Beth has gone home for Christmas but Jack still has tests and a paper due, so I am home all day with the girls, and today was lovely.
I made gluten free blueberry muffins with zucchini baked in. I turned on the oven light so Clara could see the muffins baking, and she responded "I...want...muffins!" I got one of her kiddie spoons and gave her a small spoonful of the muffin batter, and she couldn't stop giggling as she ate it and stomped around the kitchen. I gave her two more spoonfuls after that and enjoyed her delight and my own childhood memories of Mom letting us lick the spoons when she was baking. So surreal to think now I'm the mom.
Not long after the muffins were done baking and cooling, the huge trash truck came to get our apartment complex's dumpsters. Clara loves watching the trash truck (even though she keeps calling it a cement truck), and she sat on the toy box in the nursery and watched the trash truck do it's job while she happily ate one of the muffins.
I tried not to have her watching videos all day, and one of the best ways to distract her from the computer is with books. She "read" me Hello Ninja while I sat on the floor holding Jane in her sitting up position. At this point I can tell what Clara is trying to say on every page, and I repeat the phrases back to her and then she goes to the next page. She also spent a long time looking at one of our Christmas books, Fair's Fair, presumably because it has a lot of pictures of a big black dog. And right before nap time I read her the pop up zoo book (the title of which escapes me), If Kisses Were Colors, But Not The Hippopotamus, and A Time For Everything. As long as I let her hold the books and turn the pages, she's fine with me reading them to her. She gets really excited at the end of But Not The Hippopotamus when I ready, "But YES the hippopotamus!" Haha.
She's started doing this thing in the evening where she runs up to either Jack or me with a big grin on her face and says "I'm gonna get-chu!" before running away from us and trying to get us to chase her. Tonight I chased her from the living room to our bedroom maybe half a dozen times, each time grabbing her and throwing her on the bed and tickling her. She laughed so hard, and it was not a bad workout for me either. Each time I ran back into the living room I'd hide around a corner, either toward the kitchen or toward the front door. It would have been impressive if Clara had noticed that Jane was staring at me and grinning from her high chair, completely giving away my position. Clara would cautiously peek around one corner or the other, and sometimes I'd startle her and she'd squeal and run away. Very sweet. Later in the evening she and Jack played the same game, only he carried Jane with him back and forth as he chased Clara, and when he hid around a corner he'd peek Jane's head out to look at Clara. It was hilarious.
We're starting to play pretend more. Whenever we play with Clara's fake food she wants to go find her doll Debbie and have me have Debbie "feed" herself and then feed Clara in turns. Sometimes we'll include other stuffed animals like the zebra, but no matter who is involved Clara can't stop smiling and giggling each time Debbie "eats" some of the food and then offers the spoon to Clara.
I also showed Clara how her little dalmation finger puppet fits perfectly in the engine of her duplo train, and she was thrilled about that. For a while tonight I sat on the floor and made the train "chug" around the living room only to brake right in front of Clara. Clara would open the engine, take the dalmation finger puppet out, put it back in and say "Dog in the train!" as her signal to me to have the train depart again. Then I'd say "Alllll aboard!" and chug the train around again. Clara would lie on her tummy on the floor and watch; I think she was trying to get as close as possible to eye level with the dog engineer. When it circled past Clara I'd tell her to say, "Hi dog!" and she did and she giggled and giggled. (Jane was also hanging out on the living room floor a couple feet away, and she watched this entire process in fascination as we repeated it maybe 5-6 times.) Watching Clara get psyched about these things helps me remember what it was like to play pretend as a kid.
I get stressed about not being able to work because we need the money, but it is a nice trade off to get to spend so much time with my kids and to see things from their view.
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