Still Tiny but super smart.

   About a week or so a go, probably longer, my Scary smart daughter was messing with the buttons on the TV.  She's almost two and buttons are fascinating. After already telling her 5 or six times to stop I go in and remove her from the TV point at her and tell her to listen to momma, and stop pushing buttons. Well she raised that angelic little head, stomped her darling little toesies, jabbed a cute little finger in my face and bellowed "NO!" I had to try so hard not to laugh.
   Right on the heels of her telling me off, we are now both in the living room, me checking a text, her playing quietly. Slowly she goes and picks up her doll, Baby (creative name right?) and starts to inch her way back over to the TV. As i sit there watching her, she takes baby's hand and reaches it out and pushes the button on the cable box. "Georgina!" I say, "No buttons! Get away from there." Startled she runs back over to where I am, baby in tow, and looks over at baby in shock "Baby!" She says pointing, "Bad baby!" she now scolds her toy. Seriously, it's hard to be mad at this child.

    George is getting to clever for my own good, shes a schemer. Like her father. Sometimes it's a bit of a problem, other times its awesome! The other day while playing with her dad she took a magnetic letter "i" from the fridge, showed her dad, plamed it, put both hands behind her back, dropped it, opened her hands to show her dad. "Go?" she asked. My baby does magic.
   Another example of her scheming ways, would be earlier this week while playing with her Grandma. And I mean some hardcore manic pillow and tickle fight running crazy. She looks up at me panting, "Water?" So I grab her a sippy cup (note, not a spill proof cup) and hand it to her. She promptly takes it and upends it over my Moms head while giggling mechanically. I swear shes a little bit evil.
  She's also wicked smart, she can now sing good chunks of the ABC's, she can recite her numbers to 10. She doesn't really understand what she's doing, but shes got the words memorized. And she can recognize and identify a few letters. "H" and "W" being our favorites.  She can identify a few shapes and colors. And sing a handful of nursery rhymes. She can I dentify a ton of animals and tell you what they say. For example, a bear says " Wakka Wakka!" (Did I mention our love of the Muppet show?) Also in the Vein of the Muppets, George has memorized big chunks of Rainbow Connection, which she sings to herself over and over. I finally got some video! Please ignore my husbands interuption during "The lovers the dreamers and me" she sings so often he didn't realize I was taping, the Jerk.

 

Ittsy Bittsy Teeny Weeny...

   Right from day one George has been a little girl, measuring on the very bottom of all the charts. She is still very tiny, Weighing in at about 18lbs and standing just over two feet, the bottom eighth percentile for weight and bottom twelfth for height. Like I said Itty Bitty. This in itself rarely causes problems, other than fact that her pants often fall down. Otherwise she is bright and active. She walks, she talks, she even does a couple of tricks. She is a well rounded, little, girl. Last Friday I had my first real encounter with another parent where Georgie's size was a problem.

    We swim twice a week, Lethbridge doesn't have a lot of indoor activities for wee ones to run about. This particular pool has a nice wading pool that's rather warm and has a little slide. Well a bit over a week ago George discovered that she really loves the slide, and that she can do it all by herself. She rarely lets me help. She can climb out of the water in the deep end (about a foot and a half deep) walk over to the bottom of the slide, climb up the three steps, and slide down. As long as I'm there to catch her it's all good. She is however not quite eighteen months old yet so although she can do all this on her own, she's not overly coordinated and still learning. on one try she climbed to the top of the slide, tried to sit down and completely missed the step, she fell backwards off the slide onto the foam matting. George was obviously upset, I think surprised more than hurt. I scooped her up and started to walk away from the slide, when she abruptly stopped crying, signed and said "More" while pointing back at the slide. I put her down on top of it, she slid down happy as could be, climbed out and started all over again. She hasn't missed that step since.

      Last Friday was considerably more busy than it been in a while. There was a rather large number of kids Georgie's age and up, a lot of them in the wading pool, a lot of them playing on the slide. as usual George wanted to slide and slide and slide, But being that there were so many kids I was hesitant to let her go, as she doesn't really understand lines ans waiting her turn, so instead we watched other kids play and flirted with some little boys (Seriously, she's going to be such a problem) When there was finally a lull in activity, most kids had been hauled off to the bigger pool by bored parents, George and I set ourselves up to play on the slide. After a couple of trips up and down, the little pool started to fill up again, and other children started to line up behind George, who was almost at the top. Again you must remember that George is only 18 months old and easily distracted and little kids don't always understand personal space, the line up growing (On the stairs, practically on top of George) became a bit of a stress for my toddler, she stopped climbing to try and figure out what on Earth was going on. Seeing a problem starting to develop I called to her and encouraged her to keep moving. Hesitantly she started to go again, but apparently not fast enough for the Dad waiting to help his little girl down the slide. Without consulting George or myself, He promptly scooped George up plopped her down and gave her an encouraging nudge down the slide before (Heavily) assisting his own daughter down.

     I was stunned. George was stunned. Neither of us really knew how to react, so we slid away from the slide and sat in stunned silence for a few minutes until the slide cleared again and George could once again return to the play that she so loved. I was ticked off, clearly this man had thought I was a bad parent, he had shot me quit the look while "helping" George, and I had reacted poorly. I simply had no response to his "helping" my daughter. I try and be a bit hands off when it comes to play, particularly when George doesn't need or want my help. She's brave and smart and fully capable, so sometimes I sit back and let her explore her limitations without restricting her to what I think she should be able to do at her age, she'll prove me wrong every time. It's not the end of the world if she gets a little scared, or falls and gets a bruise, she'll learn and get right back up and try again.

    As we were playing on the empty slide, the wife of the man brought their little girl up to play as well. She and I started to chat a bit as George successfully navigated the stairs and flew down into the pool giggling all the way. She asked me how old George was, I told her. Not uncommonly she was shocked, George is the size of an 12month old. "Did you hear that?" she called to her husband, "She's 18 months!" He also looked shocked, I asked how old their little one was. She laughed, "18 months". 18 months with a tiny vocabulary and needing a lot of assistance up and down that slide. I felt vindicated, clearly this man had thought George was much much younger than she was, and not only that but my kid (who's technically 17 1/2 months) was doing things their kid can't. My Kid Rocks!

    George is way to damn smart, she can walk run and climb with the best of them, She has started to string together words, she can match, she can tell you what she wants and say please and thank you when she gets it, she can lie (more like fib) she can walk backwards. She is Brave and clever, she is empathetic, she constantly amazes me. George is is teeny tiny, and we are going to run into problems like this for a while. Hopefully I'll have a better response next time it happens

High River Day 1.

Trying to blog off your phone kinda blows. George and I are in high river this week. I went out and forgot that the laptop would be locked in the room with a sleeping baby when I for home, so here I lay, fighting with a smart phone. It's not impossible to blog like this, just inconvenient. After breakfast, George and I said goodbye to Steve, and took off to High River for the week. The wind was super scary bad on the highway. So I drove 80 moat of the way. George slept. Once we reached my mom and dads house we hooked up with my Auntie E and took off for lunch. Where George got spoiled rotten. Sorry guys, I can't do this, my thumb is getting le tired. I will do a for real post in the morning

Movember.

        Today is Remembrance day, you'd think I'd post about that. But honestly I've nothing really to say about it. It is what it is. I've been to War Memorials, Concentration camps and several of the landing beaches from WWII. The wars were tragic, and what those men and women went through for us was awful. Going to those places really opened my eyes about Remembrance day and what it means for all of us. But being that I didn't do anything today that relates to Remembrance day, I'm not going to post about it.

        Instead I'm going to post about Movember. The month where all of the men I know grow facial hair to raise money for cancer research. The problem being that really about 50% of the men I know participate in this making it really hard to choose who to donate money to. I know all the money goes to the same place in the end, but still you want your friends to feel like they are contributing and will hopefully do it again next year. It's like High School all over again! Trying to pick the right group to back. Fortunately my father is participating and I'm mostly broke, so he wins, and will get my donation this year. Tra-la.

       But even though I can grow a spectacular mustache nor can George, that doesn't mean we can't get into the spirit of the thing. So today we did this...

 

        If you haven't donated yet and are wondering who, what, and where to donate please click here  and make a donation to my Dad and his team. At some point cancer touches us all, please donate today. Plus if a super cute baby can grow an epic awesome stache to help out, you can probably chip in a couple of bucks...just saying...

Ya, I've no idea what I'm doing.

     So I had a topic that I was going to blog about but apparently my brain is mush and a bit leaky, meaning I've no clue as to what that topic was going to be. But as I'm participating in NaBloPoMO I need to type something up here.

    Also I desperately need some new glasses. My prescription is shot and I'm mostly blind.
    So in loo of a post here are a couple of Georgie's favorite music videos. Enjoy! There are others more along the Sesame Street line that she watches with her dad, but shes helping me with this making it hard to do to much.   

   She's Punk Rock today. I'll post again if I remember what I was going to blog about.

Snow, books, and teeth

        Last night mother nature deemed it necessary to pull out her paint brush and paint us a winter wonderland to enjoy. The only problem is she forgot to stop. It started with rain yesterday morning and turned to snow in the afternoon, then it snowed harder, and it's still snowing. Between Steve and I the walks have been shoveled 5 times today. I also shoveled most of my neighbors walk as she lives alone and has an enormous corner lot, with two driveways, its the weirdest house.

         Normally George and I would have gone swimming this morning, but after our adventure driving daddy to work, we decided it was best to be home bodies today. We did brave the elements to give Steve a ride in today, as Lethbridge bus service is kinda terrible when the weather turns. By 8:15 am neither Scenic drive  or Whoop-up had been plowed (two of the busiest roads in the city) Needless to say I was unimpressed.

          Being home bodies turned out to be pretty nice. I was able to keep on top of the walks, and not have to many people pack down the snow making it hard to shovel. George got two good naps in, which doesn't always happen if we're running about. And George and I cuddled on the couch and read books.

       Actually we read four books, over and over and over. Fortunately they were some of her better books. The Paper Bag Princess, a couple of Sandra Boynton books, and a super fun book called What the Ladybird Heard which is this super cute book in which a ladybug, with the help of some farm animals, foils a plot to steal the prize winning cow. The best part being that it Rhymes and has a pretty good beat, so you can really get going to the rhythm. Making it just as much fun for me to read and it is for George to listen to. The only problem is, the book is English, as in from the UK. Which in itself isn't a problem, but if you don't have an English accent then some of the rhymes don't really work. For example,

But the Ladybird had a good idea
And she whispered into each animal ear

    Which sorta works, but if we were in the UK where most words ending with an "a" are pronounced "er". For example you'll often hear it pronounced Afric-er as apposed  Africa. I know it's just a silly little thing but being as I've read the book probably ten times today I've been stumbling over that one a lot.

      For whatever reason George was in a pretty good mood today, which means she sat nicely in her high chair, after finishing lunch, and allowed me to prep dinner. I made homemade spaghetti sauce which takes a bit of prep and needs to simmer for a long time so if Georgie is being a crank pot I often end up working with her screaming and whining around my ankles as I try to chop and fry and boil. It's like fun, only I worry about spilling hot things on the baby. And I managed to load and run the dishwasher with out little hands trying to get into the dirty cutlery, it was great.

     After I had everything up and running and simmering away, I cleaned George up while she attempted to mouth trumpet, which is probably the cutest thing going, and I noticed a bit of blood in her mouth. That's right folks! She's cutting a tooth! Finally. It wasn't until much later that we actually were able to feel the little thing. We Skyped with my dad, who was taking a snow day, and had a little nap. But when George got up, she let me feel around and there was definite tooth! it still doesn't look much different than it did yesterday, it's been pressing on those gums for weeks, but it's through! Now I know I'm probably jinxing myself right now, but if all the other teeth could pop through with as little fuss as this one, the world would be an alright place. Now I just have to take the kiddo to the drug store, I promised to take her to pick out a toothbrush once she finally popped. 

I have no post, but there is video.

    George did not sleep well last night. She got up every hour and a half, like clockwork. I'm really hoping this is teeth. You can actually see one tooth about to pop out, it's been than way for about a week. So I'm exhausted, as is Steve, as is George. Plus it's been raining/snowing all day so George and I have been stuck indoors. Needless to say it's been a fairly unproductive day. Not much to blog, so instead here's a cute video of my baby.

There's also one of her protesting this morning but this last one is taking so long to upload I doubt I'll be able to post both.

Oh, that worked a lot faster than expected. Her dad had to put her down so he could make a lunch for himself and I was off getting dressed and she was not having it. she stayed like this for a good fifteen min before I had to cave and pick her up so we could drive her dad to work. We actually had turned out the light and left the room for a good seven or eight min before I had to go get her. And man was she pleased with herself when I picked her up. unfortunately for her, when we got home I got her out of her jacket and plopped her right back where she was, she did not like that to much and infact rolled over and came into the living room to protest, loudly.