Still Here, Still Busy

Just not posting often. A thousand apologies!

We've finally wound down from a crazy bunch of traveling. Since this time last month, we've visited Evansville, Michigan twice, and Joliet, all on back to back weekends. This is our second weekend in a row at home, and we're finally feeling like we've recovered from all the travel. Not that we don't love seeing everyone, but all that time in cars does take its toll on a person. I caught a cold around the first of the month, and it's taken me until just recently to sleep it off. My lollygagging hasn't been entirely due to laziness. ;)

I'm working on uploading a huge quantity of pictures and will update here when that's done. Stay tuned for puzzling evidence.

Let's see . . . Gaz continues to surprise and entertain me. We're doing a lot of singing, and she picks up lyrics really fast. After a few listenings to the Jimmy Driftwood songs "Straighten Out My Laig" and "Down in the Arkansas" she could belt out the choruses perfectly (well, the words, not necessarily the tune), and she's picking up some Elvis Costello and They Might Be Giants, as I've been playing some of that lately. We also do this thing where I'll start to tell her something, and maybe she's not listening, so I'll start singing a little song about what we need to be doing, and she'll answer me in the same tune, and we'll go back and forth like this until one of us (usually me) gets tired of singing. Sometimes it's the difference between arguing over getting out of the house to go to the grocery store and having a happy, pleasant child willingly take off without protest.

Two days in a row we've had good potty mornings. We get up and first thing she and I go to the bathroom, where I've been able to talk her into sitting on her potty. She's got the usual amount of patience for a two-and-a-half-year-old, so getting her to sit down long enough for her to actually go is usually the problem. But she's so excited about being involved in emptying the potty chair into the toilet and flushing that she's slowly starting to come around to the joys of potty use. During the day she still doesn't think much about having to go until after it's already done, so I don't see an end to diapers any time soon, but we're making progress. She's generally dry all night, so this is good too. We're trying to figure out some kind of reward we can do consistently that doesn't involve food or stuff. Maybe trips to the zoo? We're working on that.

The vocabulary is enormous. We have many more thoughtful conversations than we used to, and Gaz is more sensitive now about how she speaks and how she sometimes misspeaks or misunderstands words. I've been admonished several times now "don't laugh when I say that!" because she'll say something that comes out wrong but adorable, and I just can't help myself. I keep trying to explain that sometimes the words come out and the words are funny, not Gaz herself, but she's my little diva. She takes herself pretty seriously.

We've been doing a lot of cooking and cleaning together. Right now she and Mark are vacuuming (she with her little play vacuum), and she is my constant companion for dishwashing and general straightening up. Earlier in the week we made cookies, which was educational for both of us. She learned the dangers of flour (getting it all over herself, in her eyes, etc.), and I learned that she is the exact opposite of attentive. Or she is attentive and keeps doing what I tell her not to do to see if I'll give in. Periodically we'll have these battles of wills, and while that is, I know, a part of her understanding what the boundaries are with me, I just wish she would schedule these for more convenient times. Not when I'm trying to get cookies in the oven without burning myself.

She's having a great time lately going to the library, and now that the weather is getting gradually nicer, we're taking strolls down that way much more often. Each time we go she ends up grabbing a book from nearby the area where I am looking for things, and most recently she picked up a cute little tiny book (entirely without my input!) called On Bullshit. I am sure a couple of great-grandfathers got a big kick out of that. I know I got a kick out of the look on the librarian's face when Agatha relinquished the book so she could scan it in. (It should go without saying that I didn't read the book to her, but she enjoyed reading it to me. "Once upon a time a girl walked down the street. . .")

I'm sure there are a million other things I could (and probably should) relate here, but I'm tapped out. Probably better focus on the uploading.