Coming back to normal… June 7, 2009

It’s been a crazy couple of week, with Kathleen traveling and all the grandparents coming to visit, but we’re slowly finding our way back to some sort of routine, and I thought I’d fill the rest of you in on some of what’s been going on.  No pictures today, but some semi-random highlights anyway:

• Lizzie is starting to learn colors.  Blue and green are her favorites to point out (maybe because the words have easy vowel sounds – they come out as “boo” and “een”) but red and yellow are not far behind…
• She’s also starting to work out what letters are, and that they’re different from the rest of what’s in her books.  She started with saying “E!” and pointing at any words she could find, but when I identified an O for her, she immediately switched to pointing out each and every O she can find on a page.  I thank the General Mills company for this.
• One activity that she enjoys quite a lot recently is to stand right in front of one of us, so that we’ll bend down, make a “seat” with our hands, and swing her between our legs.  Something that she enjoys only slightly less is “swinging” her smaller stuffed animals in much the same way.  Do unto others, I guess…
• She is going gangbusters at picking up new words.  One that’s rapidly becoming an unfortunate favorite is “My!”, which she employs any time that something she wants is out of her reach (or has been taken away from her).
• When my parents arrived, Lizzie immediately greeted her grandmother with “Nana!”, a name she hadn’t picked up on before that.  Hooray for Skype.  (“Papa” was a bit tougher, but she had it down by the end of the week.)

Hope you all are doing well.  We’ll post pictures when time permits – 2012 is looking good…

First Post November 19, 2008

After a year of parenthood Bill and I have come to the conclusion that we are never going to have time to check in with all of those that we love as much as we would like. Yet, our beautiful and talented daughter develops new skills what seems like everyday so we want to share all of Lizzie’s new excitement with you all. Hence this blog. I now promise to try and write something every day or two about Lizzie’s new developments for all of you Lizzie-enthusiasts out there. I will also do my best to get photos up more regularly than we are able to update our current Lizzie photo website. You are all welcome to leave comments at anytime. Let me know how this works for you. I love you all. Lizzie and Bill both say hi too!

How did I get this idea? November 19, 2008

I’m still playing with stuff, so you’ll have to bear with me in these early posts. But, I thought you may want to know where this idea came from. It is taken straight from Lizzie’s amazing Godparents Joe & Amber. They have set up a lovely blog about all of their adventures in Germany that I find myself checking up to two or three times a day just to see if there is anything new. It makes me feel like my friends are not half a world away and more like I see them regularly almost like stopping by the 2nd floor desk (where Joe used to work when we were in school) or their apartment for dinner… but not quite. Still it’s better than frequent expensive phone calls. So, this was part of my inspiration, the other came from a day a couple of weeks ago when Lizzie was eating corn. That was it–corn, well and milk. I could put a variety of healthy options on her tray and she would go right past the cheese bits, the bread, the bits of chicken, and eat only the corn. She would finish the corn on her tray and look at me for more, despite the fact that there was plenty of food still on the tray. If I gave her more corn she was happy and would eat it all and then repeat her request for more. This was true for both lunch and dinner. I think I did get some other food into her at snack time when there was no corn option. As I was changing a very yellow diaper the next day and laughing at my silly corn-eater (who had by this point moved on to a peas-only diet) I thought, you know I should share these fascinating bits of Lizzie development with the other people who might actually be interested in her progression from eating only corn to eating only peas. So, this blog is set up for those of you in this category. If you are already bored I suggest you do not check in too often.