Introverts Unite

I love this picture only because each adult does not want to be in the picture.  The close observer will note that there is third adult in the picture, propping up Happy and using her own child as  screen.  Of course I too was more than happy to be on the other side of the camera/phone.

I asked the question, "Who likes popsicles?" before taking the picture.  Even though Emily didn't raise her hand, all others were  accurate in their responses.

Hotel Parker Nawrocki

"Look Daddy, I made my baby sleep on some containers."

In related news, Calvin has been sleeping on the couch that is den and his legs hang over the edge.  Emily and I are clearly doing a great job of teaching Charlotte how to be hospitable hosts.

Vacation Slideshow And All Its Details

As a family, we were at the Parker Compound in Hancock, Wisconsin.  Below are some pictures from our trip.  A few tips for the slideshow and my captions.  If you want the autoplay to stop, simply hit the pause button (of course), but as a heads up, the pause button comes and goes depending on where you place your mouse/cursor.

Secondly, if you want the captions feature off, click on the the little word bubble in the bottom left corner (again its presence or absence will depend on where you cursor is).

Finally, you can also watch the slideshow on Picassa. Click on the colorful Picassa rainbow circle at the bottom right of the slideshow AND THEN click on the hypertext that says "2014-7-21."  Clicking on that will take you to the Picassa site, which has a slideshow option that is much cleaner and easier to look at.  If I were, say, a grandparent, these extra steps may be worth the hassle since I don't get to see these kids much.  Sorry I cannot put the link in directly but I have to write this post in HTML mode and it has been too long since I shared a link posting this way and I have forgotten how to do it. I really wish this weren't so clunky, but for some reason Google, who owns both Blogger and Picassa, has chosen to make interfacing between Blogger and Picassa difficult. I think they want to steer everyone on Blogger to Google Plus, but that is just a guess.

Anyway, the trip itself was awesome.  Everyone had a lot of fun and I am sure it is fun for Emily to see her kids grow up with their (second) cousins making memories in the exact same place Emily did, with her own cousins, who are now moms with her.  I know I enjoyed watching my kids enjoy themselves.

The Magic Number

This evening I was going through the pictures on my phone to delete the unwanteds when I came across this picture of a partially eaten sandwich.  I was about to delete it, wondering why I took the picture in the first place.  But then I remember why.

Last week we made a twilight dinner stop at a Culver's while we were on the road, on the way to the Parker Compound in Hancock, WI.  Charlotte, age three, took a break from eating to make a random observation, as is her wont.  This time she held up her twice-bit grilled cheese sandwich and said, "Look Daddy.  It's my three."

Charlotte's Penguin

Charlotte drew a penguin this morning from scratch.

Planting A Rainbow

Yesterday Charlotte was drawing on the sidewalk and asked me to draw a flower.

When I was done, she looked at my attempt (on the left) and said, "Now I'm going to plant a rainbow!"  She is borrowing the phrase from a book she likes called Planting A Rainbow about growing a flower garden.

She drew the rest of the flowers you see.  I think she did a pretty good job.

Pretty soon she'll have to hang out with Zander when she wants to draw because she is about to eclipse my skill set.

Summer Loving

Charlotte loves many things, including eating outside whenever possible.  She prefers the front yard and my suspicion is because it means the girls from across the street or next door may come out to see us.  Charlotte is too shy to seek them out herself but social enough to want to see the kids on the block. In the meantime, this is a pretty typical breakfast scene for Charlotte on a non-school day.

Charlotte also loves our pets, especially Pancho.  But she has become very attached to all three over the years.  Yesterday she said  "Pancho is a good boy.  He's my best friend.  Take a picture of me and my doggy."  So I did.

And now that she claims Pancho is her doggie, she can start picking up his poop and pay for his vet bills.  That reminds me, we're out of heart worm medicine for July.  To the vet!

Play Date

I'm not going to lie to you.  Summers off is a pretty sweet gig.  It makes the most frustrating and demoralizing parts of my job worthwhile.  I need to remember this post and this video when things start getting dark and deep in about five or six months.

A little context here.  At Happy's one year check-up the doctor identified low muscle tone in this Haps as well.  So I talked to Charlotte's physical therapist and she agreed that there is low muscle tone, just not as low as Charlotte's and she gave us some suggestions, including having Happy crawl on uneven surfaces.  This should explain the air mattress.  And now Haps will soon be evaluated by the school district special ed team, just like Charlotte was.

Two Fisting

This picture was from her last nap of the summer with me yesterday.  Her new thing is to wake up and just chill in her crib with her books of choice (either you have to figure out which books she wants or it takes some finessing for her to go with the books you give her).

Yesterday afternoon she spent over an hour in her crib looking at books (and would have gone longer but I talked her into a diaper change and a second lunch/first dinner).  One time I checked in on her and she was kicking two books at once.

Thanks for another awesome summer Charlotte.

Another Day at the Office

Emily shot this video yesterday and e-mailed it to me this morning.  This is Charlotte leaving the house for the day. She has a work bag the same way Emily or I do, some keys somewhere, and then to do her own thing she is carrying a toy kennel with a stuffed dog inside.

This is a sad week for me because I go back to work Friday.  But it was another great summer thanks to Charlotte.  Last night I went for a run with a couple teachers from the school I worked at two years ago (I hang out with those folks way more than I do the staff at my present school, part of the reason I'm bummed to be going to back to work).

At the end of the run my friend and I were talking about how fortunate we are to have such a family-friendly job.  He is probably the least sentimental person I know and he said, "I love my daughter so much it hurts sometimes."

I watch this video and I know exactly what he means.


Edit:  Hey, this is Emily.  I was planning to blog that video, but Mike beat me to it.  Dang it!  I was going to post it with the picture below.  This is what I look like when we leave in the morning.  I am a bag lady, which is story in itself.  Anyway, this might be how Charlotte got the idea that dragging a big bag around means, "bye bye."

Multiple bags satelliting around her.

Texas Defined

There is a story from when I was a kid and we were moving to Texas.  I was young, two or three.  I don't remember any of this time of my life, of course, except for random five second snippets here or there (and none of these snippets are part of this story).

 But the way I remember the story (my mom will have to do the fact checking) is I knew that we were moving to Texas, but I sure as heck didn't know what that meant.  So throughout the move I kept asking, "Is this Texas?" 

I don't know if this right after the move or during the move, but we ended up doing a family outing to some caves.  I want to say we were at Natural Bridge Caverns and the tour guide turned out all the lights so we could see just how dark it was for the original spelunkers.  And as we silently sat there in the dark, I chimed in to the tour group, "Is this Texas?"

And now it has become very clear that Charlotte has no bleeping clue what Texas is either.  As we were driving back to Minnesota she kept saying, "Texas" with a smile on her face everytime Emily or I said the word in conversation.  Wouldn't it be nice if she were saying it, fondly recalling the great week she had with her grandma, aunts, uncles, and cousins?  Of course I'm not fool enough to fall for that projection.  I figured she just liked the word.

Well enough time has passed for abstraction to wash away.  Today we were at the Children's Museum and she was looking at books (as mentioned in the post from earlier today--see below). She came up to me with a board book, a smile, said, "Texas," and handed me the book to read to her.  And not just any book.  A counting book about gardening with a picture for each page.  Much like one of her favorite books, 1 2 3 Texas.

So there you have it.  For Charlotte, Texas simply means "a counting board book."  In her defense my original use of the word was "Hey! Who turned out the lights?!?!?!,"

Her understanding will evolve.  And since Texas is a part of me, I hope it will become part of her being too.  And I'm talking about livestock, sunshine, the Spurs, the Alamo, or any of that.  I'm not talking about family and my sense of home.  I love it here in Minnesota and this is where my life is.  All I want is for Charlotte's Texas to feel a lot like this video: hanging out with cousins at my mom's house.  

Here she is with her cousin Hannah, who was nice enough to put some batteries in this toy cell phone for Charlotte to enjoy and organize a bunch of toys for Charlotte to play with.  They had a great time together, as was true for the time Charlotte spent with her other Texas cousins Calvin and Sophia.  That's Texas.

And we were nice enough to leave the cell phone behind so it could enjoy Texas and we could enjoy it not in Minnesota.

Back From Texas

Emily, Charlotte and I had a very nice trip to Texas to see my family.  Charlotte has such a great collection of aunts, uncles, cousins, and an amazing grandmother (of course I'm a little biased), so it is important to us that she see them as much as geography allows.

Charlotte continues to be an incredibly patient and easy going individual.  She did great with the drive down and the drive back up.  We made sure we were done driving for the day by 5 p.m. each day to give her plenty of time to explore the hotel room, hallway, and pool.  In the car, Charlotte did an awesome job, entertaining herself with books, music, and Emily when needed.  And she was VERY effective at letting us know when she needed a break from the car.

So I'll upload videos and pictures here and there throughout the week.  I thought this video was a good place to start.

This is the second night at my mom's house and Charlotte is having her first dinner (she tends to have a first dinner and a second dinner... as long as she eats at the table, I don't care how many dinners she has at this juncture in her life).  It is a perfect example of how she will say "all done" when really all she means is, "I'm considering the notion of being done with eating in five to ten minutes."  But it is particularly funny in this case because she says "all done" right on the heels of ranting and raving about how good her cheese stick is.

Also, right around 12 seconds she looks at me (and my phone video taping her) and says "yah yah" which is how she says Charlotte.  She says "Charlotte" everytime she sees my phone because her picture is the phone's wallpaper (how cliche).  I show her pictures from  the phone maybe two or three times a week tops and yet she already knows it as "Charlotte."  Creepy.

Fish Lake 2012

We went to the cottage for 10 glorious days.  Some of the days were perfect and some were very hot.  Charlotte took the lake like a fish.  She would wake up and say, "swimming.  Go swimming." She loved her floatie and got really mad when we dragged her back to the shallow area.  I took a nap everyday and Mike read all the books he brought with him.  The slideshow can tell the rest of the story.

Yard Bear

Our lawn is a state of neglect as we are between vacations and I have been spending most of my free time reviving our backyard deck and front porch.  So this morning bright and early I took advantage of the fact that Emily hadn't left for work yet and mowed the front lawn as quickly as I could.

Soon enough Charlotte had to come outside with me so Emily could get ready for work.  As you can see, her love of sweeping generalizes to the great outdoors.  She did a nice job of helping me sweep the cut grass off the sidewalk.  Also take note of all the berets in her hair.  That is her new thing: to ask that we put all of her berets in her hair at once.  You can tell Emily got her ready this morning.  When I do it, all the berets hang off her hair like clothespins and it is so very disorderly.  Also take note of the powerwashed front porch.  I just need to sand the rough spots and put down the new finish.  This project should just take a few days but with a baby to mind it is taking many weeks.

Charlotte has been working on picking up her toys after she plays with them and she presently thinks it's a lot of fun (we'll see how long that lasts).  So she was pretty excited to help me "clean up" all the grass.  I also wanted to get a shot of her butt.  While I was mowing she a) thought it was hysterical when the grass shot up in the air as I mowed and b) loved to crawl the top of the incline in our yard and scoot down it on her butt.  You can see that stain stick was used today.

In fact, when all of our yard work was done, she had to take a bath.  Music class was this morning and she couldn't show up smelling like a barnyard.  As you can see, it was a good morning for her.  You can also see the next chore I have in mind for her: cleaning the shower tile.

Why Charlotte Doesn't Walk

Even if you put wheels on her, mobility doesn't interest her.  Why see what's down the road when everything around is so awesome?

I was worried the last video I posted was too long and boring but my mom said it wasn't long enough.  So if you are stuck in a different state and 22 seconds of Charlotte doing nothing is too short for you, below is another minute of the same, only with more... well.... I don't know... more sips from her straw?  Smiles?  Regardless, these 85 seconds of footage represent the six minutes (yes I timed her) Charlotte stayed in this one spot just chilling.  Then she'd scoot about 20 yards and do some more homesteading.

Quick update on the walking front: I got our family an annual membership to the Children's Museum as I mentioned.  Charlotte and I have been a few times and she loves to explore and climb and she feels safe taking motor risks there.  However, her attempts to walk have come to a stand still (again, pun fully intended).  She will stand up and look and me (or Emily) and we'll encourage her to take a few steps.  You can really see the wheels turning in her head.  She thinks about taking a step but decides not to and drops down to a crawl.  Something is keeping her from trying steps.  Comfort level or convenience, or both, or something else, I don't know.  But I do know she has the ability to do more but is going at her own pace.

Soaking Up the Nothing

Charlotte is always in the moment.  Always.  Make it through this video, and watch it over and over until two hours pass and that is a typical morning for us.  I'm sure that will change with age, but for now, om y'all.

Still Scooting

Today Charlotte and I went to the Children's Museum and spent all our time in the Habitot which basically just a giant Occupational Therapy gym which is exactly what Charlotte needs.

Charlotte quickly found a ramp to scoot up and down on as she has been doing for some time.  I shot some footage shown below.

Kind of fun to compare to the video Emily shot when we were at the Kansas City Children's Museum in March: http://parkernawrocki.blogspot.com/2012/06/fancy-scooting.html

Since March, Charlotte has a haircut, can scoot up and down on her own, move a lot more quickly, but is still having a lot of fun.

She also did some new things today, like using the railing to walk up and down the ramp and some steps.  Like I said, it's like informal Occupational Therapy.  You have to look at it that way for the Children's Museum to seem like a good financial deal.

Summer Update

Summer II has begun for me and Charlotte and we are settling into a routine.  Life is good.  She enjoys being outside either in the backyard or at different green spots we jog to with Pancho along the Mississippi.  But her favorite thing still is looking at books, which I'm sure makes her Suze very proud.

Wait I forgot.  Eating.  Her favorite thing is eating.  And taking a long to time to eat.  She'll eat for 20 minutes or so and then say "all done." But really this initial "all done" just serves as a statement that she plans on being done eating sometime in the next five to 15 minutes.  She loves everything about food, even the shopping and cooking.  For an easygoing child, Charlotte gets really upset if I'm cooking and she can't watch.  So I either hold her while I cook or have her sit in a chair in the kitchen.

And no matter what when she sees food, no matter in what state it is, ingredients, trash, pictures....  she'll say, "mmm good."   Really Charlotte?  Onions frying in oil after only ten seconds deserves the "mmmm good" label.  Cripes, how about a little critical thinking?

Like I said, cooking and eating aside, her favorite thing is books.  Lately she has become very particular about what she wants to read.  Her favorite books right now are Mother Goose books, especially a Richard Scarry Mother Goose I got for her at Wild Rumpus (I never knew he made a Mother Goose book until I found it there).  But she is also fond of the Mother Goose editions her aunt (my sister Sarah) got her.  Part of our morning routine is to sit in her room and read together; I read my book and she reads hers.  Just last week she started asking me to read her books to her instead.  Usually that is something she only likes at bedtime.  So it's a pretty nice time.  And it's really cool because she is now often picking the book we read at bedtime the night before.

At work I use this website called Tarheel Reader for the students I work with who are emerging readers/writers or non-verbal.  I also use it with the autistic kids to get them to ask questions of each other and me and process the answers.  Anyway, here is one of many stories I wrote with the kids this year:

http://tarheelreader.org/2012/01/13/favorite-things-2/

These were two of my lower-level autistic students so they didn't get to the point to even do a project like this until April, when Charlotte was first getting into Richard Scarry's Mother Goose book.  Read it for page 13 only.  Jonah, one of the kids in the story, would come up to me the rest of the schoolyear and say, "Read Richard Scarry to your daughter" and then start quoting passages from What Do People Do All Day?  It was pretty awesome.  I miss a lot of my students but am enjoying the break.

In terms of other skills, her fine motor is as solid as ever and her language is chugging along.  Two word phrases are commonplace and I love getting insight into her lexicon.  Like "table" means "I want to sit in a seat and do an activity," be it sitting at the table to eat or read or sit in her stroller to look at flowers.  She also loves to scoot around the block in a foot scooter Emily got at Savers.  If you ever want to know the #1 reason why Charlotte doesn't walk, carve out 45 to 60 minutes in a day to take her around the block in her scooter and you'll see why.  The question "hey what is this in my hand?" is so much more interesting to her then "hey what's over there?"  If they did a toddler play about Christopher Columbus, the role of the person who spent twenty years at her table whittling a block of wood into a BEAUTIFUL steering wheel for the Santa Maria's would be played by Charlotte Nawrocki.

So i takes forever because she stops every thirty seconds to focus on each yard, house, blade of grass, sound.... She best appreciate being an only child with a daddy who is no hurry because most kids don't get the chance to take this long to go around a block and comment on each sound, say to every tree, and watch other people.

Kind of an interesting language aside: she uses the word "owl" to mean, well, an owl, but it also means every animal decal she can see from her changing table.  And "doggie" is still the catch-all phrase for four-legged animals but she will also name some of them by specific name.  She might even say, "doggie cow" when she sees a cow.  So I think she is getting semantic categories.  I never knew toddlers at this age can already express categories and use words in double-meanings as starkly and competently as Charlotte is.  Like I wrote in an earlier post, my surprise largely because I worked with toddlers who were on the other side of the language spectrum.  Charlotte's personal lexicon does lead for funny moments like when she saw a picture of a cat in a barn scene and pointed to it, assuming it was a cow and said, "Doggie moo."  Try again, my dear.

Gross motor is coming.  She'll be walking by the end of the summer and probably as soon as mid-July. She takes one or two steps a day but never out of purpose of moving from A to B; she's doing it more to experiment.  Well, until today.  We were at music class this morning and she took four whopping steps across the room.  It was the first class of the summer and we are going at a new time (summer hours for me!) so I didn't know anyone.  So when Charlotte took four full steps (and this time it WAS just for the purposes of locomotion), of course no one cared because they had no idea how big of a deal it was.  It was also the end of class so all the parents were busy getting their kids ready to go.  But I saw it and was so privately excited and wanted to clap and cheer but no one cared, including Charlotte.  This is partly because she took a decent spill after the fourth step and was too busy brushing off the fall to notice the gravity of the moment (pun fully intended).  But it was exciting for me and really somewhat bizarre to just sit there and quietly watch it happen.  Regardless, she is getting bolder and bolder with her gross motor each day.

So it's been a nice start to the summer.  If I get my act together maybe I'll take some pictures of it.

Play In the Sunshine

WEEEEEEE!

Baby benchpress