The biggest news is that we don’t have childcare at the moment. Poor Maureen had a death and severe sickness in the immediate family and decided not to come back from her vacation. It was very sudden for us, but Leilani doesn’t seem to miss her, which is very surprising to me, considering how much Leilani talks about cousins, and Oma, and Grandma, and other people she has not seen in a long time.
Maybe it is a blessing in disguise though that she left us, potty training and discipline are so much easier now that everyone watching Leilani is on the same boat, and Leilani made great progress doing puzzles in the last 2 weeks. We were also forced to organize our lives better, Leilani is on a much more reasonable schedule now, and last but not least we finally are checking out Auntie Joy’s toddler school (in Lihue, hello commute). While I wish very much that Leilani will be able to attend right now, she seems a little young… we’ll keep trying and report the progress.
Potty training is going great, although we went back to night-time diapers. We go everywhere (including Papayas :-) with her, have full day outings, and even start being confident on friends’ carpets. Her accidents usually are a few drops in the underpants and a distresses cry “I need potty”. Sometimes (when she’s having fun playing) we still need to remind her, when we notice her knees being presses together. She still makes us stop the car and goes by the side of the road sometimes (I think it’s a bit of manipulation, but who want to risk washing a car seat). The biggest issue is that she can’t really go on command, so in cases like these (excited or by the side of the road) she gets off the potty/toilet to wander around naked until she remembers she had to go.This happens mainly at the park, and I think is a relict of Maureen not ever putting her on the potty at the park
Saturday we went snorkeling at Tunnels (Haena), and later kayaking at Pinetrees in Hanalei. Leilani talked about going kayaking all day, since we had the kayak on the roof of the car. She loves to sit in front with Mommy while Andy gets his exercise paddling in back. She sits quitely and looks for fish, turtles and sharks (“Bruce” from the Nemo movie) but there were none to see in Hanalei Bay. The destination of the kayaking trip was to see the big sailboats anchored in the bay, the biggest being a two-masted wooden sailboat that we told her was Pippi’s (father’s) sailboat–it looks like an old boat, and we actually vaguely know its owner . We finished by watching part of the ocean film festival outdoor on the beach, Leilani lasted until 9:30pm (always hoping for another fish or turtle movie–there were enough to hold her attention, and she likes to watch surfing).
Julian was there with us, and patiently tried to teach Leilani gemetrical shapes, that he drew into the sand with a stick. A circle, a square and a triangle, then he asked her to stomp one of them. A few days later Leilani took a wooden spoon, raked a V on the carpet, and said: “Triangle. Stomp triangle…” We emailed that to Julian, with a subject lien “Impact” and the answer was:
> wow! ai in young lifeform.
> symbolic notation.
> wish we had computers that could do that.
> aloha
> julian
Sometimes when Leilani is really dirty she gets a bubblebath (keeps the bathtub clean :-)
A few days ago we went to dinner with Cristophe – Leilani was playing with his daughter.
Andy took a cool photo:
