No, I'm not pregnant

But Elena insists on singing,

"I'm getting a baby brother,
I'm getting a baby sister,
I'm getting a baby brother,
boing boing boing boing."

Worms, take 2

I killed our worms. It was just too hot for them outside, even in the shade. I looked up temperature ranges and found that 85 is really quite warm for them (I had previously thought that it had cooled down enough because the highs were in the low 90s instead of the low 100s). So the worms died and the fly larvae took over.

We ordered more worms and started over. This time, we're keeping them inside until it gets much cooler.

On the upside, starting over gave me a chance to try my hand at shredded-paper bedding as opposed to the coconut coir bedding that came with the worm farm. I'm hopeful it'll work out this time.

Hiding games

Me: Close your eyes!
ER: (shuts her eyes tight. very cute)
Me: (hides Pooh doll). OK! Open your eyes!
ER: (looks around, finds doll, squeals with delight)

now... the other way around:

ER: Close your eyes!
Me: (I close my eyes)
ER: OK! Find Pooh!
Me: Is he over h...
ER: He's right HERE! (she points to where Pooh is). Find him!
Me: (I obligingly find Pooh)
ER: (Laughs with delight)

Done repeatedly, she would never let me look somewhere other than where he was, and she'd only tolerate my inane searching for at most five seconds before telling me where Pooh was so I could find him.

She doesn't have Theory of Mind yet. That is, she isn't aware that I'm privy to a different set of information than she is... that I have a mind separate from hers. Theory of Mind generally develops around three to four years old. A similar psychological experiment includes trying to get a child to hide a piece of candy in one of her hands. A child too young doesn't understand what you can and can't see and merely tries to mimic procedure.

Navel out of order

I was giving Elena serious raspberries today on her tummy. I turned to give her another good one and found her belly covered by her hands.

ER: "My navel is closed!"

Scheming... a new era

Elena has, for some time now, been superb about doing her business in the toilet... as long as she's naked. I tried a different tactic today, for fear our daughter would never learn to be clothed. I offered her an additional piece of chocolate if she will go in the toilet even if she has undies on. Her eyes lit up.

Do you think you can do that?
Yes, nodnod.
...
I need to pee!
(hmm...) Ok, honey. You know what to do.
(scampering off...)

She got on the toilet and proceeded to try and grunt and push and heave a poopie out somehow. None came. She looks up at me. "Please leave?"

So you can say you peed when you didn't? And let you become aware that it's possible to do things behind my back? Um, no.

But the day is coming where she's going to pit her skills against ours.

Naming the Animals

Elena got a new stuffed animal lately. It's a replacement monkey for the monkey that Zoe (the boston terrier here) chewed up some time back.

Actually, that's kind of a funny story. That poor monkey had had literally its face chewed off. Elena found the monkey and became really disturbed. "Sick monkey?" Yes, honey. It's a very sick monkey.

So anyway, she's playing with Chimpbert (my monkey -- my employers gave him to me -- he's a code munkey) and her new monkey. A little dialogue ensued:

ER: "Monkey's name Chimpbert."
me: "Yes. What's your monkey's name?"
ER: "Monkey?"
me: "Yes. What's your monkey's name? My monkey's name is Chimpbert. Your monkey's name is..."
ER: "Mbumblatwofunisal"
me: "I'm sorry. What's its name?"
ER: "Barrn"
me: "Barrn?"
ER: "Yeah"
me: "Is Barrn a girl or a boy?"
ER: (confused) "monkey"
me: "Yes Barrn is a monkey..."
ER: "Name is Garin"
me: "What's that?"
ER: "Monkey's name is Garin"
me: "Right. Garin. I'm a boy, you're a girl. Chimbert's a boy. Is Garin a boy or a girl?"
ER: "You're a boy!"
me: "yes..."
ER: "I'm a girl!"
me: "yes..."
ER: "... Chimpbert's a monkey."
me: "Yes. Chimpbert is a boy monkey. Is Garin a boy monkey or a girl monkey?"
ER: "Girl monkey. He's a girl monkey."
me: "OK. She's a girl?"
ER: "Yeah! He's a girl!"
me: (um...)

And a couple days pass and now Garin's a boy. Go figure.

Must... laminate...

I've got to find our laminator. Haven't seen it since the move. There's materials that need made. Specifically, I'm looking to have a picture of something (like a cat) on one card, and then have on another card the label (cat). The vowels are in red of course, like any good Montessori teacher would do. :-)

... Oh. Never mind. It's right there.

Food Gathering Skillz

This girl has some powerful visual recognition going on. And a whopper of a memory. She'll remember where people left things. And she'll pipe up when we're making out the grocery list with things that we were intending to get.

We were out by the macadamia nut trees (the inlaws have three of them). I had the day previously shown her what a macadamia nut looks like in the husk. Most macadamia nut trees will drop their nuts when they're ripe. But you don't look for the nuts themselves, since there's shells like crazy from the thieving squirrels, and if you find one out of its husk, you have no idea how old it is.

Anyway, we were walking out to the trees and she says "I found one!" right away, pointing a ways off down the driveway. Sure enough, one had rolled down there. She remembered what to look for.

A couple days later, we were under the trees and had fairly well combed the ground for nuts. I was pretty confident we had almost all of them. I asked her, "Do you see any more?"
A second passes. "There's one!"

I look at where she's looking. She's looking up into the tree.
"Wait. Where, honey? Show me again."
"Right there!"

I got down so I could look up along her arm to where she was pointing. Sure enough, on a racime about 10 feet in the air were three macadamia nuts growing right on the tree.

Now, macadamia trees are the gangliest, bushiest trees I've seen in a while, and our trees are at the end of this particular round of nuts -- there aren't that many on them right now. Seeing them on the tree is quite difficult, and it doesn't help that the nuts' husks are green. It's much like a Where's Waldo exercise, but worse.

I explained that we weren't taking those because they aren't ready yet.

"Do you see any more?" One second passes. "There's one!"

And she had spotted another such racime, this time with one nut on it.

This happened a couple more times, just as fast. It takes me on average about 30 seconds to do the same thing.

Family Relations

Looking back over what has been posted, I didn't see one story that I thought deserved mention one story missed getting told.

Back a couple months ago, I was in the car with Lee and Loni and Elena, I think for our Mexico trip. Lee and Loni (my inlaws, if you didn't know) were talking about things being passed on through the generations, that I (Erich) might enjoy, my kids, or even my grandkids.

At this point Elena pipes up: "I'm going to have kids?"

My jaw about dropped to the floor. How'd she figure that out??

Order

Elena's showing signs of having developed her need for order, which was supposed to be starting sometime in her second year. She was super excited when I cleaned up her room, she is disturbed if something is keeping her from walking down the usual side of the stairway, she delights in routine, and is enjoying sorting activities.

This, of course, doesn't prevent her from being a human whirlwind, getting out everything in sight.

Carnivores

I was rocking Elena to sleep last week. We were watching Planet Earth. We hadn't seen Planet Earth for several months, so it's a bit fresh for us.

Well, we were watching this wolf chasing down this caribou calf.

ER: What it doing?
me: The wolf is chasing the caribou. He wants to eat it.
(the wolf got the caribou and bit in)
ER: (distressed) What it doing?
me: The wolf is eating the caribou.
ER: Nooo....

Sounding out words

Elena's not quite to the point yet of sounding out words by herself, but she is starting to join me in sounding out words, and she is now starting to find the sounds made by certain letters interesting.

Counting to 10... and beyond!

Yesterday, we were having fun counting her crayons. I discovered that she has now learned how to count to 10 all by herself. She's got 11 and 12 down too, but then forgets 13 and proceeds right on to 14. 15 is right out. After dabbling with 16 and 18, she bounces around the higher double digit numbers and then on into imaginary ones, for I either no longer hear them at that point, or they are a different breed of number than my reality holds.

I'm of no use to her anymore

I was laying on the floor in Elena's room. She comes over with a (empty) paintbrush and starts to doodle on my face. She had about the gentleness of a blender.

She gentled up after telling her. After a minute or so, she was done.

"I'm all done"

"Painting?" I ask.

"With you"

Veloci-raptor attack!

Or speedy raptor anyway.

I've been feeling a bit homesick lately for the Midwest, so I decided to make something for supper last night that was a staple for me growing up: tuna casserole. This has no relevance to the story, but in blogs you're allowed to be irrelevant.

We were outside, peaceably eating our dinner, watching the hummingbirds over the workshop and the other birds by the feeder. Then all the sudden we saw this big hawk (pretty sure it was a hawk of some sort) come in real low around the side of the workshop. After trying to snatch one of the birds off the perch of the birdfeeder and failing, the hawk and its quarry race off... right toward us! They flew right over our table!

I have an account!

I finally went and registered myself with blogspot.

This is news enough around here. Serena's been pushing me to do this for a while.

Overheard today...

"I'm not an elephant, I'm Elena!"

poor worms...

So, without thinking, I left the worm house where you see it in the picture instead of putting it in the shade. A number of worms tried desperately to escape from the heat, only to dehydrate and die on the pavement (Out of the frying pan into the fire?). But there's still plenty in the house. You can also tell it's hot in there for them because the worms were all concentrated along the edges. Apparently, when it's cold out, they'll move toward the middle because it's warmer there. That is, if it ever gets cooler here.

But it may happen! Today was the first day where the high was below 90F since we moved here! If we can get below 30C, I'll be a happy camper.

Worms!

Pictured is Elena with our new vermicomposting tray system. It is now set up and filled with worms! For those of you who are interested, here's a description of the process:

The worm house came with a block of coconut coir about five inches on a side. This is fibres from coconut all pressed together into a brick. We soaked this and it ballooned out to fill a large kitchen bowl. This is part of the worm "bedding." In the future, we'll be using shredded paper for bedding. We had also saved a small kitchen trash can full of kitchen scraps (vegetable peelings, etc). We mixed the scraps with the coir (squeezed out), plus a few handfulls of dirt (supposedly to seed our system with the bacteria that aid in decomposition). Then we added the worms, who swiftly climbed away from the light and into the scraps and bedding.

In the picture are only two trays of the five we have. Hopefully, the worms will process the food in the lowest tray for a while, then move up to the tray above where we will have added more food for them. The idea is that by the time we have put scraps on the top tray, the material in the bottom tray will be ready to harvest and relatively free of worms.

In with the scraps were some white larvae (of flies, I think). Most of them were in a little colony under the scraps bucket (there was a crack on the bottom where things leaked out), but I'm sure some of them got into the worm system. Does anyone know whether these are problematic?

Elena enjoyed the whole process, but she really doesn't like being dirty. She helped me squeeze some of the coir, but every time she immediately wanted her hands washed ("Mama, wash my hands!". She tolerated holding a worm for about three seconds before she wanted it out of her hand. These must be Erich's genes. With her interpersonal sensitivity, her ability to "behave" as the only child at an adult dinner party, her dislike for touching bugs and dirt, never mind the blond hair and taller-than-average stature... If I hadn't seen her emerge from my body, I'd wonder if she were related to me!

Our morning conversation

ER: "Mama?"
me: "Yes, Elena?"
ER: "Don't eat my poopie."
me: "Okay. I won't."

ER: "Papa?"
me: "What about Papa?"
ER: "Papa don't eat my poopie."
me: "I'll let him know."