Heidi

Lulu's latest YouTube fascination has been a Japanese anime cartoon from the 1970s based on the novel Heidi by Johanna Spyri.  Unfortunately, the copyright enforcers are out en masse on this one and there's only one (!?!) folge of the 52 that's on YouTube in German.  (The original cartoon had an episode per week like the Wonderful World of Disney on Japanese TV)  I can find the other episodes in Italian and Spanish but not German...so we have been watching one episode over and over.  And.  Over.  Again.

Lulu has also started to spontaneously sing the German theme song.  Here is her punk-rock version from this morning:



In case you're wondering what the actual song sounds like, you can hear it here.  And if you want to help prevent my inevitable case of insanity, then please go here and help a mother out!

Pigtails!

Here's a picture of our favorite 2-year-old heading off to school:

Bunny Friends

Snorri (L) and Siggi (R)

Lulu loves her bunny friends, Siggi and Snorri.  And they appear to "love" her (in that they tolerate her company a LOT better than Dido).  She wants to see them every morning before we leave for school and in the afternoon when we get home.  Given how cold/wet the weather has been lately, they've been enjoying the house quite a bit lately.  We keep them mostly confined to the parts of our house that have tile floors, but they also sneak into Lulu's room because it's hard to keep her door shut.

Look at the size of THOSE feet?!

They're sweet boys who are starting to grow into BIG boys!  Their diet is a combination of fresh fruits and veggies (mostly dandelion greens, parsley, cilantro, cranberries, and apples), various types of hay (mostly alfalfa and timothy), and rabbit food/pellets.  Owning a rabbit is kind of like owning a combination of a dog AND a cat--they are self-cleaning but they also enjoy your companionship like a dog.  And even better--they're quiet!

My only problem is that they have BOTH discovered the fireplace.  I was unaware that we had accidentally bought chinchillas??  For some reason, these guys are just attracted to the ashes in the fireplace??!  Any suggestions that don't involve matches and roasted rabbit??

Living Color

Lulu helped me play around with the color filters her daddy got in his christmas stocking yesterday.  I especially like the yellow one next to the stack of books.

Christmas morning

Here are some mindnumbing fascinating videos of our Christmas morning:

This is the stocking portion of the morning...followed by the Santa portion...

Old photos

I found some old photos on an old memory card as I tried to figure out our video camera (in anticipation of christmas morning) and some were too cute not to share.  I think Walter and I make awfully cute babies, don't you?

$5 says I can stick this WHOLE fist in my mouth...?

well, hello, there!

someone practicing her John Wayne impression

there's that Chalmers half-smirk she inherited
(my brother and I both make that face)

These are from July 2009, so she was 11 months old.  It's funny/neat/bizarre to see glimpses of the little girl she has become in the intervening time.

Overheard by house elves...

as someone was running around the house (naked) after her bath:

No peeing in the corner!

Yogurt...

...spoon not necessary.

Small Victories.

So after Walter (conveniently) left for work this morning, I was left with the task of getting Lulu dressed and ready to go to daycare in time for a 9am pilates class at the gym.  Given that he left around 8am, you wouldn't think this would be that much of a challenge, particularly when daycare is literally less than 5 minutes away.

But you'd be wrong.  Very, very wrong.

After struggling with her in an attempted good-natured manner for about 10 minutes, I was just almost at my wits end.  I had managed to get shoes and socks on her, but Lulu refused to wear pants at all (and I hadn't even attempted to the shirt yet).  So, I stood up, grabbed her by the hand and forcibly hauled her to the sliding glass door in our kitchen which I proceeded to open.  Then, I plopped her sweet little tush outside on the back patio in only a diaper, socks, and shoes and shut the door.

Now, our weather at approximately 8am this morning was in the mid-30s (I thought it was a little warmer until I saw the weather observations).  Chilly enough that you saw frost when you exhaled.  To be honest, I wasn't sure what I was going to do at that point, but in about 20-30 seconds, she was standing in front of me with her arms crossed across her chest.  I opened the door and she said, "Kalt, Mama."  To wit, I replied, "Yes, that's why you need to put your pants on."

She nodded and walked into her room and put on her pants and shirt without a fight.  Heck, I even got her to wear a jacket by reminding her that it was cold outside.

I don't know if I can chalk that one up to a 1 in the win column or whether it was a temporary victory.  I suspect that, at best, they're all temporary victories right now.

And I did manage to make it to my pilates class on time btw.

On the same theme.

This evening, we also picked up an "Ouch Report" along with Lulu.

To:  Louisa's parents
What Happened:  During nap, Lulu was upset because she didn't want to lay down.  She threw herself on the cot and hit her mouth on the edge of the bed.
Treatment:  TLC.  red mark on left side of mouth.  **Visible bruise @ 4:00pm

Oh, dear God, please, please, please let this developmental stage pass quickly!

Pity Party, Party of One??

Oh, the temper tantrums are killing us, slowly but surely killing us.  I shouldn't be surprised--I've had lots of warnings about "the terrible twos."  But up to now, she's actually been a pretty calm child (at least in retrospect?).  But in the past few days, the terrible eruptions of temper at the most inopportune times have tried my patience, my creativity, and sadly, my compassion.

For example, on Sunday at breakfast, she started screaming, pointing toward her room, wailing something that sounded vaguely like, "Blankey!," and had tears rolling down her face.  Walter brought every single blanket out of her room and she would just scream harder until she almost choked with frustration and rage.  Worst of all, she was inconsolable, so the helpless feeling of not knowing what to do to make it better was frustrating for US, too.  We finally snapped her out of it by calling Oma and putting her on speakerphone and even then, it took about 5-10 minutes before Lulu warmed up to saying hi back.

Sigh.

So far today, she's thrown at least two--one in the morning as we tried to get her dressed and another this evening once I picked her up from daycare.  I know from my reading that her emotional system isn't fully developed yet (and won't be until she's about 6) and sometimes her brain is awash in stress hormones and she hasn't yet learned how to calm herself.  But I'll be damned if I know how to do it.  There's no reasoning with her, talking it out.  Heck, even hugging it out doesn't work sometimes.

So, I'm left with the hope that this is a mercifully short developmental stage and that I can learn something about myself in my handling of it.  But, I have to confess at the moment, I'll be damned if I know what that is!

To quote John Updike...

...Rabbit, Run.

Yeah, that's what we worked on this past weekend.  I had the "brilliant" idea of painting the rabbit's sleeping hutch in stripes after Walter said that it needed paint to seal the plywood from the elements.  So, the bottom is the same dark brown as our beams, the white is the same white that's all over our house, the top is currently painted the greenish-grey that our eventual house color will be, and the bright green stripe through the middle is our living room color.  To give you a sense of scale, here's a picture of the hutch in its current resting place (but not its final place):

While I painted, Daddy was busy building the rabbit's outdoor "rabbit run."  Here's a photo of Lulu to give you a sense of scale:

All we really lack is putting the write on the wooden frame and then we can move the out into the yard so they have 24/7 access to green grass.  Walter's idea is to put a lid on half the rabbit run's top so we can easily get to them whether they are indoors or outdoors (relatively speaking, of course!).

While we were working, the rabbits were enjoying their ersatz outside pen.

While we were busy working, Lulu was entertained by a neighborhood squirrel (or "Eichätzler") and was excited to point him out to me.

Even this morning when we went outside to make sure the bunnies had food and water before we left, she asked where the squirrel went.  Apparently, he made quite the impression!

Breakfast with Dora

I had the "brilliant" idea this morning of letting Lulu wear her Dora-the-Explorer swim diapers because they are a size 5 (and she's in a size 6 diaper now) and they're sort of like pull-ups.

Bonus--she already knows who Dora is even though we a). don't have cable, b). have never talked about Dora, or c). have pointed out Dora in a store to her. Ahhh, the insidiousness of daycare, eh? I'm lucky--it could be Disney princesses, right?

Anyway, I wasn't counting on her memory because once we put the Dora swim diaper on her, she immediately starting digging around in her top dresser drawer until she pulled out this outfit for breakfast this morning:

Daddy persuaded her to wear a t-shirt over her bathing suit, but the rest of her outfit is ALL Lulu's idea!

Playtime!

It was rainy all afternoon once we got home from running errands, so after Lulu woke up from her nap, she played with Siggi and Snorri indoors.

They had fun playing Legos:

Lulu and Siggi

Snorri decides to play, too.

And then she took the kokos for a ride:

"Get in, Snorri, get in!"

I love this one.  So sweet!

Sewing Project Update.

For those of you who remember our sewing project last Christmas break, I thought you might enjoy seeing our fashion model wearing the jacket and pants her daddy made her last year.

Kind of crazy to see how much she's grown in a year when you compare the photos I took this week to the ones in the link above.