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…

We had a Saturday-to-Saturday beach week. We stayed in Richmond on Friday night, got the cars packed with uncharacteristic efficiency on Saturday morning, and were on the road to the beach before 11. Dad and I were driving the truck with most of the food and a lot of the luggage and beach stuff. Mom, Amanda, and Adria were in the Acura, and Ali and her family drove a rental car.

The driving was going swimmingly until traffic slowed down with about an hour left in the drive, and we decided to take a break at a rest stop just a few miles from the bridge:

Taking a break from the drive at a rest stop

Adria talked GranD into playing with the controls in the Acura

When we got back on the road, traffic was extremely slow. After a few minutes, it became apparently that it was not a temporary slowdown. All told, that last hour ended up taking about 4 hours to drive. Amanda and Mom were out of diapers, out of milk, and pretty much out of snacks for Adria…who was extremely ready to be out of her car seat. I wasn’t even in the car, and I felt sorry for them all. The saving grace was the portable DVD player, which ran Dora on repeat for hours and mercifully had enough juice for the duration.

It was getting dark by the time we got to the house…so much for a walk to the beach before dinner. As a consolation prize, Thrace and Adria got to help Gamma back her car into the parking spot under the house…

Gamma, Adria, and Thrace “driving” the Acura

We had an early dinner tonight, so there was time for a walk to Rite Aid for some ice cream before Adria’s bedtime. We’ve tried this before and we’ve watched as she adorably devoured my cookie-dough ice cream, but thoroughly spit out all of the best parts…the chocolate chips and the cookie dough chunks.

Well she’s at it again, this time with much more energy and coordination. I was “sharing” my cone with her, but towards the end I lost the battle and she took it from me.

Adria eating her Dadda’s ice cream

A grubby little Adria having a grand ole’ time

Next time, I’m getting the mocha ice cream and Amanda gets to share.

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!?

Either I need to clean the screen on our sliding glass door, or Adria needs to stop kissing it. Or both.

Adria’s dirty face after a screen smooch

On Tuesday we were at Costco, and we had a quick dinner at the cafe before going shopping. We let Adria play in the basket with the stuff in her diaper bag while we ate…this system has worked well for us in the past, but she is quickly getting bigger and stronger:

I had the camera out for this performance because she had already done it once before, both up and down. Look at those arms! How many of us could do that move, at scale? Adria is trying to make her uncle Tyson proud.

P.S. Sorry for the blurry-cam…I was filming out of one eye and using the other to maneuver myself for the save, if necessary.

Adria has been sleeping very well lately. We’ve noticed that she goes through cycles, both in eating and sleeping. Right now she seems to be in a phase where she isn’t eating very much (although she’s drinking more milk and is having no problem making dirty diapers), but she’s sleeping a ton.

Last week, for 3 days in a row, I ended up late to work because Adria slept right through our normal time to leave for daycare. And keeping with the “never wake a sleeping baby” philosophy, we just let her sleep until she got up naturally. One day that was 8:15am, where her typical time is more like 6:30am. Last night she slept from 7:15pm until 7:30am. We sure wish that we could get 12 hours of sleep…but if we went to bed at 7:30pm, often we wouldn’t have even had dinner yet.

We’ve been trying hard to get her to bed a little earlier lately, because over the past two weeks we’ve been so busy that we’ve been keeping her up a little later than usual in the evenings. I’ve been wondering if we are slowly shifting her schedule back by 30-45 minutes, which we can’t afford to do with our work routines. The summer is so busy and we’ve been traveling so much, it’s hard to keep the strict schedule….but I don’t think that we can complain about lack of opportunities to sleep anymore.

In an amusing oops-what-did-we-just-teach-her moment, Amanda and I have realized that Adria thinks that all alpha-numeric characters are called “2″.

I’m not sure exactly how this happened, but it stems from the fact that we live on the second floor of our condo building. She always loved the elevator buttons and lights, so we would emphasize that she could push 2, and I would point to the lights above the door and say that they would open when we got to 2. I think that she latched on to the number two then, and she would start pointing at things that looked like numbers and saying “two!".

Recently, she noticed the numbers on the condo doors, so as we walk down the long hallway we would point out all of the 2’s, of which every door on our floor has at least one, and many near us have several. There have been a couple of walks back from the elevator that went “2……2……2……2……”

And then one day we noticed that she would point excitedly at any and all text and exclaim “Two!” Oops. Actually, we’ve never let her call something 2 that wasn’t a 2, but we have definitely focused on them because she seems excited about them. She’ll figure it out soon. I think a good starting point would be….1.

For the first time (on record), Adria has now gone to Dad to get something that Mom already said that she couldn’t have.

A friend was having a BBQ, and we were in his back yard hanging out with a bunch of people. There were two dogs running around, but they had been temporarily put behind a gate which kept them confined to the side yard and the house.

Well, Adria had walked Amanda over to the gate and wanted to get through to see the dogs and/or the house. Amanda simply said “The gate’s locked, we can’t go through there.” Adria acted compliant and wandered away towards me, so Amanda moved on to something else.

Next thing I know, Adria grabs my finger and does her “Walk walk!” command, which means that she wants help traveling somewhere. She towed me very directly (and I noticed this at the time…she pulled me between a few adults that I had to excuse myself past to keep up) to the gate, and made motions and noises to get through. I thought that she either wanted food (she knew that there were cookies inside) or to play with the dogs, and I had no real reason not to let her have either, so I helped her through the gate and we went inside.

Meanwhile, Amanda was looking around wondering where we went, and immediately realized that I had been played. That little turkey…

This is probably only the beginning. Is it a bad sign that we’ve already been beaten once and she can’t even really talk yet?

I mentioned earlier that Adria had some intuition about how the gate latch worked, and was caught trying to escape from the play area at daycare. Well…this is at the park, not daycare, but it’s the same idea. I didn’t put her up there, show her the gate, or even point it out to her. She sought it out on her own. Look at the intensity on her face…

Looking for a way out of here

Ah-hah! Found it!

All I have to do is flip this lever…

All…..most….got…..it!

I grabbed her before she was able to figure it out. Didn’t seem like a good precedent to set.

Plus, she was sort of straddling the moving and non-moving parts of the gate there at the end…

Adria loves bubbles. The bubbles themselves seem to have some attraction, but I think that she likes the mechanics of making them even more. The wands, the soap, the dipping action, the blowing, etc. But she sees bubbles everywhere…when we blow them, in her books, in the bathtub…she definitely has bubbles on the brain.

She can blow bubbles on her own…sort of:

Adria blowing the beginnings of a bubble

Bubble blowing usually degenerates into bubble munching. I’m not sure what it is…I’ve tried it, and it tastes terrible. We have stopped trying to fight every wand lick (she’s too quick), but we put an end to bubbles after she’s had her daily allotment of soap. That’s about the time when she opens her mouth to talk and accidentally blows a bubble.

Adria munching on the bubble wand

Apparently, it never gets old. I took Adria down to our park on March 19th, and there was one lone puddle in the middle of the sidewalk. After playing with the gate for a few minutes, she made a beeline to the puddle.

I suppose I don’t really care if she plays in the puddles, under the right circumstances. It wasn’t cold, we weren’t going anywhere, and I made sure that she didn’t drink the water or suck on her hands (too much)… After that, it’s just good, dirty fun.

Playing with the gate, all nice and clean

Look, Dad, a piece of dirt!

Sweeping up the water

Back to the gate…and puddle aftermath

During one of our now frequent visits to the park, I filmed Adria going down the slide on her own. She has done this many times before, but we usually stick to the straight slides…this one has a bend in it. On the way down, she got a little sideways, and bumped her head pretty good right at the bottom (listen for it):

I was trying to watch her and the camera at the same time, so I knew that she bumped herself, but I didn’t realize how solid it was until I reviewed the video later. It’s amazing how resilient she is, though…it clearly distresses her, and she even rubs her little head…but there is too much to do. She never cried and it didn’t really slow her down…back to playing!

That bump actually left a pretty decent bruise that hung around for several days.

Adria did a scary thing over the weekend. I’ve already posted about how she likes to open and close doors. Well she went into our spare bathroom again, this time with the light on, and this time with Amanda watching her closely. She closed the door behind her…not a big surprise.

The next thing she did was surprising, though…she opened the cabinet drawer, which, as it turns out, blocks the bathroom door most efficiently:

Full view of the drawer blocking the bathroom door

Adria wanted out, Amanda wanted in, and we didn’t like the idea that she was stuck in the bathroom, of all places. The poisons are locked up, but everything in there is very hard and/or has water in it. When the drawer is open, you can only open the bathroom door just a crack…not enough to get your fingers in there and wiggle the drawer closed, which was my first thought:

The bathroom door can only be opened a crack

Well, Amanda kept her head and simply asked Adria to close the drawer. Whether she followed instructions or just decided to close it on her own, we’ll never know…but, disaster averted.

I have little doubt that, in a pinch, I could have put my shoulder into the door and broken the drawer…but I am very glad that it didn’t come to that. That would have been quite a major property casualty, definitely our biggest so far…

P.S. We keep a bunch of spare tooth brushes and toothpaste boxes in that drawer, and it has happened to me before where I have opened it and something has sprung up, effectively locking it open. That would have been fantastic. Time to put locks on those drawers.

Sometime in the last week, Amanda and I were moving about the house cleaning up a bit and getting ready to go out. We were playing a zone defense with Adria. If she wandered into the kitchen where I was, I would keep an eye on her…and if she headed back near Amanda, then Amanda would watch her. We’re starting to trust Adria more and more not to get herself into too much trouble too quickly, so we’ll let her go a minute or two out of eyeshot (although, typically we can still hear what she’s up to in our small condo).

Well on this occasion, suddenly she got quiet. We did a quick sweep of the condo and didn’t see her, and the last obvious place to look was our walk-in closet…except the door was closed and the light was off. Suspicious, I walked quietly up to the door, and I heard a tiny bit of shuffling around…I asked out loud if Adria was in there, and I heard a tiny bit more sound. So I opened the door very slowly, and when it was just open a crack, she flung it open and popped out with a big grin on her face. She had been alone, in the dark, and 100% silent for at least 2 minutes.

I wished at the time that I had gotten a video of that performance. Fortunately, just a day or two later, she did it again…this time with our spare bathroom. I had a close eye on her this time because we typically don’t let her play in/near the bathrooms, so I watched her shut herself in…and I immediately pulled out the camera:

While in San Diego this weekend, I snapped the following photo, which I think deserves a caption contest and a ‘bad parenting’ tag. Click here and here to see why it’s perfectly fine after all.

I hope you learned something about playing near wells…

Ok, give it your best shot in the comments…

We’ve had a little rain in LA over the last few weeks, and we discovered that Adria loves puddles. Here’s a cute video just outside of our condo door, where she found some shallow puddles near the courtyard:

Later on, we took our eyes off of her for a second, and when we looked back she was trying to drink out of a puddle. When I grabbed her, she had a big grin on her face and water dripping out of her bangs.

It’s time to start considering brushing Adria’s teeth for real. For at least six months, we’ve had a little thimble brush that has rubber bristles, and I have been in the habit of playfully brushing her teeth after her bath. I don’t force it, though…I try, and if she lets me, great. If she refuses, I move on.

Within the last month or two, we got Adria her own toothbrush. This was even less of a success. I try to brush her teeth a bit, but she doesn’t like it much and I still don’t force it. Last Friday, though, I had my regular checkup with my dentist and he said that I should start brushing her teeth every day, especially in the back…as much to get her used to the process as anything else. But he was adamant that we start now…so I guess we will begin that battle.

One thing that we discovered is that, while she doesn’t like her own bristled toothbrush, she does like our toothbrushes. Go figure (monkey see, monkey do?).

Adria brushing her teeth with Amanda’s toothbrush

While hilarious, this is also actually rather convenient. She plays with it a bit, but also lets me steer it around and brush in the back of her mouth. So…mission accomplished?

If you are wondering why I have that smirk on my face in the photo, it’s because I’m using my toothbrush…Adria is using Amanda’s.

In the last 2 days Adria has taken two pretty major spills. It’s a little scary, and she has done a little damage, but I think that generally I’m ok with it.

Profile view of Adria’s new face scratches

Portrait view of the scratches under her eye

There are two main reasons why I’m ok with her falls. First, it happens because she’s a little explorer. She pushing limits, climbing, testing her balance. I know, I may regret this later, and she can potentially get herself into some real trouble…but for now I approve of her desire to feel out her environment. And secondly (but equally important), she seems willing to deal with the consequences of her actions. She shakes off her falls quickly, and rarely repeats a major mistake (she only closed her fingers in a cabinet door once, and only closed them in a drawer once).

The scratches on her face happened today, when she was climbing on a boat that they have in the play area at daycare. Of course I don’t know the exact details, but she slipped and went face first into the sand in the boat.

Yesterday, she was trying to play on the sofa and she stepped off of the cushion. I’m not exactly sure why, or how she misjudged so badly…but she stepped into thin air and went down fast. I was watching her closely, and there was no chance of catching her…so not only did she fall off the sofa from nearly standing, but she bounced her right ear off the (padded, thankfully) edge of the coffee table on the way down. Just a minute or two after it happened, she was comforted…and a few minutes after that, she was whining to get back up again. And what do you know….the second time, she was more careful, and decided against trying to stand up to cross the cushion.

As I’ve mentioned several times before, we don’t generally let Adria watch TV just yet. She sees TV’s in restaurants, and watches our digital photo frame, etc…but we’ve never just plunked her down in front of the TV to entertain her. Until now.

Adria got a few Baby Einstein DVD’s for Christmas, so we decided to throw one in and see what it’s like. I think it’s ok…it was simple, slow, and educational…but as you can see, she got very caught up in it:

We may go through these DVD’s a couple of times here and there over the next year, but I don’t think we’re going to make a habit out of it. Maybe around birthday 2 we’ll consider a little more TV.