Cerin Amroth

Been a while since a good general update …

On the health front:  no worries!  Everyone’s been fine for a couple of weeks running now.  There have been cases of HINI at Dominic’s preschool and probable cases (“flu-like symptoms”) at Ella’s school as well, so we are beset on all sides but soldier on nonetheless.

We’ve started scheduling afterschool playdates for Ella; she has her third one this afternoon.  I wasn’t sure whether she’d be interested in playing with the other girls in her class, most of whom do in fact do things like wear pink or wear dresses or bows in their hair or have flowers on their backpack.  But that doesn’t appear to be a significant impediment.

It’s so fun to watch her learn.  In addition to the general progress we can see in her reading, her Spanish, and all that, we’ve also seen a shift in her solo activities:  she likes to do a lot more drawing than she used to.  When your kid is a baby there’s a particular thrill in seeing something of you in them:  they have your eyes, maybe, or your chin.  As they get older these are replaced by different thrills.  When Ella doodles she doesn’t generally draw pictures of people or things; instead she’ll make outlines of abstract shapes and then have fun filling them in in different colors and shades.  That’s totally what I did too.

Dominic throws tantrums.  The two things in his life that he would like to have happen a lot more often are 1) preschool and 2) Friday lunch with the guys (though he says “Fwiday lunch of the guys”).  He adores preschool two mornings a week and when I must inform him on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays that he is not going to school that day: tantrum.  Similarly, every day is a good day as far as he’s concerned for us to drive to Clarendon and meet my friends for lunch, and when we don’t do that on Monday-Thursday it is an occasion for a tantrum.  These are the easy sorts of tantrums, though, where you can distract him — “would you like some juice?” “let’s do a puzzle!”  “hey Dom, show me something that’s green!” — and he’ll forget what he was carrying on about.

Toddler bed continues to work well.  And though I fear to articulate it lest the fact evaporate even as a reach out to touch it:  he’s been sleeping in a little longer.  Today by alarm going off at 7:00 was the first sound of the morning.  Wonder of wonders.

Halloween costumes:  Dominic will be a bat, with one of those toddler onesie costumes.  Ella’s going to wear her long-sleeve hoodie with skeleton ribs on it, and a lone ranger mask.  (She finally outgrew her Peter Pan costume.)  I lobbied hard, as I do every year, for her to go as Kiki — even offered to dress Dom up as a cat so he could be Gigi — but she ain’t biting.

A final anecdote:  I’ve been playing around with Picasa 3.5, which have face recognition technology so once you identify some specific people in your photos it tries to extrapolate which ones they are in all your photos.  And in many ways it works remarkably well — it even identified some childhood photos of me as me after I had identified myself only in adult pictures.  But there’s going to have to be some significant technological advances before any software can tell apart pictures of Ella and Dominic circa 12-18 months . . .

I have finally spent some time editing photos from this summer, so I uploaded quite a few. The first batch is from before my last upload and involves photos from when Theressa, Benoy, Dev, and Neesha came to visit. This was our first time meeting Neesha and the first time that all of us were together in the same place. The last time we saw Theressa, Benoy, and Dev was when Nate and I visited them in the Philippines. We had great fun together and saw an amazing amount of things over the course of a few days. In addition to wanting to make their trip fun-packed, we wanted to mark off several things in a picture book of DC that we had given Dev for his birthday. He brought his book everywhere.

Matt and Sarah also came to visit before heading off for their next overseas destination. The kids had great fun playing with them, and we were happy to get in a few board games and a lot of catching up, as well.

After that, there are a few pictures of everyday life, and then some pictures from a recent visit of Nate’s parents.

Nate and his parents went to Ikea last Friday to get a toddler bed for Dominic. We’ve been meaning to transfer him out of the crib. Now we have motivation because we’re bringing the crib to Vermont at Thanksgiving for an upcoming cousin.

Happily, the transition to the bed has gone well. He wasn’t very excited when I asked him to show it to me after I got home from work. However, he has been good about laying down in it for his naps and bedtimes. The most amazing thing is that he doesn’t get out of it during the middle of the night. He’s woken up a couple of times during the night, and he simply sits up and calls for one of us to come get him.

Last night, he rolled out of bed for the first time. Nate laid him back in the bed, and he went back to sleep quickly. The bed isn’t very high from the ground, so I suspect he hardly woke up.

I suspect it won’t be long until he realizes he can get out himself. For the time being, I’m happy to trade getting up to go to him in the middle of the night with him constantly showing up at our bed side.

We learned at our conference with Ella’s teachers that she is doing well with beginning and ending sounds of short words. She has difficulty with the vowel sounds – but who doesn’t?

This morning, on the way home from church, we passed a billboard advertising a jewelry exhibit at one of the museums downtown. It displayed this garrish, bejeweled squid pint. Ella asked what it was.  I told her it was a squid, and she proceeded to try to spell it. Her guess was S  I  D. I told her I was very impressed that she got that many letters right. I asked if she knew what made the ”kw” sound, and she guessed k. I then told her about the letters Q and U and how they are often paired together. She spelled the word a few more times before feeling satisfied with herself. I told her she had to tell her teachers about it at school tomorrow.

On the health update scene … Ella does have an ear infection, but no fever. The doctor started her on an antibiotic. She went back to school on Friday and complained only once or twice more about her ears hurting.  Dom still has a bad cold, but no fevers.

Tomorrow is Ella’s first day of intersession – a 2-week period between semesters where students can take a break, take fun classes, or get extra help with school work. Ella will be taking a morning class on cooking and stories, and an afternoon class on Mother Goose stories. She’s a little nervous about the different routine, but I’m sure she’ll like 2 weeks without gym – her least liked part of school.