Liesl's birthday party/Halloween party

We spent Saturday at Mary and Joe's house, celebrating Liesl's first birthday and Halloween. The whole family got together and it was great to see everyone. Here's our dainty birthday girl.

With Grandpa, who she likes to feed bits of her food.

Birthday cakes! Mary made the chocolate graveyard; we bought the chocolate spider.

Trish and cousin Hana.

The pumpkin apple cake I made for Liesl is in front, with a candle. The usual terrible family photo. :)

Seb and cousin Rio, dressed up as Gem (a cartoon character).

Happy birthday, baby

Happy first birthday to our happy, curious, feisty, strong-willed, fearless little munchkin. The wrecker, as Sebastian calls her. What an amazing year it's been.

Liesl's first birthday

Our girl was born almost a year ago today, on a beautifully sunny day. The leaves were red and orange and yellow, the sky was a clear blue, and the air felt crisp: a perfect encapsulation of autumn in the northeast. She was born at Phelps Hospital in Sleepy Hollow; the road to the hospital is lined with grand old trees which were gorgeously bright yellow, and the maternity rooms overlook part of Rockefeller Park and the Hudson River. She was born at 6 am and I remember lying in the bed that afternoon, in a ray of sunshine, holding her, looking out on the river and feeling happy and relieved and grateful.

On Saturday we went up to Rockefeller Park to celebrate Liesl's birthday by remembering her birth day. It was sweet to be there, to remember pulling into the emergency room at 5 am, for Steve to remember doing that beautiful drive under the trees to see us during the day, to look out over the water, and to watch her clambering around everywhere. Amazing how much they learn in a year. More pictures in picasa.

From October 2011

From October 2011

letters and things

Sebastian has been doing a lot more writing and drawing since moving up to the Pre-K room at daycare. Both his fine motor skills and his creative imagination seem to have rapidly developed simultaneously, so he is both more capable of drawing and more interested in drawing actual things (as opposed to just making lines and colors). So he will finally say to us, "This is a bus/person/tree/train".  One of the skills that the Pre-K room emphasizes is learning to write your own name, which for Seb is a bit of an ordeal. But he knows the letters and was able to put together his "whole big name" on our fridge using letter magnets. And he's getting better at writing his name too. He wrote "bus", in the picture below, and then wrote "Alex" (one of his friends at daycare), and then tried to sign it (he got as far as Sebas before running out of paper room and steam).

This is just a random video of Seb dancing. I think he has a future with Riverdance.

daredevil

We discovered that our little daredevil loves ride-on toys. She loves to be pushed around on them.

So for her first birthday, we bought her a big car. :)  She loves it.

When not trying to hitch a ride, she climbs everything. She climbs on chairs, tables, ottomans, beds, stairs, playground equipment, random boxes... 

But then, every once in a while, she calms down and sits down. She has two favorite books, both by Eric Carle - Brown Bear, and The Busy Little Spider.  Here we are reading both. Interestingly, I didn't notice until watching the video that she clearly had a thought about sheep while reading the spider book and wanted to get the bear book in order to show me that there was a sheep in there too.  Amazing.

apple picking

We had a terrific fall weekend - I played frisbee yesterday morning. Seb and I took a bike ride together, and Steve and Seb watched a beautiful sunset tonight over the Hudson.  Today we drove up to Wilkens Farm and did some apple picking in the morning, and in the afternoon went to a book fair at Washington Irving's homestead, here in Irvington. Despite predictions of rain, it turned out to be a sunny and pleasant day. Sebastian loved riding the tractor to the orchard, picking apples from the trees, and then eating as many as we'd let him try. Liesl got into the act as well, happily munching her way through an apple. And then we all enjoyed freshly made cider donuts.

The book fair is an annual festival at Sunnyside. Dozens of children's authors attend, with stacks of their books at the ready for you to buy and them to sign. It's a cool way of demonstrating to Sebastian that books are written by real people that you can even meet. He isn't yet thrilled by the idea of having his name written in the book by the author, but I think it's pretty cool. We bought 5 or 6 new books for our boy.

talking and walking

Liesl has been trying to say her first word: "uh-oh". She's got the first part down, and she's got the concept (throw something on the floor, smile at Dada/Mama/Seb and say uh-oh, wait for them to pick it up, repeat), but the second half of the word is hard. So she just says "Uh!". It's pretty cute. She also tried to say blueberry the other day for Steve, which really surprised us. (Although, given how much she loves blueberries, maybe it shouldn't have.)

She's doing a pretty good job of communicating without words, however. She has a very definite protest cry that we hear when we try to take favorite objects away from her. She has a real giggle, that she'll make when you tickle her or turn her upside down, but she also has this funny cackle that seems to mean "look at me, wasn't that cool!?".

I often offer her Cheerios during meals as a way to keep her occupied and happy. She likes to feed herself, but usually can't feed herself enough food for a meal. So one of our games is that I put a Cheerio in my hand and place it in front of her, and her game is to pry open my hand and grab the Cheerio. When she opens her mouth for the Cheerio I shove a bite of real food in. (Hey, it works.) But the other day, my hand was on the table in front of her and when she pried it open there weren't any Cheerios inside. She opened up my hand a few times and turned it over and over, looking for the Cheerios, and then she lifted my hand up to her mouth and bit me. Mama finally got the message, and got some Cheerios.

She's definitely a full-on toddler now - just yesterday she walked all the way through the kitchen, the dining area, around through the living room, down the hallway, and back to the kitchen. We call it the loop. I can't believe she's walking already. She sways a bit, like a drunken sailor, but is totally undaunted by her frequent falls onto her bum. She's also starting to take an interest in playing games with us, and unsurprisingly two of her favorite games are to try and roll a ball back and forth and to push little cars around after Seb. If she's not a tomboy, it'll be a miracle. I have to get my fix of cute dresses now, since she'll probably start refusing to wear them next year.

Football season. :)

Walkway over the Hudson

On Sunday we drove up to Poughkeepsie to take a walk over the Hudson River on the new pedestrian bridge (opened 2009). It's one of the longest pedestrian bridges in the world and was formerly a railroad bridge. It's beautiful. Gorgeous scenery all around, great views of freight trains and ferry boats and passenger trains for one small boy, and a really nice wide trail over the river. I've never walked across the Hudson before.

Seb

Poor Sebastian's newest tricks and achievements have been forgotten in the excitement of Liesl's more rapid changes. But he's growing and changing too, especially in the realms of language and imagination. He has finally grasped the concept of patterns, and can see and repeat simple ones (red blue red blue red ??). When he lines up his cars now, he sometimes arranges them according to size or color or type, which is new and fun to see.

He also has grasped rhyming and has begun to take great pleasure in picking out rhyming words in his stories and every day life. (pooper and scooper! those rhyme!!)  Many of his books have rhyming couplets and he is basically discovering them anew.

We taught him to play rock paper scissors and he loves it. He loves the idea of a game that can be played anywhere and often asks us to play now when we are walking on the trail. Of course, he always does scissors. Always. So it's not much of a game. He was fascinated to watch me and Steve play, however.

Somehow the idea of chores has sunk deeply into his imagination, and he now will say that he's going to do something "as a chore" "to help out". This often involves something real, like putting away everyone's dishes after the meal (instead of just his own) or helping me fold and put away the laundry, or helping me vacuum. His help, as expected, is not always terribly helpful, but I do appreciate the thought. He usually wants a reward for his good behavior, though, which is sort of contrary to the selfless nature with which he presents the original offer. Fortunately, being our child, his rewards are mostly food-centered: bread, cereal, ice cream, watermelon, pastries.

And finally, he still loves stories. He loves to be read to - the same books, over and over, until he gets tired and moves on to a different tranche of books, which we then read over and over. We're on a Poppleton kick right now. They're short chapter books about a pig named Poppleton. And after a hiatus, we're reading Frog and Toad again. He has also discovered that people can make up stories and tell them to him - Steve is tremendously good at this - and so over dinner or in the car he'll ask for a story. It's always the same genre: "mama, tell me a race car story".  I am not very good at impromptu storytelling, but I try, and he is an easy critic.

He starts in the Pre-K room at Happy Harbor tomorrow. I can scarcely believe it. Our big boy.