Tuesday, September 30

Picnic Lunch

Peanut butter sandwiches and an artichoke in the park: Matilda's ideal lunch.
This question comes from one of Matilda's recent favorites from the library, Are You My Mother?

Here Matilda is being generous with the numerous starlings eying our lunch. We also had the company of several woodpeckers that Matilda was pretending to throw bugs off her insect quilt to.

Saturday, September 27

2.5 Year Update

Despite numerous colds, Matilda somehow managed to stay healthy enough that she hadn't seen her pediatrician since the last well-child check-up in March. M was highly anticipating our visit to Dr. K yesterday and did great for all the prodding and poking. Matilda always becomes so still while with Dr. K, observing her every move and soaking it all in and quietly doing whatever is asked of her for the exam. Matilda even took her flu shot like a pro, just sitting still and watching as the nurse inserted the syringe into her arm, but never cried or got upset.  It was astounding to witness.  As we left the office, M recounted it all many times and stated it hurt, but never really complained.

Current Stats for our big, tall girl:
Weight: 29 lbs; 4.2 pounds more than in March, 50 percentile weight for age. The extra weight seems most apparent to me when pushing the jogging stroller lately. 

Height: 36"; 3" taller than March, 50 percentile height for age. This means she can now ride the kiddie coaster at Disney! Her height seems to show most in the tee shirt department as they all look too short to me recently, like mid-drift shirts.  

Other random bits I want to remember about Matilda lately:
  • Tim & I have clearly done a good job of providing praise and positive feedback to this kid. She is so self-congratulatory and will declare, "Good job, Matilda! Yay, Matilda!" after even the smallest achievement. She is getting really good at writing the letter M but after each one, legible or not, she will point to it and say "Perfect M!" 
  • She is overly concerned with everyone's emotional state recently. She'll ask multiple times a day, "Mama's feeling happy? Daddy's feeling sad?" This has been going on for a few weeks now, but this past week it has moved beyond just Tim & I and she asks about other family and friends now at random. I am somehow always compelled to call whoever she seems to think is feeling sad, as if M has some psychic connection I need to verify. 
  • Matilda started to sing this month. She has always loved music and we listen to music throughout everyday but until recently she would never singalong. It is so fun now to finally hear her little voice singing in the backseat or joining us for bedtime songs. Many of the songs she'll sing she knows in their entirety. It makes me feel like she's already a little type A perfectionist who wouldn't sing until she had it all worked out in her head. 
  • Spanish has been more and more of interest to Matilda lately. Not only does she want to know more Spanish words, but she can accurately identify when someone else is speaking Spanish. The funnier part is that she will also claim someone is speaking Spanish if she hears them speaking accented English, any kind of accent. When Martin & Kamay arrived last week, speaking British English, she immediately accused Kamay of speaking Spanish.
  • She still speaks in the 3rd person.  "Matilda do it by her own self" is her mantra of late. 

Thursday, September 25

Disguises

I feel like I've been posting too little lately but there's nothing much going on to report. This week has been filled with lots of quiet days at home since we've all had a cold. Consequently we've been increasingly creative with keeping M entertained without excursions, resulting in some goofing off.  

Two nights ago the only way we could get M to brush teeth without throwing a huge fit was in her Harry Potter glasses. The problematic/gross part was that every time she would lean in to spit out toothpaste the glasses would fall into the sink and get spit on. Yet she would insist on putting them back on before we continued. 
Yesterday Tim came home early from work to nurse his cold so I split my time between chicken soup prep and creative projects to keep M from climbing all over Tim on the couch. Much entertainment was had with these homemade, tin foil "bracelets of victory" a la Wonder Woman. 

Sunday, September 21

Birthday Fun

Matilda decided she wanted to eat the white chocolate sign on my cake today and we said, "Why not?" She's been sick with a little cold and we figured anything to keep her happy while all the company was here. In no time flat she had devoured the entire chocolate piece and we are still trying to settle her for bed now, three hours later. She has been all charged up and is currently cracking up to a bedtime story Slinky Malinky, her new favorite book from Martin & Kamay. 

Friday, September 19

Apple Pickin'

During our quickie trip to Ithaca we managed to squeeze in some major fall appreciation with a trip to our favorite u-pick orchard, Littletree. It was everything I remembered and Matilda enjoyed it as much as I had anticipated.

Heading down into the orchard on a gorgeous (gorges!) fall day. Picking her first apple. Sharing a bite with Daddy. We all ate too many apples to count while in the orchard.
So happy with her haul. She was also quite pleased to see turkeys and butterflies and to pick lots of goldenrod in the orchard. A perfect outing in Matilda's mind I think. We capped it all off with a big cheers for delicious, fresh, unpasteurized apple cider.

Wednesday, September 17

Photo Overload

We have so many pictures and stories to share from Brian's wedding I can't quite figure out where to start so I am just going to start by posting a bunch of my favorites.  

Here's Bri getting dressed, you can see it takes a lot of help: 
Matilda also seems to need some assistance in the dressing department! Her dress was too big for all the car seat buckles so she was riding around in only her fancy new wedding shoes.   
I like this one of Bri chatting with Matilda in the church before the service starts. 
Walking back up the aisle at the end. I was sighing a big breath of relief as Matilda did pretty well during the ceremony. She provided a constant stream of chatter with her play by play, but wasn't too loud and most of the folks sitting near us seemed entertained. The most memorable comment came as she watched me speak at the podium midway through the service. I came back to our pew to find the other bridesmaids in hysterics because M has been saying "Mommy's naked, Mommy's naked." Apparently she coudn't see any of my dress from behind the podium! 
For the professional photographer I think Brian behaved, but for Tim in this shot my brother couldn't resist his typical funny faces. 
Matilda gets down with the bride in her gorgeous red reception dress. 


Tuesday, September 16

Home & Settling

So we are home and trying to cope with the time change. Matilda fell asleep as we took off from Phoenix last night at 6:30 and never woke up until 5 am this morning. Lots of great pictures to sort through but here is one Cathy managed to get up already. It is the three of us on the dance floor at Bri & Gia's wedding - M still claims dancing was her favorite part of the wedding. I think my favorite was the cookie train.....details to come. 

Tuesday, September 9

Pony Ride

After 2.5 years we finally took Matilda to ride the ponies in Griffith Park. We decided to start off with the tame, ponies on a wheel option, but I think next time she'll be ready to graduate to the ponies running free around the oval track.

Monday, September 8

Hula Hula

Adam & Alwyn brought Matilda this adorable souvenir of their Hawaii vacation. She tested it out with some dancing, some ukulele playing and some bed bouncing. She seemed to find the bed bouncing part most satisfying as it made her grass skirt fly and spin nicely. She is currently telling me that she wants to be Superman for Halloween, but if that falls through at least we have a back up costume!

Saturday, September 6

Wedding Cake

Sarah & Gaurav humored us all with a really great cake cutting/cake feeding session.Woo hoo! They did it! Congrats again, guys. Note Matilda's proximity to the action; she was really concerned with when we would finally get to eat the cake.

Body Art

In an effort to get the cake ready for Sarah & Gaurav's top secret wedding yesterday, I allowed Matilda to use markers. Markers are considered a special treat by M since they require near constant supervision so we rarely bring them out. My compromise was that she could use them while locked into her highchair. After a few minutes of frosting I heard Matilda exclaim loudly, "Matilda's a LEOPARD!"

Friday, September 5

Somebody's Getting Married!



Thanks for reminding us all of this Rachel, it is the perfect theme to be running through my head this morning!

Thursday, September 4

Camping Food


Growing up we did a lot of camping and our family had strict rules about camping food: Salted peanut chews are camping cookies, not to be made for any other occasion. When you cook sausage while camping, it must have peaches and cinnamon added. Make your brown bears (a marshmallow-y s'more alternative with peaches, butter and cinnamon) in empty, cut beer can bottoms is if you've forgotten your tin foil. Fancy chocolate is usually best, but when camping,  Hershey's is the gold standard for s'mores. 

Everyone knows that food (any kind of food) always tastes better when you are camping. I think it must be due to some intangible combination of the hard work you put into preparing it, hunger from all that hard play, waiting around smelling your food on the campfire, and all that fresh air coming together to make it perfect. I love camp cooking and it is so fantastic to now be creating camping memories for my own daughter. Although as you can see in the video she clearly has some opinions for changes to our tradition.



Of course, the meal eaten out on our drive home from camping always tastes fantastic too. Here Matilda is all red faced from our hot hike, devouring her fruit cup and peanut butter sandwich at the Mt. Whitney Restaurant in Lone Pine, CA.

Wednesday, September 3

Painting

I finally broke out our new stash of paints yesterday and Matilda had a very prolific painting session. She took a yoga painting break mid-session. At one point she decided that she would rather paint herself, which led to a very purple ring around the tub for our post-painting bath.