Teacher's Helper

Last week, Emma's teacher told me that she is a little helper. Apparently, when the lunch cart comes, all the kids run to it and crowd around it, anxious for their milk and lunch. Somehow, they've developed a routine that now all the kids go sit at the table except Emma who is more than happy to carry each child's milk cup to them after the teacher fills it. The teacher said that it definitely helps make the room more organized and that Emma loves doing it and the kids wait patiently for her to bring them their cups.

Little Gamer

After not having a good night of sleep, Emma was out of sorts today and took an extraordinarily long nap. When she woke up, she was still out of sorts and wouldn't let me pick her up for quite a while. I finally went to get Kurt, hoping that she would let him get her, which she did. She couldn't decide what she wanted...she didn't want to eat or drink or play. But she got really excited when Kurt asked her if she wanted to play video games. She shook her head very emphatically and said "I do!" So downstairs they went to play geometry wars where Emma can fire and Kurt can steer on the same controller. I think this was one of Kurt's happiest days...his little gamer is finally emerging!

Boo Boo

This morning, Emma was playing in her diaper bag and found a band-aid. When she asked what it was, I told her it was a bandaid and that bandaids make boo boos better. She immediately looked up at me and put it on her mouth. Poor girl, her top two incisors are coming in and her bottom two are still working their way to the surface so her mouth has been pretty sore for the past few days. Hopefully, once they all break through the skin, she'll be much more comfortable.

Weekend Pictures

Just a couple pictures from all the time we spent outside over the gorgeous fall weekend:

A tired girl fell asleep during lunch

Like Daddy Like Daughter

A couple evenings ago, Emma and Kurt were in the basement after dinner. When I finished cleaning up, this is what I walked downstairs to:

Like Daddy like Daughter

Emma used to never like blankets on her. At all. She would fight and fidget until she was out from underneath one even if we were snuggling with her on the couch. Lately though, she's been loving her blankets, or "Bee" as she calls them. In the mornings, if we put the television on to entertain her while we get ready for work, she'll climb up on the couch and cover herself up. 

In her bedroom, she will pull a blanket out of her crib, climb up into the chair, ask for Elmo, monkey, frog or bear, and then ask for a book and sit and "read" for a bit. She is so happy sitting in that chair. She thinks she is such a big kid when she's sitting there reading her favorite nursery rhyme book or another current favorite, Curious George and the Bunny.

We say this all the time, but it is truly amazing and exciting to see the little person that Emma is becoming.

Little Mommy

Emma has been very motherly lately. We're not sure if this is a developmental milestone or just Emma's natural personality coming out. She has been very interested in putting her dolls and stuffed animals down for naps and for giving them drinks from her sippy cups. She even shares some tea with them from time to time when she has tea parties with Mommy and Daddy. When she puts her friends down for naps, she covers them up with a blanket and then pats their backs for a bit before tossing them off to the side and going through the same routine with another one. In the evenings, one of us will be laying on the floor playing with her and she will get a blanket and cover us up and then pat and rub our backs for quite a while. One afternoon, she alternated covering each one of us up and patting our backs for about 20 minutes. Every once in a while, she would even give us a good night kiss. It was really quite cute.

This evening, I asked Emma if she would give me a massage. She said yes and tried to repeat massage. She proceeded to cover me up and then pat my back relatively hard about 8-10 times, then rub it about 4 times over and over again. When I told her how sweet she was she came up to kiss me and then leaned in for a thank you kiss and hug. :)

Pink Eye

When I picked Emma up from daycare on Wednesday, I noticed she had a eye booger in her right eye. I told her that I hoped she wasn't going to wake up on Thursday with pink eye....but she did. :( It wasn't a bad case at all, but since she can't go to daycare without treatment, we called for a sick appointment at the doctor's. Luckily, Thursday was Veteran's Day, so both Kurt and I had the day off. Unfortunately, we spent over 3 hours at the doctor's office and pharmacy. I (Carrie) was not a happy camper.

Emma ended up screaming the entire time she was being checked out. (The nurse practitioner checked her ears, throat, and chest to make sure it was "just pink eye" and not a more systemic infection.) We left the office with a prescription for both eye ointment as well as amoxicillin in case Emma wouldn't let us put the ointment in her eyes. We drove around for 10 minutes so that Emma would fall asleep, then I ran into the pharmacy while Kurt stayed in the car with Emma. After wandering around aimlessly for 15 minutes, I was paged to the pharmacy where I was informed that they couldn't fill the prescription because it was dated for Friday, not Thursday. Back to the doctor's office we went to get it updated. (This took another 20 minutes.) Luckily, it only took about 10 minutes to get the ointment from the pharmacy.

Emma woke up by the time we got home, and Kurt put the first dose of ointment in her eyes while she was in the carseat (We figured restrainment would be helpful). She was not happy. Since we had to fight with her again that evening and on Friday morning as well, I called the pharmacy to have the amoxicillin prescription filled. Emma was fantastic when we picked it up. She held my hand and didn't touch anything I told her not to! She even got to pick out a Dora the Explorer cup during the outing.

That evening, I tried to give her the oral medication but she did not like the bubble gum flavored liquid. We've tried using the medicine spoon, a straw in the spoon, and a dropper, pretty much all have failed. We even resorted to bribing her with orange juice for every dose she takes. This morning though, I offered her juice if she took her medicine and she refused. She definitely knows what she likes and doesn't. Luckily, her eyes are clear and we think she had a viral case not a bacterial case of pink eye.

She loves me!

Last week for the first time, Emma melted my heart when she said "Love you" for the first time to me. Kurt was getting her ready to settle down for story time before bed and asked her to tell me that she loved me before I left the room and she did!

Sheep

Last week, Emma was playing with little animal squirt toys. She is really good at telling us what sounds animals make, so I decided to reverse the question and ask her what each animal was called. When we got to the sheep, Emma quickly responded "Sheep." Her pronunciation was a bit off though and it sounded like "Shit." It was quite funny, although I tried not to let her see me laughing. I made a mental note to work on the difference between "t" and "p" sounds.

Birthday Party!

On 23 October, we attended Emma's friend Cameron's 2nd Birthday party. (Cameron was Emma's first boyfriend at school.) The theme was "Down on the Farm." Luckily, it was a gorgeous day and Cameron and his 6 friends were able to be outside. The kids had fun with animal and farm stickers, playing on the slide, attempting to hit a ball off a tee, and exploring the back yard before singing songs and posing for pictures.

We sang, The Farmer in the Dell, She'll Be Coming around the Mountain, Old MacDonald, and of course, Happy Birthday. The kids, all mostly around 2, did amazingly well and sat on bales of hay during the singing.

 Afterward, they were rewarded with animal cupcakes and barns filled with fun favors like animal crackers, silly bands, stickers, and a stuffed animal.

During the party, Emma enjoyed her very first juice box! She loved it and sucked it down in no time. Since she doesn't drink juice very often, we only allowed her to have one. She was relatively satisfied to carry around the empty juice box and chew on the straw from time to time.

Emma fell asleep on the way home from the party around 630pm and slept straight through the night until about 5am. I was able to snuggle with her and she didn't really wake up until 630am the next day! Since she got so much sleep, she was an amazingly happy little girl the entire day!

Happy Halloween!

Ages ago, Emma and Daddy picked our Emma's tiger costume for Halloween. We immediately started working on her sound effects to go along with her costume. As a result, long before Halloween, Emma could tell you that tigers (and several other animals) said "ROAR!"

On Friday, Emma dressed up as a rare pumpkin lion for school. (The jacket portion of her costume, was too warm for her to wear inside all day at school.) When I first showed her her whiskers, she didn't know what to make of them, but quickly forgot about them. (I'm so thankful that I thought to use eyeliner instead of regular Halloween greasepaint/makeup--so much less mess!)

A rare pumkin tiger (with attitude!)

On Saturday, we carved our pumpkin. (When I say we, I mean Kurt carved and I sorted through the goop for the pumpkin seeds!) Emma was not very interested in playing with the pumpkin guts. I tried to show her how to put the pumpkin seeds on a cookie sheet, but she tried to eat them instead so she got out of that job. Kurt kept what he was thinking of carving a secret while he drew the template. When he was finished he asked Emma if she liked it. I think she gave the ok. When he was finished, he knew he made the right choice! Emma LOVED her Elmo pumpkin! On Sunday morning, she kept looking at the pumpkin sitting on the island during breakfast and saying in a happy voice, "Elmo! Elmo! Elmo!"

Thinking about putting her hand in the pumpkin

The finished pumpkin!

On Halloween, I got her dressed in her costume in the afternoon and asked her to lay down so that I could put on her whiskers and to my surprise, she promptly did! We intended to try to get some good pictures of her outside in the day light but mostly, she just ran around and played with 4 year old  neighbor.

The tiger in the wild!

 

While I was cleaning up dinner, the doorbell rang and at 6pm we had the first of our 95ish trick or treaters!  Emma was not very impressed with the costumes. There was a skeleton in the first batch and we think it may have frightened her a bit when he walked toward her. We quickly finished up our chores and got Emma into her jacket and took her outside. Our neighbor, Will, was out on his stoop with his bucket o'candy and we took Emma over to him. He told her how cute she was and we tried to get her to roar....instead she burst into tears! And then cried harder when he put candy into her cute little pumpkin! We got her to calm down a bit and took her to another neighbors' house who we frequently talk to, and she started crying again when they answered the door in costume. :( We thought it would be fun to sit on our stoop to hand out candy and that Emma would have fun seeing all the people but she was just too worked up so we went back inside and Kurt and I took turns handing out candy. Every once in a while, we would grab Emma and show her the costumes, but she was very timid the whole night.

Not sure about this whole thing!

Although not entirely how we planned Halloween, we did have a nice, low key time. Hopefully next year, Emma will be a little bit more excited about it!