Da Keiki Blog

Today – 7/21 – was Rowen’s first birthday party. Our cameras seem to have problems on most birthday parties… this time I depleted the batteries beforehand, but at least we managed 2 photos.

We still have nice sunrises here, and Andy still has to get up early.

Kiko bigfoot

Last week at Lydgate park…

I need to watch what I say in front of Leilani… when looking at a few similar photos of Leilani walking with me (from the back, with half the upper body cut off) I remarked, to Andy or myself “Who’s that fat lady walking with Leilani?” Leilani cheerfully replied “Mommy!”

We are making the first attempt to really potty train Leilani. We want to try for at least 14 days and then re-evaluate. Since last Friday – 8 days ago – we don’t use daytime diapers anymore. The only exceptions were today at the birthday party, and yesterday for a short time as punishment for refusing to sit on the toilet (lose underpants privilege!) – both stayed dry though.

Most of the night time diaper stayed dry too, but she does have (peeing) accidents – the first day twice on the carpet, once at Walmart, once in front of Papayas (took me 5 minutes to get the restroom key), every time Aunty Maureen took care of her (we sent Maureen on a vacation now).

She thinks as soon as she is naked she can pee everywhere outside, and I have not really discouraged this. Depending on whom she watched recently she squats, stands against a tree or lifts her leg :-)

Most of her recent accidents are not full pees, she stops herself and runs for the bathroom or asks to be taken there where she then finishes.

We has a severe Mommy malfunction too, I had some cleaning to do and parked Leilani in front of the computer. After a few minutes I saw her walk out the room, usually she stays glued to the screen when Pippi is on, but I couldn’t let go that very moment. A couple minutes later I heard a pretty distressed call for help from the bathroom – I ran in, and Leilani had managed to take the panties off (but only after they were wet), put the kiddie seat on top off the toilet (wrong direction though), but couldn’t get up. At least now I know the most compelling argument for waiting with the potty training… it’s easier when they can do these things by themselves already…

Wham! A rock thrown up by a lawnmower slammed into our windshield. A little crack formed, right at eye-level on the driverside, and Andy and I started to lament and complain unhappily. My thoughts about stopping, confronting the guy and trying to make his insurance pay got interrupted…

“A star! A star!” Leilani called out from the backseat. I looked again. The crack looked indeed like a star. When Leilani started singing “Twinkle twinkle little star how I wonder what you are…” the rest of my anger melted away.

Every time now when we get into the car Leilani notes happily that the pretty star is still there…

Leilani recently started to be really afraid at certain scenes while watching Nemo – especially when the fish are depicted fearful. The scene that Andy said almost made her cry from fear is when Nemo swims inside the filter unit to jam the pump.

The first scene, where Coral gets eaten she watches very sadly, and sometimes comments on ‘poor Marlin’, ‘crying a lot’, but I assume because Coral is just in the beginning and no attachment is formed to the character, no real fear is shown (Marlin first bosses her in and then gets out to defend her). I told her that poor Coral gets eaten, but she does not seem to empathise with her at all – or at least less than with the average fish on her plate… but then gets really sad in the next scene with Marlin.

Nemo’s initiation scene to the tank gang she likes so much that she re-enacts it – ah-oh-oh-oh a-oh-oh ring of fire ah-oh-oh-oh sharkbait oh-ah-ah. I’ll try to record it so you know what I’m talking about….

We ordered her more Nemo sippy-cups, and – in an attempt to keep her from wearing her Nemo boardshorts all the time – nice Nemo T-shirts and a dress, but so far she just wants to wear the dress or T-Shirt with the shorts….

We have given Leilani yoghurt since she was 9 or 10 months, but she never cared much for it. We usually buy maple syrup-sweetened organic goat yoghurt, not very sweet, but very healthy and expensive, says Andy. Only occasionally she eats more than a few bites, mostly when she wakes up in the middle of the night hungry.

Today Andy and I shared one of the sugary (though organic) fruity dessert yoghurts and did not finish. Leilani found the cup, tasted and dubbed it “Ice cream yoghurt.” This after sharing Lappert’s mango sorbet and chocolate ice cream in Poipu on Sunday–come to think of it, the yoghurt was mango flavored so that’s probably how she made the connection. Oddly enough, she’s not a big fan of mangos themselves, she tends to prefer more acid fruit. She finished the yogurt cup, wanted more and then demanded real ice cream. She got a home-made lilikoi-coconut popsicle…

Monday we were at Karla’s playgroup, and the toddlers ran around naked. We have been trying to teach Leilani to go away from other people when she has to pee (and not to wipe herself with a towel). She went way in the back where there was a dirt patch around the coconut tree, turned towards the tree, and when finished, she got Ian’s gardening toys to put some dirt over the wet spot, just like Kiko the cat.

She is pretty good potty-wise, today the morning diaper stayed on and therefore dry most of the day, except for the time when she was wearing underwear, a bathing suit or was running around naked in the garden. Recently when we are in the garden and she is not naked she often has been telling us something like “I chi-chi grass. Diaper take off!” just to be able to run around naked. For Andy’s sake (who has some weird perceptions about having to wear something Wrong, I have weird perceptions about not making fake excuses–I’ll have to teach her to just say she wants to be naked, I have no problem with that) she then squats down and pretends to pee (meaningless, because in the yard she mostly pees standing up). And here I thought she couldn’t relax again in the moment and just wanted to keep playing immediately.

One of the (anti-mothering, so last century, probably permanently damaging Leilani’s whatever but I-dont-think-so) potty training tricks we use are stickers – removable and re-stickable. Doing anything on the potty (almost always) = sticker, dry diaper = sticker, telling us she has to go = more stickers … you get the idea.

We went through a pirate and sailboat sticker album, now have one with whales, one with prehistoric animals (dinosaurs), and another one with objects in the sky. The pirates were not a big hit, but their boats and parrots were. That album had a beach scene poster that we put up next to the toilet, that’s where the stickers go. Boats and whales on the water, pirates and dinosauriers on the beach. Mamoth and homo habilis – she can say that now, first she called them “Affi”(German monkey) – on the wall next to it.

Andy adds: now I know why pirates have hooks–because babies tear their hands and arms off! When Leilani unsticks the pirate stickers, she peels them only from one end, and if an arm or a leg doesn’t pull in the same direction, it sometimes rips off.

Today was air-machinery day. The bats and owls in the sky-things-sticker-book have been used up. There’s a moon to light up the beach scene and a few stars too – so today up went the space shuttle, a jet and 2 helicoptors. She can say “Hubschrauber” (helicopter in German) very well and “helicopter” in English quite well, too. She knew to place them in the sky, and had great fun with them all of a sudden she said “All fall down” (like the song “Ring around the roses…”) ripped off the police helicoptor and put it into the ocean, laughed like mad and ripped it off again, rolled it into a ball and yelled “Trashcan!!!”. I think Andy’s relationship to helicopters has been engrained in her genes (well, I can’t say I like them either… so maybe she has double-anti-heli-disposition Andy wonders if that’s a German word :-]
Yes, I just shortened it a little. The full German word is Autosomale-Rezesiv-Genetische-Anti-Epistatische-Hubschrauber-Dispositions-Präadaption

Leilani loves Pippi Langstrumpf (“Longstocking”), but Annika, the good little neighbor girl even more now. Annika is always orderly, clean, well behaved, never speaks back and tries to keep Pippi from doing really stupid things. Leilani always demands to see Annika; I have to draw Annika all the time; she wants me to sing Annika songs…

I am pretty happy about that identification… especially … because… ahem… well…

(and that’s a 386, running SCO Unix, so that’s only a short time after they stopped filming Pippi… )

In case you’re wondering, Sonja loved Pippi too, colored her hair the same, and probably behaved a little like her too. But we both noticed in this picture that the haircut is strikingly similar to Annika’s, so maybe she has a split-personality…

I’d just like to add that Andy thinks my stream of thought is hard to follow… I just wonder how other people perceive our blog-alog (from dialog)…

So many blog articles in such a short time… I think I broke my own record. I uploaded huge amounts of photos to the printers today, and figured as a by-product, I should post them on the blog too…

Yesterday we went to Anahola beach. Leilan enjoyed playing with the water, and dumped several watering cans and buckets full on herself.

You can also see here that her hair is getting thicker and long enough for a half-curl over the ears and above the neck.

Later that day, Leilani was wearing a dress she got from Laureen in Austria!