Parental Praise

I was worried that becoming a stay at home mum, I would miss the praise (however minimal) I got at work. So far today, I've been told "good job, Mummy" for pouring cereal and I got a standing ovation after going potty. Not too shabby if I do say so myself.

I posted this on Facebook. I got 129 "Likes" - if you know what that means and 1 apology from a past employer! Tim Metzer said: I'm sorry I didn't visit that often to tell you what a good job you were doing. Sounds like your "current" employer is doing a real good job at letting you know how you are doing. I told him that he told me I was doing a good job as often as I deserved it :) No arguing that my current "employer" is cute, but she's not as good as he was at witty banter.

Apparently a few people felt the same way?

Cadadoo!

For a few months now, one of Teagan's favourite activities has been to tell us to sleep and wake us up like a rooster. She can't quite spit out COCKADOODLEDOO, but CADADOO gets the message across. She'll tell Daddy to "sweep" then it's Mummy's turn to "sweep" and usually next comes "Teagan turn."

It's funny when we're at home and it's planned, but Brandon has an uncanny ability to fall asleep anywhere at the drop of a hat. It hasn't happened yet, but I'm waiting to hear CADADOO at church. She's told him to wake up several times, and perhaps she senses that a rooster doesn't belong in church. *knock on wood*

Tongue workin' overtime.

Teagan's doing really well learning the alphabet. Every so often I'll hear her singing the ABC's to herself and it melts my heart. For the most part she's pronouncing most letters properly (with the exception of Rs which I think is pretty common) but she is focusing on giving "L" her all lately.

"Crayon" is one of my favourite words that she says, and I coaxed her into saying it on video. It's more than a little shaky, so I don't know whether you'll get the full effect, but just watch for her tongue jumping out of her mouth when she says CRAY-LON:

Other words that she seems to get tongue tied over: stroLLer, MuLan, NanareLLA. It's precious. And a word of note, though it doesn't feature an L is Teagan's version of yogurt: nogurt. Cracks me up.

Tea for Three

Our sweet neighbours, The Statens, bought Teagan a Rapunzel tea set for her 2nd birthday and she loves it - shocker! She started out content to pretend to drink, but I had the genius (read: stupid) idea to give her some water to play around with once and there's been no going back. You might think that this means I'm lightening up, and I'm not as worried about messes. Think again.

 

Poor T is resigned to beach tea parties - that is, on a beach towel in the kitchen. Please don't judge me. When I'm sitting in the middle of pile of laundry for a family of 6, I'm sure I'll look back on this and laugh. But for now, we'll all have to settle on this compromise.

She doesn't seem to mind. And her favourite guest so far? Her daddy. You'd think he was the English one, raised pinky and everything. The man can hold his own at a tea party. So proud.

Little Miss Manners

I'll have to confirm with Guinness, but I may have the world's most polite two year old. Her vocabulary is increasing exponentially, but the words she uses most seem to be "pease", "dand you", "shoory" and "wowcome" (please, thank you, sorry and you're welcome, in case you didn't catch it).

We inherited a series of 12 phonics books featuring Dora the Explorer from a great friend. She loved reading them for the first week or two, but now she's moved on to stacking them instead. But not before having me hand her the dozen books individually. Once she's created her literary tower, she passes them back to me. One by one. By one. It's some of the most tedious playtimes I've ever experienced, but the saving grace is the dialogue.

As I pass them to her:

"Pease."

"Dand you."

"You're welcome."

12 times over.

Once she has them all stacked, she cautions me to be "Cayful!" And then she passes them to me:

"Please."

"Thank you."

"Wahcome." (I keep thinking she's about to say waka waka. One day.)

x 12

If got bored reading this, try living it. Over. And over. And over. I suppose I should be glad that she's using her manners. Correctly. She doesn't always get it right. Take last week for example:

Mummy after Teagan broke wind: "What do we say when we toot?"
Teagan: "Thank you."
 
Manners are confusing.

No idea where she gets it.

Whenever I turn my back, she's pulling out all of her movies and...organizing them.

When she's finished reading a book, she places it on a neatly stacked pile of other books. And if they aren't lined up exactly, she says " careful!" No joke.

And yes, she reads each Dora book exactly the same way:

"Hi! I'm Dora! Ready to help? Great! blah blah blah" then usually something about "Swiper no swiping!" In this particular story, Dora dresses as Red Riding Hood, so Teagan mentions Riding Hood no fewer than four times on one page.
But I digress. She's hit and miss when it comes to cleanliness and organization (ahem, throwing everything out of her crib to let me know she's ready to come out) but we have a start. A scary, compulsive start.

A Child's Prayer

Until a couple of days ago, Teagan had absolutely no interest in saying prayers. Sure, she's fold her arms and close her eyes, but refused to repeat after me. She's started to say words as I'm saying them

Tonight she said her very own prayer for the very first time.

Something about "day"

Something about "potty"

Something about "baby" - Even though she's just repeating what we've been saying, to hear her pray for a new baby melted my heart and brought me to tears.

So sweet to know that she HAS been listening for months and was taking it all in. I'm so looking forward to hearing her continue to pray and add things that she feels are important as she gets older. I can't believe how fast she's growing up.

Puddin' Painting. Take II.

Daddy working another Saturday + needing a bath anyway = Puddin' Paintin'. It was a lot more successful (read: messy) than our last attempt  in June of last year:

She started off a little reluctantly, but once she saw me eat some, she dug in. Things got a little boring, so I painted a Three Musketeers mustache and goatee on her to get things going. Then she tried to paint her nose and her nostrils are still blue. So much mess. So much fun. What else are you going to do when poor Daddy (the fun one) has to work?

Rough Nights, Good Mornin's

For as long as I can remember, I've sung "Good Mornin'" from Singin' in the rain to Teagan every morning when I go into her room to get her out of the crib. She usually jumps around and claps her hands while I'm singing and turning off nightlights and noise machines and opening curtains. Today she surprised me. She sang with me. Technically speaking, she sang it after me, but it was such an amazing surprise.

And to think, I almost wasn't going to sing it to her out of spite because I was grumpy about her not sleeping in after a particularly restless night.

I'm not sure where the switch is that flipped, making Teagan avoid sleep like the plague, but I NEED to find it. <eye twitches>  Gone are the days when we laid her down and she rolled over, whispering "Good night" immediately before nodding off for 14 continuous hours. Sigh. A girl who made sleeping a hobby is now an insomniac who fights it until the bitter end. I don't remember exactly when it started, but it's been weeks now that we're all up three and four times a night. The weird thing is that all she seems to need is some love and attention. One of us goes in, picks up all the things she's thrown out of her crib in a fit of rage, wraps her up in a blanket, shoves a binky in her mouth and sits down in the rocking chair. Usually by this time, she's already ridiculously close to being asleep. We sit in the rocking chair, swaying back and forth, me struggling to contain her unusually tall body in my arms. In a few minutes, she's fast asleep and we tuck her in for a couple of hours until she shrieks once more. Lately she's been making a game of it and pretending to be asleep. She appears to be out like a light, and I'll look down at her and her eyes are wide open. It's creepy and funny at the same time. It takes an incredible amount of will power not to laugh out loud. Somehow, the fact that it's 3:00 in the morning helps me hold back my chuckles. When she isn't surprising me with her huge baby blues, she's reaching out from her ramshackle swaddle and stroking my face. It would be sweet if it wasn't the wee hours. Okay, in spite of the fact that it's so early it hurts, it melts my heart.

While I much prefer to see her smiling little face in the daylight, I have to remember that she won't always be this little and she won't always need me so I'm trying to do my best to enjoy our little snugglefests. A work in progress, to be sure. I hope she doesn't give me too many more opportunities to embrace the moment.

"Freckle" Face

How Teagan would look if she had freckles...and freckles were made of cilantro. It's safe to say she enjoyed our Thai Pesto.

The Littlest Laundress

Teagan has really gotten into helping me with laundry lately. Considering the fact that our laundry increased exponentially with her birth, I'm happy to accept the help. 

She loves to push the buttons, but before we get there she has to help me load. I pulled the clothes out of the washing machine, made sure we could dry them (with the way we're growing, we can't afford to shrink some things) and handed them to her to transfer to the dryer. She said "thank you" for EVERY SINGLE ARTICLE of clothing I handed her. The British in her, my Mum claims. We're nothing if not polite. 

It was so cute that I could almost forgive her for pulling out a pair of my pants and gasping "So big!" Almost.

Pooping ON the Potty - GRAPHIC

I still wouldn't say that we're potty training. More like potty training pre-training. Just getting her comfortable with the idea and getting familiar with how it works. She's been sitting on the potty (very demurely, I might add) on and off with mixed results. 

 

She sat and watched a movie with us sans pants on the potty and did something none of us expected: she pooped on the potty! Like, ON the potty. Not quite sure how it happened, but I was extra impressed.