Saturday, June 26, 2010

The Cheese Stands Alone

Yesterday was one of those days where doing nothing feels like a fun and fulfilling day! I mean that in a good way. I decided not to do any of the activities on offer with my moms clubs, and we just lounged around the house. Normally on my 'rest' days, I sit at the computer Facebooking and doing emails and such, and Little Z stares like a zombie at her 'shows' on Daddy's computer. Well, in all honesty, we did some of that too. But we also had quality play time together.

We opened the day with me showing her the Dora The Explorer application I put on my 'new' iPhone (my husband's old one - see previous post.) That ate up a bunch of time, until she got too frustrated with it. It's really meant for slightly older kids, and we just did the touch-to-color portion of the app. So then I showed her the Itsy Bitsy Spider app, by Duck Duck Moose, who did the Wheels On The Bus app she loves so much on my husband's phone. It just plays the song in the background while you sift through pages where touching/sliding certain objects makes them move. It's a great tool for teaching her how the touch-screen works. She tends to hold the phone with her thumb over the Menu button, so I frequently hear a wail of "I NEEDA ITTABITTA PIE-DAH GAYM!" from the bedroom, where she's still playing with the phone!
So I show her ONE TIME how to turn the phone on, slide the touch-button to unlock, and slide the app icon pages until she sees her 'spider square.' Not long after, when I went in to change her diaper amidst protests, she snaked the turned-off phone from me, and had it turned on and unlocked before I had grabbed a diaper out of the basket at the foot of the bed! She has mastered the on and unlock features! She still gets stumped if she doesn't see the icon, but I moved her apps to the front page for easy access. She has little sausage fingers, and lack of fine motor skills, so she often jabs at the wrong icon and is typing up text messages before she realizes her game isn't on, but I taught her to press the menu button ONE TIME ONLY until she saw the page with the spider game. She could do it all by herself by lunchtime.

When it was time for my shower, I set her up in front of Dora, with a bowl of Cheerios mixed with organic fruity-O's of some kind (Cascade Farms, I believe.) I confiscated the iPhone due to a lack of desire to get milk on it. Then we played for a while in the living room before I realized we had hit nap time and hadn't had any lunch! Since I was in a hurry, she had a hot dog (she doesn't like them cooked, since she hates waiting, but I read that even though they are pre-cooked, there's still a chance they have listeria, so I nuked it for 30 seconds first.) I cut it up into little chunks, even though she doesn't need me to. I know hot dogs are a choking hazard, but she's been very good about taking small bites and chewing thoroughly. From 13-months-old she's had no problems eating dogs, and I never leave her with one unsupervised. But in this case, I didn't have any cheese except for string cheese and the last little bit of 'cheese of 1000 hands' which is what I call the cheese we used in my cooking class where the kids got to grate it for their quesadillas. It's kinda grubby. I saved it for cooked-food purposes only. So I thought it might be cute to slice up the string cheese and hot dog into little bits. Add a blob of ketchup (she loves 'dip,' and it cools down the food enough she's not screaming that it's too hot when it's really only luke-warm.) She ate it all and asked for seconds! And she ate at least 2/3rds of that too! I had some leftover tuna/mayo mix on Saltines (and her discards.)

After nap, we played in the living room with a new toy I had ordered over a month ago from Totsy.com (a discounted daily-deal site.) It was an Alex Toys' Moody Monsters 3-game-set. We played with the Memory game and the Mix N Match game. I tried to get her to find the matching faces, but she would pair them up using toddler logic. "Dis wun sad, needs his mommy! Happy wun! There! He wit his mommy nao!" And she just liked building long snaking many-armed-and-feeted monsters with the mix n match parts! And then started adding on shapes-shaped play foods (like a rectangle 'chocolate bar.')

Then we touched-up her pedicure by adding new colors and painting them on the parts of the nail that the previous color had washed off of. She loved her 'rainbow nails' and I loved that the polish was non-toxic!
 

On a trip outside to get the mail, Z decided she wanted to play in the little pebble patch next to our driveway. We found a ginormous ant - big enough she could pick it up in her pincer grasp! She loved it. It was dropped and retrieved several times, and, quite frankly, I'm amazed it survived intact! When I finally made her set it free (it needed to go home to it's mommy) she cried and said she missed it.

As some roving missionaries took advantage of my inability to escape inside with my kid fast enough, Z decided to bring out her tub of chalk, which we keep in an old kitty litter bucket on the porch (to prevent having to go inside and look for her outdoor stuff each time she wants to do something. We just keep her chalk and bubble stuff in there.) While drawing her 'fire breath' masterpiece (from DragonTales - they all breathe fire,) she saw a teeeeny tiny ant walking across the poor attempt at a Cassie face that she had me draw. (A Dragon Tales character.) She picked it up (and by 'picked,' I mean 'squished) and proceeded to show it around and talk about how much she loved it and would take good care of it.When I suggested that she may have squished it, I was informed that she had not. When she decided to set him free to go home to his mommy, she decided he was, in fact, squished. "Dis wun too skishy. I needa FESH WUN!"

For dinner we had toasted cheese sandwiches. Since she kept reaching for where the sharp knife was cutting the cheese, I set her up with her child-safe knife (really it's just a pumpkin carving knife, but works for sawing and hacking away at softer foods) and the 'cheese of 1000 hands' to cut on 'her' cutting board. She had great fun. She even helped to slice her sandwich, and enjoyed her crookedy bits.

  

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