Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Popcorn

"Like father; like daughter," as the saying goes, continues to hold true for Miss Clara.  Brian, Jan, Brandon, and Kevin will understand the significance of this video easily, but for the rest of you who have taken an interest, let me explain.

Mitch is serious about his popcorn.  He ate it nightly during his teenage years.  When we started dating, I was a little put off by the fact that he didn't seem too excited about sharing any of it with me either.  

Since we've gotten married, he's taken his popcorn habit to the next level.  He doesn't make it every night, but he will frequently fill our largest mixing bowl full of "home-made" popcorn.  It's quite a science.  He will either air pop it with a spray bottle of melted butter in hand, evenly coating it as it pours out, or kettle cook it in our giant stock pot.  

He's much better about sharing now, but can still finish this large quantity on his own, and often does.

So for me, it's quite entertaining to see Clara insistently interjecting herself into the "popcorn" way of life, as Mitch tries to relax with his popped handiwork while watching some Hulu.

This is a small sample of what went on for quite some time.  Notice he's rather stingy with the popcorn he gives.  But she was relentless.

Makes me giggle.


Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Learning Explosion


Learning Explosion


Clara is in the midst of a definite learning/development explosion.  Within the past few weeks she has starting learning like crazy!  Here are a few examples of the things we're seeing her do.


  • Blowing kisses (...we never taught her that... ?)
  • Doing the Itsy Bitsy Spider actions 
  • Patting a back, high fiving, knuckles, kissing, hugging on command.
  • Dancing on command or when music plays (her favorite move is to "worship" by sticking her arms up in the air--so cute!  I did that once day and now she's all about it.)
  • Understanding a lot of what we say to her, including "wait," "no," "come here," "bring me that ___," "sit," etc.
  • Knowing her boundaries: she no longer tries to stand in the bath, get breakable dishes out of the cabinets (although she knows exactly where the mixing bowls that she IS allowed to play with are located), pull the books of the bookshelf, play in the trash, etc.  The boundaries we've emphasized with her, she respects.  So encouraging!
  • Identifying her belly, hair, nose, eye, ear, and toes, although she gets pretty insistent that her "eye" is located on the side of her head at times. 
  • Playing games with us (pat-a-cake, break the pickle)
  • Understanding her surroundings.  Her eyes show that she is with-it. She finds ways to communicate what she wants most of the times, but also reverts back to her much-loved whining tactic at times.
  • Signing: "more, all done, please, food, help, up"
  • Talking: She says "no, mom, dad, eye, more, yeah, hi, up"
  • Babbling continuously throughout the day.  There's no doubt at this point that she's going to be a talker.
  • Carrying her baby doll around burping it, an outflow of her recent exposure to baby Anna and Grandma's persistent and vigorous (and effective!) newborn burping techniques
  • Going up and down stairs by herself successfully, sitting and sliding down a slide, and crawling through tunnels.
  • Identifying some of her animals correctly


Melts my heart.
Busy talkin' and rockin'.


Not sure about this one.
It's so fun!  We can pretty much "teach" her anything we want to now, because she is picking it up so fast.  I am having the best time with her.  Kids are awesome.