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Journal Key:

Green = Steve | George = navy | Janet = Purple | Evelyn = Black

12/24/09 (Thursday)

Poor Cara's had a long and exciting week, what with all of the snow and Hanukkah on Sunday, ballet on Monday, and then seeing Santa twice on Wednesday. Her friend Nick gave her a great present on Wednesday, too; it's a create-your-own fairy tale book. There's a nice, large, 30-page hardcover book with several sheets of stickers and punch-out things, along with markers, sequins, gemstones, and ribbon. It's very exciting. We got it out this morning. We laid everything out and talked about the stories we could make, and I even showed Cara a possible storyboard. Then she put lots of stickers on one page. Maybe we'll just make a book of scenes. In the scene we made, it's the princess's birthday!

All of that stuff is still out all over the living room floor. The rest of the day was less productive, from the child's point of view. She did spend some time helping Daddy wrap my presents and a little time helping me wrap presents. She made a card to go with mine. Also, she and I went out a couple of weeks ago and bought, with her allowance, a present for Daddy. It's a Reese's peanut butter cup shaped like a Christmas tree. Today, we wrapped it. I did the folding and cutting, and Cara did the tape. She also wrote out the label.

Steve and I have noticed a couple of interesting things. Cara has gotten into the habit, which I attribute to preschool, of saying to herself the sounds that letters make: "P. Puh-puh-puh." I'm waiting for that to turn into some sounding-things-out skills. Additionally, when we read to her, she seems to be echoing us; she whispers along, at least at the ends of sentences.

Around four, we headed to Grandmama's house for Christmas Eve. Cara fell asleep in the car and took a while to really perk up. Eventually, though, she was bouncy again. She spent some time making Aunt Claire make paper doll clothes. Aunt Claire wants to get out of doing that. I think she has to free herself from this predicament.

Presents came after dinner, which Cara did not eat. Which ones excited her? My most vivid memory is of her being very excited about getting a coloring book. She's much more verbal now in expressing her gratitude and her feelings about her presents; I'm pleased with her. The first thing she opened up to play with was a Tinkerbell toy, a book either identical or similar to the one Claire gave her last year. It has cardboard fairies and plastic clothes that adhere to them. This new book is in far better shape than the other one, and Cara is pleased to have twins.

During dessert, which Cara did not eat, she went and opened up the big barrel-shaped container of fairy-themed tinker toys Claire had gotten her. She brought everything, gradually, upstairs, and we set to, building a structure that Cara declared could be a clubhouse for her girls and then taking that apart to make a car. It's a very pretty toy, and it's one that Cara will soon, I think, be able to use mainly on her own.

We got home around ten. Cara wanted a cookie. I let her have two. She put together a plate to put out for Santa. Santa can only eat three cookies, I told her. She put out about eight. The plate we use has a picture of Santa on it, and I believe that she was "making him" out of cookies. We set out the plate and the milk, and then Steve read to Cara some of the new books she'd gotten for Christmas.

12/25/09 (Friday)

Yesterday, when Cara woke up, she sat in the hallway and whimpered. I coached her a lot on the idea that when she woke up on Christmas morning, she should go downstairs to see whether Santa had come. This morning I woke up fairly early and sort of dozed until I heard her little footsteps on the stairs. Would she come back up to tell us, or would she just dive in? She came back. She seemed unexcited. We all spent some time getting ourselves ready, and then we went downstairs to all open presents together. Steve asked her why she hadn't been happier, coming back upstairs. Apparently it hadn't seemed like Santa brought much.

Santa brought a lot. In her stocking, Cara found a nice plush doll of Tiana, the Princess and the Frog princess. She's taking her to bed right now. The big item that Santa brought, which Cara didn't seem to notice at all until we asked her whether she wanted it open, was a Disney castle big enough for her girls to live in. It has an elevator and a light, and there are several rooms. It's the perfect place for a ball! It also comes with two smallish dolls, a prince and a princess. They have both been stripped down to their painted-on underwear and left on the floor.

In the morning, besides having a nice breakfast, Cara had time to play with her tinker toys again with Daddy, turning the car into a playground with working swings and a teeter-totter. She herself built a large girl out of tinker toys. It's her. She and Daddy also spent a little bit of time trying out the new computer game he bought her, Dora saves the Crystal Kingdom. Cara and I played with it when we went to the Mac store to get Steve's new computer, and it's quite a good game.

Soon enough, it was time to get dressed up and go down to Aunt Sally's house for Christmas. Cara was excited about showing Sally the new coat that Santa had brought Deesta as well as her Tiana doll. She was also excited about playing with Lilly, who's now almost sixteen months old. Cara managed to confuse both me and Steve the other day by talking about Lilly, apropos of nothing, when the most recent Lilly we'd met was her plastic mermaid toy.

The first exciting thing was the tree. It's up on a stand that houses a toy train complete with buildings, decorations, and people. The train drives around, and the tree spins. This is fascinating.

In every picture I've ever seen of her and in real life, Lilly is a very, very cute little girl. It was fun to see her today. Cara continued her policy of not eating holiday meals, and so she spent quite a while waiting for Lilly, asking what she was doing and why she wasn't coming to play, while Lilly ate her turkey and some yogurt.

Once again, Cara had a lot of presents to open. She got another Barbie, and she got a mermaid Barbie, whose tail flaps when you push a button. She got more great art stuff. She and Lilly each got a little pink soccer ball with the Disney princesses on it; this was Lilly's favorite gift. Owen and Griffin each got a little blue taggy elephant toy that looks like it'll be a lot of fun to get into one's mouth, if one can manage it. Lilly got a set of foam blocks like Cara's, and everyone tried to introduce her to the game of knocking towers over. Cara decided to build a city, and Lilly tried helping, but then they both got distracted, which was probably a good thing.

It was a very tired child that we took home. Cara is very sad that Santa isn't coming again tonight. It's a good thing that we have some relatively normal, boring days ahead of us, so that maybe we can get back to our routine and get all of this excitement out of our systems.

12/26/09 (Saturday)

Today, as prescribed, was a very normal, boring day. We didn't leave the house! Cara asked in the morning whether she could stay in pajamas all day, and we said that sounded fine. She didn't. Eventually she decided to get dressed, and off she went. She came back wearing a shirt and carrying a pair of too-small tights. She planned on wearing a skirt over this, but it was her old black tutu, which was too big. She decided it kept wanting to fall down, so she left it off and stuck with her tights for most of the day. Eventually jeans became acceptable.

In the morning, we did a lot of cleaning out and reorganizing. I brought out boxes of baby toys we'd put away in the basement, and we poured everything out. We spilled out all of the stuffed animals, some of whom had been in a bin in the basement since we got the new carpeting. We have a big bag of toys to go to Goodwill. Some of the older toys that were in Cara's bins have been put away now; some day, we'll get out the Playmobil 1-2-3s and the Weebles again. Now, there's more room for her Barbies and other big-girl toys.

Cara and Steve spent over an hour playing with the Play Doh octopus that Casie got Cara for Christmas. His arms are all different tools, and his body is a cool extruder. He doesn't just make shapes, he sort of embellishes plastic sea creatures that plug into his base. There's also a fish mold that's like the one we have that makes bears. Fortunately, I left for a while while this was all going on; they mixed up lots of colors, which I think is really how this gets to be fun. Personally, I couldn't have done it. I'd have had to keep everything organized. They made rainbow fish and multicolored eels and who knows what else.

They also played the new Dora computer game a couple of times. There's a part where it gives you the final two letters of a three-letter word, with a picture of the noun, and you have to pick out the first letter. Last time I did this with Cara, a month or two ago, it was total random guesswork on her part. Today, she made the sounds and figured out the letters, no problem! She's really getting it, I think.

12/27/09 (Sunday)

At the grocery store today, there was a sale on seafood. I decided we could have a treat and bought two lobster tails. When she saw them, Cara was very intrigued. She told me she had never tried lobster, but I reminded her that she'd tried it in North Carolina and liked it. For lunch, I melted up some butter and got out some nutcrackers for the shells and we dug in. Cara was thrilled that she liked it and went running off to tell Steve about it. She came back and we finished the whole thing up.

Our evening chore was to get the baby's room ready for painting. We moved some things out of it and then Steve and I set up the crib while Cara and Buster both sort of watched intermittently and wandered around and Cara drew a picture for Owen. It's him on the ground taking a nap or something, and there's a tiger-lion, which looks nothing like a feline, standing to one side saying "GRRRRRRRR." I helped her spell that. I'm pretty sure she hadn't thought the narrative of that picture all the way through.

Setting up the crib may or may not have made the painting we're planning on doing this week more convenient. The spackling, though, will definitely be helpful! I do love to spackle, and it's a very glamorous, exciting thing to do. Steve picked Cara up and, to her intense delight, she got to spackle her first couple of holes. It was thrilling.

12/28/09 (Monday)

Just to shake things up a bit, this morning I went to work and Cara went to preschool. Mommy kept herself busy somehow or other. When I got home from work she was laying on the couch. I went and picked the child up from preschool. She was very excited to show me some kind of a person she had made out of what was probably Play-doh. Unfortunately we both subsequently forgot to take it (neither of us being certain it was complete yet or ready to take home), and today is the only day this week the child will be going to preschool. So there it will sit. There was also a very interesting contraption made of two tiny plastic cups/bowls that had been filled with some kind of rattly objects, fastened together end-to-end in some way, and coated in glitter paint. We also forgot to bring that home. We did manage to bring home at least three mittens, two dolls, a pair of sneakers that had spent the weekend at preschool, her lunch bag, and some papers from her mailbox. We did not bring home a pair of loose brown sweatpants that were lying in her bin--neither of us were sure whether they actually belonged to Cara.

When we got home, Cara wanted me to play with her. We had a nice time playing with her girls. They were having a parade--always a good time--and getting dressed in various outfits. Then Casey and PJ came over. They each had electronic games, which I think they'd gotten from their Christmas party at Susan's. PJ's was a "white guy" head (clone trooper from Star Wars) that opened up. They played with them for a while. Then PJ played with Cara's handheld video game thingie for a while. Casey was busying herself with Cara's new Disney castle. Cara said: "Casey! Come on! Let's play with babies!" Casey said: "Okay," stopped what she was doing and proceeded to go along with Cara's suggestions. They dressed up from the dress-up bin and then were going to take their baby dolls to the movie theater. I'm not sure why, since it appeared that the babies were too afraid of the movie. I was amazed at Casey's easy acquiescence to almost any plan of action. I wonder if Cara will be able to boss her baby brother around as well.

We had dinner and then I finally surrendered and let PJ play Samus with me. We plugged away at it for quite a while, until I realized that it was past time for Cara to be in the bath and everyone was waiting for PJ and I to be done playing so that the kids could go home. Oops!

Tonight when it was time to brush teeth there was no step stool in the bathroom. It turned out that it was in the baby's room, because this morning Cara had asked to step up for another peek into the crib.

12/29/09 (Tuesday)

Cara and Steve went to Chuck E Cheese today, their traditional Mommy's-not-here pastime. It was their first time there since the place got redone, and it was very nice. There were cool new games, including one in which the object apparently was to punch ducklings and one in which you had to push a lever to make bones pop up in the air and go into a dog's mouth. Cara explained that she tried moving that lever different ways, but really it just had to go down. The games now dispense tickets that can be redeemed for prizes; we have 36 tickets in a cup in our cabinet, because Cara (A) did not want any of the prizes and (B) wanted to show me the tickets. It was thrilling.

In the afternoon, when I got home, Grandmama and Aunt Claire were here to start work on the baby's room. Grandmama and Steve painted the yellow strips at the top and bottom of the walls, and Claire penciled in the landscape we'll be creating when we continue on Thursday. There are some mountains and a river and a forest and a swamp with, as Cara suggested, a friendly crocodile. She also penciled in three fairies in the sky on Cara's wall, and she has been commissioned to create the Disney princesses across the room from them.

12/30/09 (Wednesday)

After not having been able to play together for months, since before the twins' birthday in August, Cara and Sarah and Lina got to spend some time together today! They came over here this morning and mostly played with Cara's toys while Cara also played with things, but eventually they began a very loud and fast game of hide-and-seek upstairs. Whichever one was holding the light-up, spinning Rockette was It, and the other two went and hid. Mostly they hid by getting under the covers on our bed or Cara's bed. There was much glee.

We took them to Build-a-Bear, to get them some very late birthday gifts. Cara was lucky enough to find a cat that she didn't have already; it's gray, so it may be an updated Deesta. Lina got a dog, and Sarah picked the neon pink bear that I had just pointed out to Shannon, saying how happy I was that it wasn't a cat. For the first time, we got a sound. The cat meows. The sound-box ended up in her hand; I'm not sure whether that's a good place or not. The three girls got to do the heart ceremony together, all rubbing the heart over their hearts for love and on their stomachs so their pets wouldn't be hungry and on their foreheads so that they could think. Cara's new cat is named Lulu and has a bride outfit.

Dinner tonight was asparagus, salmon, and pierogies. Cara refused to take anything but asparagus. We got her to take little bits of the other things. She tried the salmon. "Can I have more fish?" she said, and "Mommy, this is the best fish you have ever made." It was a little harder to get her to try the pierogie. When she did, though, "I just forgot that I liked this! Silly me!"

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