Adria has suddenly switched to saying “Mom” and “Dad” from “Mamma” and “Dadda". She uses the words in sentences…"Hi Mom!” “Where’s Dad?” “Dad…<mumble, mumble>…a shirt!”

We still get the occasional Momma or Dadda just to keep us honest, but she seems to have mostly outgrown those.

We’ve been to the zoo, and we’ve been the petting zoo (twice). This weekend, we did something even simpler (and cheaper)…we wandered through Petco.

Adria and Amanda looking at the white mice

Adria and Amanda looking at the fish

We saw mice, guinea pigs, frogs, snakes, fish, birds (mostly finches and parakeets), and even a chinchilla. All for free.

And I am very proud of myself because neither girl was able to talk me into taking anything home.

As part of our tuition at Adria’s daycare, we are required to put in a certain number of “parent hours” each year. In the most literal sense, this means volunteering time to do things for the school…it can be almost anything, such as: preparing crafts while at home, being a chaperone on a field trip, helping watch the kids during the day, doing maintenance on the buildings or play yards, cleaning the toys or classrooms, etc.

You can also convert your hours to cash…either paying for them directly, or by contributing things that cost money (toys, equipment, expendables, etc). I think of this as being similar to charitable contributions on your Federal taxes…we owe this time/money to daycare one way or another through our agreement with them, but we get to direct that energy in a way that we see fit…if we wish.

Two weeks ago, daycare had a ‘parent work day’, where you could go help out with organized chores and help whittle down some of those hours. The sand in some of the play areas was getting thin, so they had several dozen tons of sand dumped onto the driveway in the early part of the morning…we went and spent several hours carting, shoveling, and smoothing sand. Naturally, we concentrated our energy on Adria’s yard first.

Here are a few photos (note that there were plenty of kids underfoot that morning…several people earned their hours by watching kids so that the majority could haul sand)…

Adria “helping” with the sand in Dad’s gloves

Two peas in a pod

Adria and Helen playing at the sand table

Looks like this year we’re going to make it, through a hodgepodge of jobs. We did some crafting at home, shoveled sand, did some photography for the classroom, helped out during the day, and provided some necessities for Adria’s room.

It has been pretty hot in LA the last week or so, and we have taken several evening trips to the pool to cool off. About a week ago, we started trying to get Adria to put her face in the water and blow bubbles. She finds it hilarious when we do it, and I did get her to try herself once or twice. She did it well one time…the next time she came up sputtering.

Here are a few photos from that visit:

Adria sitting on the pool steps

Adria loves to climb in and out of the pool

Swimming with Mommy!

Yesterday, we went down to the pool, and Adria was playing on the steps like she is doing in the photo above. I was hovering, of course, because there is no part of our pool (other than the steps) where she can stand with her head above water.

The inevitable finally happened, and Adria slipped off of the top step and fell face first into the water, fully submerged. I was right there, but it still took me 2 or 3 seconds to find the right way to scoop her up and get her out of the water. She was upset and scared, but she actually did really well…she didn’t seem to get any water in her mouth or nose, and after just a minute of comforting, she was ready to get back in the saddle!

This afternoon we went to the Montrose Street fair. Amanda specifically intended to search out the pony rides that are often available at the fair, and possibly the petting zoo as well. It is hit or miss about whether these attractions will be at any given fair or not…but we lucked out today.

Adria was insistent about going in to see the animals in the petting zoo. Had we not been planning to get her a ticket, we would have surely redirected her attention immediately from that end of the fair. But we were happy that she was interested and excited, so I bought her a ticket and took her inside.

They had goats, chickens, and pigs. The pigs were very approachable, as were some of the goats. The chickens were small and agile and seemed to know that toddler hands weren’t always gentle. They had a tendency to flee. Adria loved the small goats, though:

Adria gently petting the little goat

Then the goat moved in for a kiss

We also paid for a ride on the pony. They have a fancy little saddle that looked pretty inescapable…she wasn’t going anywhere, short of the pony falling down. Nonetheless, I followed close behind both to take some photos and to comfort her if need be.

Adria riding the little pony

…and headed back to where Mom was waiting

As it turns out, Adria was very nonchalant on the pony. She seemed very comfortable and was having a good time. It was fun watching her get her ’sea legs’ and adapt to the pony’s gait. Her head was bouncing around pretty good in the beginning…then she settled in.

Today when Amanda was walking with Adria to check the mail, Adria stepped carefully over the crack in the elevator door and then announced “I did it! Adria did it!”

We’re a little amazed, because you sort of have to learn “I” by observation of how other people talk about themselves. When we direct speech at Adria, we say “you” or “Adria". “Adria has an owie.” “You need a bath.” (I have been trying to teach her “I love you,” but I haven’t gotten it to stick yet.)

I think this marks the first mumble-free sentence, even though she has had the essence of sentences for a while now. This morning she woke up about 15 minutes before her night-light sun “came out", and she played in her crib and talked to herself for a while. The most amusing thing that she said was just as soon as the sun turned on: “Adria…<mumble> <mumble>…not asleep!” Before that she had said “Oh no! Where momma?” and “Oh no! Where dadda?", among other chatter.

Late last week, when we got to daycare a little early (before one of her favorite teachers, Graciela, had arrived for the morning shift), she asked, “Oh no! Where…Graciela…go?”

Back in June, our friends Brian and Sarah babysat Adria while Amanda and I went to help Paul celebrate his 30th birthday. Two weeks ago, Amanda and I returned the favor and watched Helen while Brian and Sarah went out for their anniversary.

Brian and Sarah (at least claimed that they) had a lot of fun when they watched Adria for us. And we can say that we had fun watching Helen too. At this age, there really isn’t much to it…if the date starts at 6 or 7, then there is only an hour or two before bedtime, and the rest of the night is just listening for any unusual happenings.

Watching Helen in addition to Adria was not hard at all. First of all, Helen is a very easy-going toddler. Since the kids are in daycare together, they are already familiar with playing together under a certain set of rules. Both Amanda and I participated in entertaining the kids…and really, a 1-1 ratio for 18-month-olds is pretty easy (as long as there’s nothing else you’d rather be doing ).

Mostly we just spent the evening in the living room, playing with Adria’s toys and books. Right when Helen got dropped off, we finished up dinner (note that Adria is eating a gingerbread cookie and has a bunch of grapes in front of her, while Helen was delicately eating a well-rounded meal with veggies):

Adria and Helen at the kid’s table

And then both girls loved story time:

Drew reading a book to both girls

Adria was a little protective of her toys, it being her home turf and all…we ended up giving her several timeouts on this night because she would steal things from Helen or swat at her if she tried to reach in for something. Here the girls are making up after such an episode…

Adria and Helen having a hug after a little toy tug-o-war

And of course both girls love to draw. They were both very adept at keeping the marker on the paper. Amanda would draw little fish on the paper, and Helen would immediately “color them in” just as soon as Amanda was finished:

Drawing with markers

Amanda and I split up and we did the girls’ bedtime rituals at the same time…I took Adria and Amanda took Helen. Both kids pretty much went to sleep right away, and then Amanda and I went back to do damage control and have dinner.

Today, Adria is 19 months and 10 days old. Oops.

In my defense, when we had her 18-month birthday party, she was already 18 months and 25 days old…it was the first weekend that all four of the original celebrants and their families were free.

Adria, Helen, Penny, and Claire celebrated their half-birthday in style this year, with a BBQ in the shade of Nibley park. Just having the four kids and their parents at the party made 12, and then we had several more couples and a few more kids join us as well…it was a great group.

Let’s see, what did we do? Primarily, we made a mess. This is best accomplished with watermelon combined with lots of powdery dirt:

Adria eating a slice of watermelon

Another great way is to use bubble soap, which (possibly counter to intuition) is extremely sticky:

Adria playing with Helen’s bubble toys

Failing that, you should buy a giant sheet cake from Costco…

Birthday cake for Adria, Claire, Helen, and Penny

…and line up between 4 and 6 toddlers behind it. Add a dog if you think that might help:

The birthday girls and their moms

All of the kids at the party with their moms

Adria straining at the leash for that ‘cupcake’

We managed to keep Adria from diving headlong into the cake, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t let her have a little fun with it…

Adria having a bite of Amanda’s cake

Adria decides that she does like cake

Adria and Penny found the water bottles in the cooler, and headed off to the playground together playing with a bottle and a cup:

Adria fills up Penny’s cup

Penny returns the favor

Adria attempted to raid the fruit salad bowl, and Paul managed to let her sample the treats without totally upending the salad:

Adria eating fruit with “Uncle Paul”

Adria and Penny once again headed off together, and got the idea to dance in the grass. They won’t play “Ring Around the Rosie” (’No!’), but they love to play “Ashes, Ashes".

Adria and Penny dancing in the grass

More dancing with Penny

As we were packing up, Adria did one thing that I really wished that I could do, right about then….

All of that partying is hard work

Adria is starting to apply ‘no’ or ‘not’ in her sentences to change the meaning, which is pretty cool. Last night when we were out in the park she said, “Adria….<mumble> <mumble>…not…home!” I repeated it ("Adria is not home?") and she said “Yeah….". Then: “Dadda….<mumble>…not…home.”

The <mumble> <mumble> thing is interesting…she knows that her “sentence” has more words when Mom and Dad say it, but she doesn’t know why, or what it’s supposed to be. So she often leaves out the verbs, and you have to infer it from context:

“Adria…<mumble>…pants!” (“Adria needs pants?” “Yeah…”)
“Adria…<mumble>…oatmeal!” (“Adria would like oatmeal?” “Yeah…”)
“Dadda…<mumble>…book!” (“You want Dadda to read you a book?” “Yeah…”)

In other amusing speaking news, she now says “There it is” or “There he is” when we’re looking for something and find it. Amanda will say “Where’s Dadda? Go find Dadda! Where’s Dadda?” And she’ll go stomping around looking for me, and when she comes around a corner and sees me, she’ll point and say “There he is!”

We started giving Adria timeouts back in March, and she has gotten several in the intervening months. In truth, though, they have been pretty rare. Adria is generally very good, and we usually feel that we can teach her simply with our words and tone.

Occasionally, though, it takes more. As I described before, the basic formula is a description of the infraction, a short (15-60 second) enforced quiet time in an isolated place, a reminder of the infraction, and then hugs and gentle talk.

A few weeks ago Adria got a little overexcited while playing with Amanda, and she bit Amanda, hard. That’s an automatic timeout. I know that Amanda was fuming because it really hurt…I, however, couldn’t help but see this picture and try very hard not to laugh:

Adria in timeout with socks on her hands

Note the dejected look combined with the mid-play sock-hands…

Adria is getting better and better at identifying colors. She mostly still calls everything “blue” if you point at something and ask what color it is…although, I have seen her correctly name “pink", “brown", and “green” before. For the most part, though, all colors are (still) blue.

As it turn out, she does much better if you reverse the problem. Here’s a quick video where I ask her to pick out her markers for me, and she gets a couple of them before she gets distracted. She’s gone all the way through before, but I didn’t have the camera ready:

Adria says “yes!” Hooray!

Ok, actually, she doesn’t say “yes", she says “yeah", and it sort of comes out like a subdued sigh. But we’re talking about the flip of a switch, maybe three days ago…she went from the manic laugh to “yeah” almost literally overnight. It actually sounds an awful lot like what her cousin Thrace says, so maybe she started to pick it up from him at the beach.

You might think that I’m upset that she learned “yeah” when I’ve been trying to teach her “yes", but I’m just so thrilled that she will acknowledge in the affirmative that I don’t really care. She simply can’t say “yes” very well, so I think that learning that “yeah” was a suitable alternative was part of the breakthrough. I’ll teach her “yes” later.

So now (again, practically overnight), she will answer “yeah” to questions that used to get the default “no” even though I knew that she meant ‘yes’. “Do you want to eat?” “Are you ready for bed?”

We even had a little dinner conversation with her last night, it was so cute:

“Did you have fun at school today?”
“Yeah…”
“Did you get to play in the sand at school?”
“Yeah…”
“Did you see your friend Penny at school?”
“Yeah…pemby!”

Ok, I know that I said that I was done talking about talking. But this is huge!

Ok, here we go. I have finally found the couple of hours necessary to wade through 9GB of images (685 photos) that I shot between leaving LAX for the beach and arriving back here 10 days later. I did not even consider any of the other 430 images (750 MB) taken by Becca, Colin, Mom, and Laraine & Don during the week…it was just too much. As usual, it’s not a lack of good photos that’s the problem…the challenge is picking a reasonable sample of photos to share.

So, enjoy the following posts on this year’s Beach Week in Corolla, NC…July 3 to July 10, 2010.

Family photo from day 5 at the beach

It’s been a while since I’ve posted a video, so here’s a clip of Adria drinking out of a regular cup all on her own (compare to my older post about this). She still gets a little down the front (and seems a little confused by that, too), but she does a pretty good job. I usually only try this with water.

Adria still struggles with her “r” a bit…so the word that she is saying so clearly that sounds like “Dee-ahh” is, naturally, “Dora". That’s the cartoon character printed on her cup.

You have to applaud the effort of shaking the cup to dislodge the soggy waffle bit, right?

This post is long overdue. We took Adria camping to San Simeon State Park near Hearst Castle about a month ago, on the weekend of 6/18/10. This was Adria’s first camping trip, and our first since she was born (and for a while prior to her birth, too). We met Amanda’s parents at the campground, and the 5 of us had a great time over the course of 2 nights and parts of 3 days.

Now, just so we’re clear, this was car camping. We weren’t exactly roughing it. Here’s what I packed into the Rav-4 before we left:

Our piles of stuff that we took “camping”

In the pile you can see a cooler for our food (and Adria’s milk), our huge tent, Adria’s pack’n'play, an air mattress, three pillows, our sleeping bags, a bag for our clothes and things (hey, at least it wasn’t a suitcase), a day-pack, diapers and wipes, a chest for our camping gear (stove, fuel, lamps, etc), and some other stuff. When the car’s right there, might as well pack it, no?

Prior to the trip, Amanda found a good deal on a huge 8-man tent and we ordered it online. To give you an idea, they allow about 2 feet per person to sleep…which makes this tent 16 feet long, which is enough room to put in three queen air mattresses if we wanted. It looked like this:

The 16-man tent, all set up

We set Adria’s bed up right inside it, on one end:

Ivan, Adria, and the crib set up inside the tent

It ended up being a good deal colder than we expected at night. We kept Adria bundled up in her warmest clothes, plus one of us was often holding her, and we had blankets for her as well:

Adria all bundled up

At night, we put her to bed with double sleeper PJ’s on, plus two blankets and the quilt that Geoff and Katie made for her, doubled over a few times. She slept great. Amanda and I, on the other hand, were borderline too cold both nights with our flannel Coleman sleeping bags (we have mummy bags, but who would have thought there’d be a need?).

Here’s Adria bundled up in her quilt on the first morning, staying warm with Ivan. It sort of seems hard to believe even now, but it was really quite cold:

Adria bundled up in the morning

We went to the beach in the morning, where it was even colder due to the strong, gusty wind off of the water. Adria loved it, though, and she wasn’t afraid to get herself (or Elmo) dirty. I love this photo of Adria and Amanda (and Elmo) at the beach:

Amanda and Adria at the San Simeon Beach

In the afternoon we went to Hearst Castle, which is just a few miles up the road from the campground. This is the mansion estate of William R. Hearst, and it’s really one of those things that you have to see to believe. Hearst had a lot of money and a lot of ideas for this estate. To give you an idea, the grounds once included a full zoo with some rather exotic animals, which have since been donated to “real” zoos. Clearly, Adria loved the tour:

Adria napped in Ivan’s arms for the second half of the tour

Ivan was taking some good photos of the mansion for a while, and then they suddenly stopped. I wonder why that was?

Back at the campground, Adria discovered her shadow. On a later walk she stole my hat, put it on, and then to add insult to injury she put me in a pretty good head-lock. At least it made for a cute photo.

Adria wearing Drew’s Hokie hat

We took another walk to the beach, in which Adria’s willingness to stay swaddled in a blanket clearly demonstrates how cold it was. Amanda took this cute shot of Adria and I staring off into the sunset:

Adria and Drew watching the sunset

And after a few minutes of playing with our headlamps, we put Adria down to bed the same way as before. She went to bed without a peep.

Adria playing with the headlamp

Day three was pretty much just packing up and getting on the road. Adria did a lot of playing in the cars (where it was naturally warm from the sun), but she played in the campground as well. It took us a while to get all of our stuff together, but mostly the delay was just getting the tents dry. They accumulated quite a bit of dew overnight.

Overall, I’d say our camping trip was a success! We learned a few things. One is, when you are car camping, there’s no excuse to not pack enough warm clothes. Another is that the tent is huge and we could be in real danger of not having enough space to set it up….but Adria slept perfectly in the great outdoors, so maybe there is more camping in our future!?

Adria is now officially creating phrases on her own. She has known several phrases for a while now (like “thank you“, “bye bye", “what’s that?“, etc)…but those were more like words that she learned and used, they just happened to be a little longer.

This week at the beach, though, she saw me come around the corner one time and said “Hi, Dadda!” I melted a little.

She is also attaching her name to things in the possessive sense…she says “Adria’s shoes", etc. More on that later.

We’re back from the beach!

Keeping with my tradition of not posting an ‘out of office’ for the whole Internet to see, perhaps no one even knew we were gone. But we went to the Outer Banks for a whole week, and had a great time. Naturally, I took hundreds of photos (made good use of the waterproof camera)…I’m still getting them off the camera and it’s midnight eastern time, so it will probably be a few days until I get any of them online (besides…I was already behind on some stuff when we left).

We had lots of time to interact with Adria and make some subtle observations on her development, so expect a bunch of posts in the next week or so.

Adria has gotten quite adept at sorting and stacking. Here’s a video from this weekend of a partial run at this particular toy. She would finish it (then drive it around like a train) then dump it out and stack it back up from scratch…I was only quick enough to get this little segment, which got interrupted before she could finish:

I love how she stacks all of the red blocks and then announces ‘all gone!’ before moving on to another color.

Adria has started to get clingy with a blanket. It’s pretty adorable.

So far, it seems that she hasn’t picked a favorite. It can be any of the blankets that we use in her crib, or even her bath towel. In my car, she has latched onto a towel that I keep in my trunk for emergencies (thank you, Douglas Adams). Her word for blanket is “Binks!", and she thinks that she is saying it correctly. If I say “Where is your blanket?” she will pat her blanket…and they if I ask “Can you say ‘blanket’?” she will say “Binks!” If you correct her, she just repeats herself.

She generally wants a blanket after her bath, when she knows that it’s time to get cozy for bed. But she’ll carry it around in the morning, and sometimes she wants it in the car. Last night she woke up crying (thirsty, as it turns out), and when I went in to check on her she was standing in the middle of her crib, crying….holding her blanket.

All of a sudden, Adria does not hate having her fingernails cut.

As little as a month ago, she would fuss, scream, and cry. Amanda has always bravely been the one to cut Adria’s nails…sometimes she would do it when I was around, and sometimes not. When I was there, I did my very best to play with her and distract her while Amanda was trimming. When I was gone, occasionally Amanda would just have to use brute force, holding Adria’s hands (and especially her feet) very tightly.

But now….no big deal. It’s like magic. Adria will sit and play quietly with one of her toys with one hand while Amanda is trimming the other, and then let her switch and continue. It’s sort of hard to impress in words how big of a deal this is…it went from a dreaded, thankless chore to a “mere” matter of time and dexterity. What a relief.