Just a few individual things that are happening around here or what we are hearing these days –

• Emily told me that her gas was “singing a little song”
• Emily’s current favorite game to play is Librarian. She brings us a small stack of books that we have checked out. She also spends a lot of time “organizing” her books into piles.
• Emily has taken to caring for Robby. She will have him lay on the couch, tells him to take a nap, and then rubs on his head. He thinks this is the best game ever.
• Emily absolutely loves to play dress up and would live in her Cinderella dress if we let her.
• Emily’s other accessory of choice is a toy crown that she got out of a kids meal. It is even worn to bed if we let her.
• Emily favors her father. She will call out to him in the middle of the night for comfort. She likes Mommy, but Daddy is best.
• Emily is learning how to tell time on a clock face. She knows when it is 8 pm and that it is bedtime. She has also started adopting time-lingo into her description of time. She will tell us that it is “15 till” or “12:30”. She occasionally gets it right, but at this point it is just blind luck. My favorite is when she tells her doll that it is 17:30.
• Emily hasn’t mastered the terms and concepts for yesterday, tomorrow, last week, next week, last month, next month, last year, and next year. Everything is described in years. She will tell us that next year we are going someplace meaning tomorrow. She has told Robby what she did the day before and described it as last year.
• Emily has a placemat map that we use to show her places she has gone and where other people live. To help her find Tennessee quickly we taught her to find the drawing of Elvis, who is placed over Memphis, and then we are on the other side of the state. She now describes where we live as being “at Elvis”
• Emily asks us everyday what we are doing that day or the next day. She is used to going and doing things.
• Emily knows the Tennessee and US flags and when she finds them she likes to point them out.
• Julia is having a few more words pop out of her mouth. She will repeat a lot of things for us, but they don’t sound quite right. She has made these clear enough to understand: no, movie, E (Emily), more, please, cheese, cak-er (cracker), and lunch.
• Julia favorite toy right now is a new slide that we have in the living room. She will sit on top of it and watch TV. She also slides all of the time.
• Julia is interested in helping us do things now. She helped pack Robby’s lunch, has gone to fetch things for Robby that she perceives that he needs, and loves to go and fetch Mommy’s shoes when we are leaving.
• Julia has a pink tutu she loves and wears anytime she can. Mommy made her a new one and so far she has been unwilling to even try it on because of how much she loves the pink one.
• Julia will not leave anything in her hair. She asks for bows to be put in her hair and then removes them while we are out. Unfortunately, this leads to a lot of lost bows.
• Julia is still highly attached to Mommy. For her Mommy is best.
• Julia doesn’t mind taking her afternoon nap and sometimes asks for it. Most of the time when she is asked if she is ready and answers yes (with a nod) and then collects her things and meets us at the pack n play where she sleeps at nap time.
• The girls have play picnics. This involves putting toy kitchen food it in baskets or bags and then carrying it around the house. After they have picked a spot they will spread a blanket, sit down, and get the food out for the picnic. A variation of this is when Emily fills a small metal lunchbox and takes it to pretend school. I’m pretty impressed with the lunch she packs for herself.

Emily has been very captivated with the idea that she is a princess. Lately, she has taken to being Cinderella. The other night, while playing dress up with her princess dress and her ‘glass’ slippers, she asked me to dance. After we danced in a circle for a bit, she informed me that it was midnight. Then, she ran off removed one of her shoes, and told me, “Prince, you have to find my glass slipper and put it on me.” She was delighted when I picked up her shoe and first tried putting it on Mommy’s foot and then on Julia’s foot, while declaring that it was too small for Mommy and too big for her sister. Then, I asked her if I could try it on her foot. Her joy was complete when I put her slipper on her foot, and announced it a perfect fit. Needless to say, we played this game several times that evening.

By far, “Mary Poppins” is the girls favorite movie right now. Emily asks for it by name and they both get excited when they hear the music. The movie is pretty long, but the amount of the movie that holds their attention is amazing.

Several things from the movie have been big influences on the girls. Emily has added “cheeky” to her vocabulary. I asked her where she heard that word and she informed me that, “Mary Poppins said it”. Emily likes to dance like a penguin and has been known to try to ‘adjust’ her pants so that she looks like Dick Van Dyke when he dances like a penguin. Julia runs to get shoes on so that she can dance properly with the chimney sweeps. Both girls dance during the movie, but mostly with the chimney sweeps and trying to imitate the kicks. Today, Emily’s favorite song was “Spoonful of Sugar”. Julia managed the whole word “movie” tonight. For Julia, that is a big deal.

There are no photos for this one, but it is a good story.

Emily has been pacifier-less since her birthday almost a month ago. She has really struggled with going to sleep and we have tried a lot of things, but haven’t found the right combination of things to help her. Tonight was no different. She was up a few times, but mostly I could hear her moving around in her room. We let her work it out on her own and finally it was quiet. Just before I went to bed I heard a few noises at the door. I thought Emily must have woken up and was looking for us just to put her back down. I like these because I can cuddle and rock her for a few minutes, only when I tried to open the door carefully it was stuck. It was stuck on a sleeping Emily! She had gone to sleep laying just behind the door. I admit I walked away and chuckled about this for a few minutes. I returned and worked for a few more minutes moving her legs just far enough that I could squeeze into the room. Sure enough she had moved her pillow, blanket, and stuffed animal to the floor just inside the door and finally found sleep. I took pitty on my sleeping beauty and moved her back to bed to sleep. Sweet dreams, little girl!

A couple of weeks ago, Daddy had to perform some light plumbing to one of our toilets. I asked Emily if she wanted to help/watch me fix the toilet. Being the ever so curious girl she is, she said yes.

She was very helpful at fetching paper towels and a cup for Daddy when I needed them. She watched as I flushed and drained the toilet and emptied the remaining water into a bucket with the cup. And she was curious as I changed the leaky pipe to the toilet and put everything back together.

Flash forward to tonight. Sometime between this recent plumbing fix and the present, our toilet started continuing to run because the rubber flapper inside the toilet would remain open, until we took the lid off the toilet and pushed it closed.

So this evening I decided to tackle this latest development–with Emily trailing close behind. I opened the top of the toilet, then flushed the toilet and began working on adjusting the length of the chain that lifts the rubber flapper when the toilet handle is pressed. As I was doing this Emily left very excitedly. She returned a few moments later with a roll of paper towels, saying “Here are your paper towels, Daddy.” She then left very quickly, so I followed her out wondering why it occurred to her to bring me the paper towels.

It’s then that I see Mommy getting the cup and bucket out from last time. Emily had remembered that I needed these things the last time I fixed the toilet, and she went to Mommy to be helpful and get them for me. What a wonderful helper for Daddy to remember these things and then to fetch them with her own initiative.

Oh, give me a home where the buffalo roam
And the deer and the antelope play
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word
And the skies are not cloudy all day

One of our overarching themes of our trip was the song “Home on the Range”. One of the library books I had picked up for the trip was the song put to pictures of a little boy chasing his cowboy hat through a dream. Emily loved reading the book every night at bedtime and then we would sing the song to her. We also had a copy of the song that we listened to everyday. Emily started calling it her song. And in our travels, we even had one day that we saw a herd of bison and a few deer and antelope grazing.

The song was definitely sinking in because one day Emily was talking with a couple of women at the Grand Canyon about the rainbow we could see. After she had pointed it out, she continued with the proclamation that ‘the skies are not cloudy all day’. Maybe one day she will understand that rainbows require a few clouds, but the exchange was very funny!