Sunday, June 16, 2013

Update on Munchkin cuteness

The Munchkin is not getting any less cute as time goes by.  In fact, I like her more and more.  Here is the new list of cuteness:

1.  At the zoo today, she decided that goats (in the petting zoo) are the best things EVER, and continued to adore them even after one head butted her and knocked her down.  The keeper put it away and the Munchkin stood at its gate calling to it over and over again until I took her out of the petting zoo.  She called it "kitty" but all animals are kitties still, including the moose.  If she could have pet the wallabies, they might have ranked with the goats, but it's a small step down.

2.  When the kiddo is entertaining herself, she carries things back and forth between toddler selected locations several times and it's hysterical.  Today's selection of items was 1 plastic spoon, 1 dish towel, 1 doll sweater, 1 wash cloth, and a baby doll.  These items moved from the coffee table to the doormat near the patio and back again no less than 5 times in approximately 5 minutes.

3.  The Munchkin is a little dicey with consonants these days (totally normal I am assured), so her "baby" is called "ye-yee" like yeti without the T.  The thought of her naming her baby after a snow monster keeps making me laugh.

4.  Any time there are rocks, she will drop everything else to get the rocks.  You might think that her daddy is a geologist and her mommy is a rock hound (he totally married me for my tourmaline.  It's nice tourmaline).  I never thought a love of rock was genetic, but I may be mistaken.  Car seat cupholders make excellent places to store car rocks when you don't want to bring them in to daycare.

5.  The kid is starting to get interested in her potty, and keeps wanting to put her baby on the potty.  Right now this process involves shoving the baby head first into the (molded plastic) potty as hard as she can.  Thank God her baby is machine washable.

Toddlers are awesome.

Saturday, June 15, 2013

Not dropping off the face of the earth.

The last few weeks have been survival mode again.  DH is off at an earth-shatteringly important army training (still without a CPAP, but that's a rant for a different day) so I've been solo parenting.  This one is long-ish at over a month.  I miss him.  The good news is that we are surviving, which is helped by better (if not yet good) sleep by the Munchkin and also netflix.

I've had netflix on a lot since DH left.  I mostly watch in the evenings, since I try to keep the days mostly tv free for the kiddo.  We generally watch something as a family after dinner before bed, and once the kid goes to sleep, the house is disturbingly quiet and lonely, so Netflix stays on.  We got rid of tv a while ago, so it's netflix or hulu, and hulu mostly annoys me. I like having no ads.

My recent list of shows includes The Glades, Fringe, and Hole in the Wall.  I started Fringe right before DH left, but he doesn't like it so I don't have to feel guilty watching all of it while he's gone.  Generally we try to watch shows we both like together.  He does like the Glades, but they got new episodes and a month is a long time.  He'll need space out time when he gets home anyway.  Hole in the Wall was a recent discovery and it's a totally silly game show where people try to fit through shaped cut-outs in a wall or else get pushed into a pool.  It's totally mindless and very fun to watch.

With the solo parenting, the Munchkin does watch more tv than when DH is home.  When I need a show for her, my staples are Mythbusters and Dinosaur Train.  She likes both of them.  Today I discovered something called Color and Sound (I think?) that's all people drawing pictures to classical music.  It's designed for babies, and I got a 30 min nap while it was playing.  We tried Yo Gabba Gabba, but it made her cry, so that's out for a while.  Her favorite recent tv clip was a bunch of singing corpses from a Fringe episode.  I really need to play that clip again and videotape the kid's reaction, because it was too funny.  I probably lose parenting points, but such is life.

While watching all this tv, I have been doing something neat.  Do you remember that hobby I had before I got pregnant?  The one with sticks and string?  Yep.  I'm knitting again.  SO MUCH FUN.  This may be survival mode, but it's a much prettier kind of survival than even a few months ago.  DH still needs to get his butt home, but there will blankets and scarves and silly tv until then.  And maybe even semi-regular blogging.