Leilani: “You stay here very quietly and don’t move.
I’ll bring you a map so you can remember where we live.
[runs off and brings shiny blue paper and points to the middle of it]
Here.
[She also brought her sticker book with her]
There is my book. Do you know this princesses’ name? ”
S: “That’s Aurora”
L: “Good job!”
She then continued to quiz me about the names of more princesses than you care to read about (and I got them all right :)
The last weekend Andy was here we spent on the Big Island. We watched the Hula, visited the crater and Lava Rock state park as well as Waikupanawa where the lava enters the ocean, visited Serge, and several parties.
I think Leilani’s main reason for not sleeping is fear of abandonment. She also still has a little cold, that is very stubborn, and coughs a few times per night.
Yesterday I laid down with her close to 90 minutes again – every time I wanted to leave she cried (loud enough to wake the neighbors) and every time I fell asleep she poked me and whispered “Wake up Mommy…”. After 90 minutes I just left. The howls of protest were surprisingly short, maybe less than a minute, and she slept from about 10:45 to shortly before 7am. That was slightly better than most of the week.
Today I did a timer evening. She wanted to watch Snowwhite, and agreed to obey the timer – set to 30 minutes. After 30 I let her watch another 5 minutes, because she had been to the potty twice during the movie. When the timer went of again I turned off the movie. She screamed, yelled and stomped for quite a while, I told her to stop or she’d go to bed alone again – she remembered from 3 days ago and immediately was a lot quieter – still sobbed and cried for a little while. She was very tired and went to bed almost right away, and I kept the timer, set to 15 minutes, and although she tried to start a discussion when it went off, (“Please 5 more minutes, Mommy please stay with me…”) fell asleep surprisingly fast after that, and I left after a total of 25 minutes – no more crying.
She still wants almost 100% attention, and is especially unpleasant when I am on the phone. Andy and I hardly get to talk, during the day he is at work, and in his spare hours Leilani is demanding all my attention… I also worked on 2 web projects (one done now and one at 90%) and a movie and while I tried to time it so Leilani is in preschool, sometimes there are business phone calls while she is not.
I also found tenants that I am happy about, they’ll bring the deposit check tomorrow. I had successfully dragged my legs with a dozen or so of other people that I felt were unsuitable (Coconut wireless said “No can do 1650” or whose mother thought that it wasn’t a good match or who asked on the phone if Wailua was close to Princeville or if it was further than 150 ft to the ocean…) It is a big relief now that I can slack off a little now about the level of cleanliness and neatness, I showed the house a few times on short notice, not easy with a Leilani… I should videotape the house as long as it is still in such a great shape…
I opened 2 new containers of playdough for Leilani, and she played nicely with it.
Leilani making her bears.
Smile for the camera!
Look how cute! They are all holding hands. Oooohhhh how cute! (actual Leilani quote)
Andy has been in SF for almost a week, and is doing well, his job is great. Leilani is often cranky, and wants 100% attention, and refuses to sleep. She has been running on about 8-9 hours of sleep per day (at that age should be more like 12h) since Andy left. Yesterday, she did not take a nap and got up at 7:30. I started at 8 pm to get her ready for bed – she was yawning, rubbing her eyes and had dark circles under her eyes. She let me brush her teeth with very little resistance, put her PJs on and wanted to see a movie – I allowed one 20 min episode of Pippi. After that she begged so much that I let her watch one more and she promised she’d go to bed nicely after that… and then begged for one more. In my anticipation and fear of the screaming protests if I turned it off forcefully I tried a different strategy – I told her “I’ll go to bed now and you’ll go to bed by yourself unless you go right now” – when she then did want to go to bed, after 10 pm I helped her only on the potty and filled her sippycup with water (she begged for milk, we often need to re-brush teeth if bedtime is too long after dinnertime) hugged her once and send her off and went into my own bedroom and ignored 5 minutes of crying. While that probably won me the “Bad-Mommy-Award” it was one of my most enjoyable evenings recently.
We found prospective tenants that look good to me – the first ones I even gave an application to fill out. I hope this will work. We also decided on a car, we go small and cheap to start out, a Honda Civic, probably without AC. If it gets too bad we can still trade it in for something bigger.
Our sunrises are still spectacular.
I sold Andy’s surfboard at the Surf Swap Meet yesterday. While I am certainly happy about the money, selling off stuff at this time depresses me – I am disassembling the life we built over the past few years.
At the swap meet Leilani was having fun climbing and playing with Mason – he is 4, that seems to be her preferred age group… there were little girls there too, about her own age, but she showed very little interest.
After we had sold the board, we had ice cream, bought a lunch at Papayas and headed to the beach park. We swam a lot, had lunch, played in the sand, met 2 little girls to play with and to pour water on… and left at a perfect time for a nap… she actually did nap, for maybe 10 minutes…
Joy showed me Leilani’s reading on Friday, and I am really impressed. I think between uppercase (with me) and lowercase (with Joy) she probably now knows most of the alphabet, and she can read little words like at. She seems to be very proud of her skills and really wants to practice it, she pretend reads books or labels or mail (and often correctly…)
She counts to 19 now in English, to 5 in Hawaiian, and somewhere between 10 and 15 in German (but often leaves the 8 out…)
Joy said she has troubles with shapes, but I have not noticed (other than hexagon vs octagon :-) and I had troubles with these in elementary school.) She gets her shoes on the correct feet 90% of the time, and dresses herself sometimes – a few days ago we came home and her dress was pretty dirty, she ran off to the bathroom (where we have a shelf for 1/2 used clothes) and came back out wearing shorts and had put the dress in the dirty laundry basket. She still does not eat by herself, unless she is extremely hungry or it is something she really likes, but I know she can, so it’s no a worry, just an inconvenience.
Her development was recently assessed with a test called HELP and she scored 36 months in most areas, 33 only in gross motor skills . I think she would have scored higher in a lot of fields, but they only test a range of 3 months.
Interesting observations she recently made: “These cherries have a tiny bit wine in them” “pardon?” “You know, the bubbly stuff…” I tasted one and she was right, they were slightly fermented. I think I already blogged about her fear about “… will […] still be my friend when we move to California?” Another good one: “I will not stuff peas up my nose again!” Staring at my screen saver (see previous post) “I think they are electrical horses. They are very pretty…”
Leilani explains to her animals Rudy (the red horse) and Giraffe (a giraffe named Giraffe) how the world works. “See this is a mirror. It reflects everything. Tis is a reflection” Rudy got it. In the Rudy voice she answered “It sees everything” Giraffe didn’t – when she held the mirror out to reflect Giraffe, the Giraffe voice called out excitedly “Mommy, Mommy!!!” and Leilani laughed at the silly Giraffe.
[Sonja adds a few days later: I think there are very advanced thoughts behind this game, the main thing that triggered it was a Youtube video clip of a kitten seeing itself in a mirror (it was hilarious I think it was this one or maybe that ) and not recognizing it’s reflection.]