Spring has sprung

It's my favorite time of year at work: baby goose time! I saw my first today; soon there will be lines of them following their parents across campus, through parking lots, tumbling into and struggling (adorably) up the banks of the ponds on campus.

Mandatory Mittens?

I could use advice. Turns out that this sweet and sunny girl, this snugglebug, this adorable creature, has a dark side.

She's a gouger. She'll cut you, she'll cut you bad.

For several weeks now Lulu's taken to grabbing faces and in the worst case, scratching and drawing blood. It's very hard to figure out -- sometimes (less frequently), it's apparently out of anger or frustration. But more often, it seems to be just fun (tickling on the bed, she gets over-excited), or exploring (just to see our reaction), or totally inexplicable. She gets "gentle" and she can definitely use "gentle touches" when prompted to do it, but sometimes...she just doesn't. Doesn't want to? Doesn't know to? Doesn't care? I don't know.

We don't know what to do. At daycare, they first tried to "use their words" with her -- explain that when she does that, it hurts other people, and it's not nice, etc. Lulu = oblivious. (Her language skills aren't up to that level of discussion, I think.)

Now they're trying what seems like a modified time out -- removing her and sitting her across the room while they tend to the other kid, although not making her stay there for any period of time. Their theory is that she really craves adult interaction, so removing her and ignoring her briefly will reinforce the negative consequences. So far it hasn't solved the problem; she had another incident yesterday which seemed more like the "exploring" type of scratching, not the anger/frustration kind.

When she's scolded or corrected at home, she immediately bursts into tears -- she knows what it means to misbehave and hates the consequences. It doesn't seem to stop her, though.

So, advice? Mandatory mittens?

Lucy Busts a Move

From the looks of things, this move may have been busted before Lucy ever got her hands on it. She loves that Dora the Explorer. And lately, she loves dancing. Dancing like a little dork. Enjoy.

PS. Melissa is not happy that I'm "taking over the blog." She says "hi, blog friends." She also says she doesn't like sandwiches. What is up with that?

Visual Poetry by RSS feed: wordle.net

Thanks to Aunt Alice for this cool looking art from an amazing web application I'd never seen before: wordle.net. Wordle creates poetic mash-ups of text, either entered on their site or linked from any site with a feed. The piece here is from a blog entry where M and I were just leaving for Vietnam to get Lucy, nearly 2 years ago.

wordle.net

Little Cutie at the Park

Oh, our adorable little goof ball. We could not love her more.

Rockin' out!

Seriously!!

How about a quick update, while we're at it (mostly for my benefit as I quickly shed brain cells like rats off a sinking ship):

Personality: this kid is, quite literally happy almost all the time. She's loving and sweet and funny. I don't think we've ever had a real full-blown temper tantrum (I think I'd know if we had, right). She gets grumpy, and waking up from naps on weekends, if she even takes one, is prime grump time. But otherwise, seriously happy.

Sleep: mostly good, mostly 7:30 to 6:00 or so. When she hurts (my god, those teeth are still coming in!), it can be less than good -- then, on a "good" bad night, it's just one or two wakeups resolved with a quick hug and cuddle, and on a "bad" bad night, it's up and crying for an hour or more. As I've whined about ad nauseum, bad/no naps on weekends, but 1 to 2 hours at daycare with no problems.

Food: eats well. Less flinging. Not quite dexterous with silverwear; she eats about half each meal with fingers still. Vegetarian. Likes all veggies (especially peas, butternut squash), most fruit, cottage cheese, cheese, soy milk, pasta, popcorn, jelly beans, yogurt.

Language: still almost all single words, not very advanced at all. I was typing up a list; I think she's using about 40-50 words or so regularly. New ones include "cheese" (accompanied by a teeth-gritting grin), "mine," and "mouse" (thanks, Goodnight Moon!). This, now that we've mostly conquered mobility, is the last big delay to overcome.

Play: more and more into pretend play with dolls or kitchen stuff, very cute. Apparently the pics above were Day Two with clay; yesterday she played with it for about 25 minutes -- a big deal; she usually flits from amusement to amusement in 5 minute increments.

And obviously, she LOVES her daycare more than I could have ever hoped.

Daahhling!

Don't hate me because I'm beautiful...