We were watching the tiger almost-sleeping, looking deceptively quiet.
Kaija remarked, “He’s waiting for some un-nervous duck to come for a sleepover!”
At which point it would be the end of that duck…
I like both that she’s playing with language (un-nervous is a neologism all her own) and also that we speak frankly to her about death, predation, etc.
The last post before August 2008 was this one: Pokie and Mux. We are starting to fill in the period between September 2006 and August 2008 with stories and especially pictures, so if you haven’t been here for a while you should make sure to check in the great 2-year gap!
Right now it’s kind of sparse, but I have high hopes.
Grandma and Grandpa have a lot of puzzles at their house. The capstone is a fiendish 60-piece Ravensburger kitten puzzle with lots of nearly-identical kitten eyes and faces and flowers scattered over it. This puzzle defeated Kaija completely about eight months ago, and she’s been steadily plugging away at it since then.
About four months ago she was able to get about halfway done without any help.
About a month ago she finally started following the “puzzle algorithm”: find the corners, find the edges, build the frame, fill in, don’t get frustrated or stuck on a single piece.
Yesterday she did the whole thing from scratch.
That’s Finn’s legs in the background, standing on the fire truck puzzle. (He calls it “hoo hoo truck”.)
We’ve been trying to limit everyone’s dairy intake because it still seems to bother Finn, and to a lesser extent me and Kaija. We must have been succeeding, since the other day when we ordered pizza for the first time in about a year, Kaija said:
“Daddy — the pizza man is MAGNIFICENT!”
(I think we’re getting our vocabulary from Disney movies.)
Kaija woke up one morning and said to me, “Daddy, a lobster has ten legs.”
I thought about this for a while, then agreed: “Lobsters do have ten legs.” She nodded.
I asked her, “How did you know?”
She responded matter-of-factly. “I had a dream about a lobster.”
A few months ago, before the babies were born, having Kaija in our bed started to get really annoying. She would be squirming around a lot, putting her feet up on my legs and in general misbehaving. After being thrown out of bed a few times per evening, she would usually settle down and go to sleep. Sometimes, Sam would carry her off (wailing) to the guest bed.
Eventually, we realized that the foot behaviour consisted of her putting one foot on top of the other, and sometimes using one foot to push the other foot off a “hill” such as my leg. A big insight came when we correlated what she was saying with her actions. “Pokie is on the big hill. Mux is pushing Pokie. Uh-oh - Pokie falls off the big hill!!! HAHAAHAHA.”
Yes, that’s right folks, our daughter has named her feet. Apparently Pokie is a girl and Mux is a boy. They are 8 and 9 respectively and “are big to go to school”. They still fight at night - pushing each other off the wall, mostly, but since she sleeps in her own bed now, this isn’t nearly as annoying. 
I’m thinking we provided her with siblings in the nick of time. If not a little bit late…
Kaija’s speech is becoming more like English and less overregularized. When she was younger she learned to answer “Are you…?” questions as “I are.” Recently she’s been producing “I’m” some of the time and “I are” some of the time. The other day she said “I’m are”, which was new to us. I haven’t heard emphatic “I am” yet but I’m sure it’s coming.
She stopped saying “crocodagle” and now only says “crocodile” which makes me a little sad… but it had to go someday, I suppose.
Kaija has been engaging in imaginative play and using her toys to act out various real-world scenarios for a while now… a notable example came about two weeks after we brought the babies home from the hospital. She told us that her IKEA kitty had lost its mama and daddy, who were at the hospital and were going to bring home her baby brother and sister. It all came out kind of scrambled, but we were able to reassure IKEA kitty that her parents would come back.
Today Kaija was playing with her Vamonos Van (a Dora toy) and she loaded it up with a bunch of Little People, and in the back she put one of her jingly balls (the sort you can buy in Chinatown). I ‘ll try to attach a picture. I couldn’t figure out what she was doing until I realized that we often load up our van with our whole family and the big silver exercise ball that we use when comforting the babies (we sit on it with a baby in the sling and bounce.) It was really striking.
Ben and Cassie came to visit for a few days. They were fabulous friends - changed diapers, played with and read to Kaija, burped, snuggled, slung, mixed drinks for the parents. You name it - they were there. Sadly, they’ve now gone back to their day jobs.
Kaija loves to visit to the zoo, and we’ve been meaning to go since before the babies were born. Yesterday, with Ben and Cassie along to help sling babies and chase Kaija was a great opportunity.
On the carousel with Sam
