Today we went to a potluck at the Wailua Houselots Park. Karla took pictures. It was so much fun that we decided to do it again next Tuesday. Andy adds: that was an absolute record time – less than 4 hours from real life to blog…
Ian and Ruby
The three of us…
Left to Right:
Marissa, Chris, Zen, Chris, Ian, Melia, Adam, and us
Leilani set a new record today for bonking her head and pinching her fingers. She was uncontrollable, into everything, and super active. Fortunatelly she got tired from all the crawling and fighting mommy and her constraints, so she took two long naps. Unfortunatelly that made her go to bed close to 11pm…
She also ate a big meal today again, that’s a relieve after almost 10 days of almost exclusive nursing – she had a sore throat, and lost any interest in solids. Even though she only had a real fever from Thursday Aug. 3 evening – Sunday Aug 6. she acted strange from Wednesday morning through most of today (more crying, being very clingy, not eating, drinking very large amounts of water, and nursing like a newborn, waking up in the middle of the night, …)
I promised more photos to come in the original post, but didn’t get around to it….
We have to lock Leilani up occasionally. She takes it pretty well as long as the sentence is short, but does funny things, I guess because she figured out it catches our attention…
What the baby eats…
…and what she doesn’t. Actually we did not intend the pizza for us either, but the solar water heater installers and plumbers for whom we’d gotten it had already eaten lunch (or saw that it was vegetarian) – so Andy and I sacrificed ourselves…
Another visit from Ian
Bath at Saltpond beach
Goodbye to the old swing… Leilani outgrew it, and even though the photos look like she had lots of fun on it, she was much happier in the highchair lately. She used to fit totally inside the seat, as shown in this old photo and this older one. She still has one outdoor and one disco swing.
We haven’t gone camping in 3 weeks because of weather, work, and Leilani’s sore throat. We never got around to posting photos of a previous Anini camping trip either….
A visit from Julian:
On Sunday we were entertaining Leilani by reading a book. Since, we don’t believe in cramming babies’ heads with numbers and colors, we just show her the pictures and read the words to say something before flipping the page—no repetition. The images and moving the pages captivate her more than the spoken words. We were reading the book that shows grandmothers doing things with their grandkids, for example walking, brushing, hugging, etc.
Imagine our surprise when we read the word “clapping” and she immediately started clapping her hands. She was looking at the picture in the book, but it actually looks more like praying, so I don’t think she was cued visually. We were both focused on the book, not her, so we weren’t encouraging her, and we definitely didn’t clap with our hands. We knew she could clap and she actually does it often, and we say “clap” in both English and German, so she knows the word. What’s surprising is that this time she clapped in response to the word that was not directed at her.
Interestingly, Leilani has another trick with clapping. For over a month I tried to show her how to clap. She didn’t like me moving her hands for her, so we started out with her clapping my hand, and later she could do it by herself. Maybe I’m just inventing motivations for her, but it does seem like she now claps specfically to get our attention. She knows it is an action we value, and we encourage the behavior by turning our attention to her when she does it. Actually, we prefer that type of call for attention much more than screaming or shrieking.
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