before, Olivia’s got some serious hang time. This morning, she grabbed onto a bar and hung on until the cows came home – literally. Mommy tends to be frightened by our daughter’s gravity-defying stunts, whereas I tend to delight in them.

The way I see it, Olivia’s is on her way to acing the Presidential Fitness Test. She V-sits like she invented the reach/move and has obviously gotten the hang of hanging. And I kid you not, while we were having family fun time at the gym last week, she insisted on holding down my feet while I did some curl-ups, then requested that I hold down hers while she cranked out a set.

So that just leaves the shuttle run and the endurance walk/run, but we’ve got some time yet.

Patchwork Quotes

Recent and random communiqué from Olivia:

“I like to say lots of things.”

“I have too much junk.”

“Daddy, it’s okay. Everybody cries sometimes.”

Snowflake

A sign your only child has lost her mind or is ready for a sibling: She plays ring-around-the-rosie with the snowman she just built.

Amusement Perk

Chuck E. Cheese is supposedly where a kid can be a kid. It’s also one of those rare places where tokenism is practiced unabashedly. For our family, it’s where we treat a child who slept moderately well at night in her own bed. Olivia enjoyed Skee-Ball and some of the other games but spent most of her time there trying to figure out how to cash in her tickets for an ice cream sandwich.

Double Exposure

I know it’s time to get a new camera when I can't figure out if the newest pictures are from my camera or are from Olivia’s Fisher-Price model.

Hare Apparent

When I was young, I was obsessed with joke books, sports, and homophones. I guess some things never change. My lifelong appreciation for words that are pronounced the same as others but differ in meaning has had some value – it’s good when penning (punning?) blog entry titles and when trying to induce an eye roll from Beni.

This thread was inspired by our daughter’s lifelong love for carrots (a classic homophone) – as a toy, not so much a food item – which thereby reminded me of one of my favorite jokes (your garden-variety kind) from back in the day (i.e., yesterday):

Q: How do you know that carrots are good for your eyesight?
A: Have you ever seen a rabbit with glasses?

Hardy hare hare...

Tryptophan-atics

As many of you know, getting our child to sleep through the night has been the greatest challenge we’ve faced to date. In fact, Olivia has only managed to completely sleep through the night one time during her two and a half years plus of earthly existence. Amazingly, our daughter is impervious to her erratic sleep patterns. I wish I could report that her parents were similarly unaffected, but sadly and sleepily, that is not the case. As the antitheses of Rip Van Winkle – i.e., good-for-somethings who do not sleep for an extended period of time – Beni and I are constantly seeking some shuteye and a solution out of this quagmire.

We’ve consulted with numerous doctors, read countless books, and spoken with many parents about our sleep situation. It seems as though we’re now cycling through things we’ve already tried before in hopes that they’ll work this time around. This week’s attempt comes from a section on sleep-inducing foods in Dr. Sears’s book Nighttime Parenting. He writes that the amino acid tryptophan (which by coincidence ranks second to phenylalanine as my favorite amino acid) may turn out to be nature’s own sleeping aid. Studies have shown that foods rich in tryptophan – e.g., warm milk, cheese and crackers, a bowl of cereal with fruit, peanut butter sandwich – can help induce and maintain sleep. And so all week, we’ve feasted on tryptophan the hour before we try to settle Olivia down for the night.

The top picture is a structural representation of tryptophan. The other two pics are of Olivia drinking liquid tryptophan, or more specifically, “hot chocolate” (the hot and chocolate aspects of the drink are debatable – what’s not debatable is that this ruse got her to consume warm milk).

Easel Does It

These pics could also be titled “To Wear One’s Art on One’s Sleeve.” It was as if Olivia was mocking the smock’s ability to…how should I say…smock. Maybe next time I’ll make her shirt the canvas and have her wear the easel.

Tractor Beams

Olivia was all smiles aboard the farm equipment at the children’s discovery museum.

Scoop Du Jour

Olivia insisted on managing our rice portions during lunch today. For a child who’s been pretty keen on the concept of sharing as of late, she was remarkably ungenerous. As a result, I wasn’t sure if my post-meal gastric discomfort was caused by Chinese Food Hunger – that feeling of being hungry a short time after consuming a Chinese meal – or my stingy daughter.

Target Shouting

We can’t stop her – we can only hope to contain her.

Make Up One’s Mark

I love the frequent reminders of how wondrous and unbridled a child’s imagination can be. For instance, this evening I was running Olivia through her soccer training regimen – I know, I know…soccer drills at two and a half may be a bit much, but the reality is that the 2023 Women’s World Cup is right around the corner – when she stopped what she was doing and ran over to the wall. At that point, she named and identified the smudges above as Li-Li (herself), Nu-Nu (Mommy), La-Ga (me), and Max (Max), and spun an elaborate yarn about our family ‘cation (Oliviaspeak for vacation).