A rare post more about Mommy & Daddy than Lea

Last weekend was Dan & my 6th anniversary. It was listed as sugar/iron anniversary so... I got a cast iron pan FULL of kit cats and Dan got a bucket full of 3 pounds of kisses and I took him to hit 5 irons. We went to this super place called Top Golf where you get to shoot at targets and keep score on the diring range. The balls are all digitally encoded with your info and it tracks what targets you hit, etc. It was so much fun we were there for like 4 hours (5 games + lunch). A wonderful way to spend a beautiful fall day.



That evening we had our traditional grown up party. My friend Sherry even came back to town (she's been in DC for almost a year). We had a fantastic time.
Sherry & Teddy

This is my wig form... our house gargoyle comes in handy.

Good ol' Captain Dan and his catch of the day — I won second place at our work costume contest. I wore that costume ALL day long. I'll post trick or treating photos as soon as possible.

And because you've been reading along thinking... hey you haven't mentioned your beautiful daughter in several paragraphs... what's that about, are you having a real grown up life? Tee hee... well yes we had a great weekend while Lea went to grandma's. Here is a beautiful photo of my cutie pie.

And in case you didn't feel you'd seen enough of Lea, here are what I believe will become the bearskin rug photos of our family... naked pumpkin carving. Lea had a touch of the tummy flu which caused a very bad bottom rash. So we had been trying to give her some open air therapy and it just so happened we carved pumkins.
Lea was a great help getting the seeds out. I think she had fun.

Lea loved to sit on the big pumkin. Even after Dan had cleaned it out, she still tried to sit on it which caused some problems.


I tried to wear the kitty ears so I could fulfill the "you're a cat" part of the bargin, but Lea wanted to wear them more than me so she got ot be a bare bottom cat.


The final product: Lea wanted triangle eyes and a triangle nose. I carved the narrow pumkin and Dan carved the one with the curl on the forehead. Good times.

Sorry Sweetie, You're a cat.

The Halloween costumes are being sewn and the plans for candy collecting are being made. But it has been made clear that I am not as in charge as I let myself believe. I decided that Lea and I would be mermaids all the way back last Halloween. And Lea is fine with my choice for her costume. If you ask her what she is going to be she will happily say "a mermaid."
"And what will daddy be?"
Lea:"A fisherman."
"and what will mommy be?"
Lea:"A cat."
"Can mommy be a mermaid?"
"Sorry Sweetie, you're a cat." This was said by Lea while visiting our friends Kris & Jerry.
This desire for mommy to be a cat has come from nowhere that we can figure out and it never wavers. Its not like she wants me to be a different thing each day. No, Lea wants Mommy to be a cat. I have agreed to wear cat ears while I make the rest of our costumes, but I have gotten her to begrudgingly agree that Mommy too can be a Mermaid. Grandma suggest Mommy be a catfish and cover all the bases.

So when we carved pumkins mommy and Lea wore cat ears. This was Lea dressed up to go over to Michael's for dinner in ther cat ears.



Other notables to Lea's Lexicon:
"Book come too?" "Elephant come too?"- meaning whether its a trip to the Lea's room to change clothes or an outside trip to the store, can this item come with us. In the below picture it was "Computer come too? Pig come too?"


"What is that again?" - said with the scrunched up face and cocked head. She says that A LOT now. Maybe because she has been parroting words for a long time and is now putting their meaning behind them. This face does not warm my heart like all the other things she does and I don't know why.

"Forever" - This word is new in the past few days. As in "I love mac & cheese FOREVER" We will have to work on the meaning and overuse of this word.

"Doing it as fast as me can" = two year old for "I'm trying to hurry"

But the BEST new expression:
"Attention Horde" = Parroting when Mommy needed an Extention Cord

Our State Fair is a great State Fair

We bought Lea new sunglasses at the fair since Mommy lost her cute pink ones in Mertyl Beach. She was styling in the the glasses that she and Daddy picked out!



We went to the State Fair on Oct. 13 with Teresa and had a fantastic day. We also got to go back the next week (on Oct. 21) with Michael, Sherry, Kris, Jerry & Wilder. We do not have any photos of the second trip however but we did a lot of the same stuff and had a really great time!
Teresa played the carnival game of popping balloons with a dart and won a pink Teddy Bear that she let Lea hold for most of the fair.


There was a very crowded petting zoo. More like a feeding zoo. It was hard to pet the animals, but the sold corn and feed to let the animals nibble... however the animals had nibbled so much few were hungry when the 100 little hands thrust feed in their face. We did not try to feed the animals, hower we got to see some animals close up. Three was a small giraffe, zebras, lots of goats (some fornicating for a real learning experience) but Lea's favorites were the baby ducks and chicks and the Kangaroo. The Kangaroo had a joey in its pouch that we could see the legs of and see it move. It was surreal to watch.

Here is Lea and the kangaroo.


This is Lea's smile when we say "Smile"


The best attraction was Little hands on the Farm. It is set up so well and they limit the number of kids inside at one time so you're not rushed or overrun. It was really nice.

The kids get an apron and a basket and go through different jobs on the farm collecting items.


First she "harvests" the feed corn where you get a bag of corn to feed to the fake animals along the way.


She waters the orchard and picks a "peach" to put in her basket. Lea's first line in this video is "There's no water" - as in "Why would you give me a watering can with no water, you crazy woman!"


She feeds the "chickens" and collects a wooden egg in your basket.


She milked the plastic, but realistic cows with a milking machine and gets a carton of milk for her basket.


She plants the "seed" (a token with a vegetable picture on it)


And picks the vegetable that we planted. In our case... a carrot


She feeds the pigs, just for the joy of feeding the pigs.


She drives the tractor to feed the sheep and collect some wool.




Then you take all the items in the basket to "market" where you sort them and "sell" them for $1


Then you go into the "store" and with your $1 buy treats. We usually got fruit dinosaur chews that Lea loved. And she worked hard for them, which made them an even better treat. In Lea's hand is her dino fruit chew packet.


Before we left Teresa got a Funnel Cake and would dip her finger in the powdered sugar and let Lea lick it off. Lea said "I love sugar" what child doesn't! It was very cute.


We had a really great sugar fueled day!

Punk-in

We're gearing up for Halloween. Aunt Teresa brought us a tiny pumkin so Lea and I decided to do some decorating. We didn't want to cut into the actaul pumkin, because this was about 4 weeks before halloween and we wanted it to last so... I gave Lea paper and had her draw shapes that I cut out - she did really good with circles. I drew the triangles and the glasses, but Lea drew other eyes and these big round things that she said were the ears so I taped them on the side of the pumkin. Lea also insisted that the pumkin need a chin so in some of the pictues the pumkin has a big chin on the bottom... that's the pink circle under the glasses I think. Lea wanted the pumkin to have glasses so we cut glasses too. We colored on the pumkin with crayon first and then with double sided tape made our pumkin creations. My punkin made a pumpkin.




At one point in our decorating I was helping Lea stick the eyes where the eyes go and the nose where the nose goes, etc. and she looked at me and said "You do it mommy" and I realized I was stifling her creative expression of making a face so this is how Lea wanted the pumpkin to look once I stopped being a stickler for eyes being on the top and all that silly stuff.

And one great thing about this pumkin decorating is we could do it over and over again. When Grandma came to town we made new eyes and stuff and had even more fun sticking them to ourselves.


Here is some video on how to build a face. This video starts slow, but its worth it for "what does a mouth do?"

rhinoceros

When I went to visit Sherry, she asked so are there any cute words Lea can't say and I said "Oh, hippopotamus and rhinoceros." Sherry said "Well those are not usual 2 year old words!" Yes we're very proud, but now she can say Hippopotamus. She and Grandma were reading a book just this morning and she said it just fine. It was so cute and I can'd duplicate it, but I got a bit of rhinoceros on video!



I have been paying attention more and she can be very difficult to understand, but if I ask her to describe the word or what its used for she can. We can usually figure it out, but there are still many "yes, dear" moments.

She Kacks for a duck. And she skips "s" at the beginning of words. I had a perfect example and now can't remember. I'll try to pay attention AND remember.

When Teresa Comes Over

Lea always has a good time when Aunt Teresa comes. Here is them playing piggies. I don't know who had more fun!!

myrtle beach

Note: there are videos at the end. There are 15 in all for the hardcore Lea fans, but the first 3 I think say it all.

We started the trip with a brief stay in Georgia at Grampy and Margaretes (though the Neal's stayed with Tina who Lea took quite a shine too, following her around her house). That was our first swim with Floaties. Lea took right to them, and Grandma, Grampy, Margarete & Dad were such sports they sat under the umbrella in the rain while Lea and I swam.






To Lea Myrtle Beach was only where the sand was. She did not quite comprehend or agree with us that the whole town was called Myrtle Beach. Unless we were going to where the waves and sand were, we were not gong to Myrtle Beach.

When we got there she looked out our balcony, saw the lagoon between the pools and told Grandma that that's where the meremaids lived. It was precious so we would talk about what the mermaids were doing. They went dancing a lot. I don't know where she got any of it, we've only watched the little mermaid once. We've watched Nemo many more times. It was just all out of her imagination.


Above you can see our view of the lagoon and pools and then the beach. Below is the bridge we had to walk over to get to the monkey pool and the beach. This bridge was over the lagoon where the mermaids lived. We didn't actually see any of those, but we did see eels and ducks.



Lea would get so excited swimming with her floaties she would laugh and keep her mouth open. We kept telling her to swim with her mouth closed (it was a salty bromine pool instead of cholorine, but still not tasty or healthy). She was just too enthusiastic!




We had a wonderful time. Most days consited of going to the beach after breakfast, then to what we lovingly called the monkey pool, because it was always full of children and had the best set of steps for jumping and swimming from. Then back up for lunch and a nap (for mommy most days too!) then back to the beach and monkey pool until we came up for dinner. It was so fantastic.


Our bating beauty had a different swim suit for everyday, some days 2 suits!

Our view was great, the walk to the beach was minimal. We had it down pat, instead of loading up everything I could think of like the first day, it was grab the bag with towels, the bucket and shovel and we were off. We can't get out of the house to the grocery store as quick as we could head out for the beach. We had our system. Some days Grandma and Grampy and Margarete would come to the beach or the at least the pools, but Dan, me and Lea hit the beach every single day. The drive was long, but for a free beach stay you can't beat it. Thanks so much to Grampy and Margarete for inviting us and for Grandma Lynn paying for gas to get there. Can't beat the price. What a great deal we had. And so much fun.

We did make it out of the condo on two days. We went to a place called Broadway on the Beach which was an outdoor shopping center built around a canal with docks. We took a water taxi across the center just for the ride. Lea saw a dragon at the mini golf place in the shopping center and would recall it later as "I saw a dragon, it was a little scary." We beleive this actually came from the circus as I discussed in the last post, but it manifested itself on this trip. Dan and I came up with some brilliant parenting if I may say so. On her diapers is a picture of Elmo with a drum, so i said if you bang on the drum it will scare the dragon away, and separately Dan told Lea that Dragons are afraid of ice cubes so all you have to do is say "ice cube" and it will scare the dragaon away. So she plays her pretend drum and says "ice cube" now when she tells of seeing "the dragaon. It was a little scary" At Broadway on the Beach... actually the whole reason for heading to Broadway on the Beach was the carousel, which Lea was scared to death of when we finally got on it. That's not quite how she remembers it, but she was not happy to be on the horse that went up and down. We also went on a small train ride and that was a big hit! We got to play on a playground there too. Lea had a blast. The rest of us were hot and thirsty, but then we went for crazy amounts of seafood. Yum, yum. Calabash seafood buffet. Grampy got Lea a chocolate ice cream cone that she managed all on her own.


Not totally neatly, but she got most of it in her, not on her. Lea also tried squid and crab, but liked the chicken best. Aunt Teresa will be thrilled to hear that!

We also went to Mini Golf (not with the dragon, with the large octopus).

We all played. Lea looked at us a little strange when we would fight to use the club to get the ball in the hole. She would run up, thow her ball in the hole and jump up and down yelling "I did it! I did it!" and then look at us like "its much easier without the stick, silly mommy!"


We had fun, but the long walk got to Margarete so we consoled ourselves with steak from Outback. We had a wonderful and fun dinner and headed home.

Aside from those two days it was delicious home cooked meals and beach and pool, beach and pool. Lea was able to make some friends. With Dan's encouragement I let Lea go on her own toward groups of kids and start her own conversation and interact in her own way. She took a while to warm up, would mostly just stand and watch for a while until she saw something she could help with and she'd jump right in. Most the kids she played with were older and she did very well making her own friends. I was very glad I held back from my instinct to run up and help her meet and play with kids. She didn't need mommy to make friends!