Dinosaur World

So I haven't come out and said it on here yet, but we're moving to Memphis this summer. I got a good job at the University of Memphis so we are moving (Kris is currently in the process of job hunting). We were very fortunate to sell our house here within four days of putting it on the market. The down side is that they want us out May 21st! We took a trip to Memphis this weekend to go house hunting. Unfortunately we didn't find anything. So as of now, we will be homeless on May 21st! Though we have a lead on a rental, and there are some other possible scenarios.

Anyway, on the way home we spent the night near Bowling Green, KY and the next morning we went to Dinosaur World before heading the rest of the way home. Stian was only mildly impressed by Dinosaur World, but I thought it was interesting. It really gave you a good perspective on just how big and creepy some of those dinosaurs were! I kept thinking I was sure glad they weren't around anymore!

Independent

Silje has an independent streak. I think that is part of what surprises me and makes me think she is so smart. Like when she tries to wipe her own face, or put on her own socks and shoes, or wipe herself during a diaper change. I do think she's smart from knowing what to do, but I also am surprised that she wants to do them. Stian is not an independent child. We really never went though the phases where he would demand to do things on his own. Even now he much prefers us to do things for him. I think he'll be 16 before he gets himself dressed in the morning. He just isn't interested in doing it.

But I suspect Silje will be different. Even today at lunch she was pretty much insisting she feed herself. I had to guide her hand to her mouth, but she had to have her hand on the spoon trying or she got mad. Then she decided she needed to help squeeze the food out of the tube too.

As an aside - I make about half of Silje's food - they have lots of really great organic options these days though, so I'm lazier than I was with Stian. Although I just don't seem to have the time these days either. She's also on purees a lot longer than Stian was. She still has no teeth, so that might be part of it. But when we have given her something more chunky she has gagged and thrown up, so we're taking it very slow.

And then just a bonus picture of the cowgirl.

And of Stian who insisted I take a picture of him too.

Progress

Silje is delayed in the physical stuff. She's really nowhere close to being ready to crawl and she's getting close to a year old now. Part of the reason for this is that she has absolutely no upper body strength. She has always hated tummy time. If you put her on her tummy she would get quite angry and stay angry for quite awhile after you took her out of it. So we haven't been particularly good about her doing it. I also wasn't sure what the point was - if she was just going to lie there and yell and not try to do anything else she wasn't getting much out of it.

We've discovered recently though that she doesn't seem to mind being put into the crawl position. She doesn't get all that mad about it. But she is so weak in her upper body that she can't maintain it. She will collapse after awhile and has a hard time getting her head all the way up to look forward while in the position. But we've been putting her in the position for about a week now and she is getting stronger. She can hold the position longer now than before.

She also likes to stand. She can't pull herself up, but she will hold onto something for awhile if you put her into the position. We stay right there because she has a tendency to just let go and we don't want her to get hurt. I was beginning to wonder if she would walk before she would crawl. But now that she is building her upper body strength and doesn't mind the crawl position I think she'll crawl first.

Although she is behind on the physical stuff, she is apparently advanced on the mental stuff. We had conferences at school recently and her teacher said she was more advanced in some areas than many of the kids in the 12-18 month room. She does surprise me with the things she does sometimes. For instance I was done feeding her the other day and I placed a rag on her high chair tray and stepped away for a minute to rinse out her dish and I turned bag and she was wiping her mouth with the rag. She tries to put her own socks and shoes on. She has been trying to help me stuff diapers for awhile. It amazes me that she understands what all of these things are for - she just doesn't have the ability to do them quite yet. I guess at school she does stuff like differentiate between shapes and understands that the circle goes in the round hole and the square goes in the square hole. She's not very good at actually getting them, but she tries.

Anyway, she also has a pretty good sense of humor already. She likes to make faces to make us laugh. She has a few that she likes to do. A few are hard to catch on camera because she does them quickly. But I did get one of them.

Spring Fest

This weekend was Spring Fest at Purdue. The highlight of the event is the Bug Bowl that the entomology department puts on. They have all sorts of events. Unfortunately it was raining pretty hard when we went on Saturday so we missed some of the more interesting events such as cricket spitting and the cockroach tractor pull. But we still got to see enough bugs to give me nightmares. 

We went to the insect petting zoo. Here we saw a Madagascar hissing cockroach (none of us touched it):

A giant millipede (none of us touched it):

A tarantula (none of us touched it):

And a few other gross, er, I mean cool, bugs that none of us touched.

We then went to the insect observation zoo and saw some other cool stuff.

We went to the veterinary medicine department's tent next and saw some animals.

Then we went to the College of Health and Human Sciences tent and Stian did some activities and learned about things like self esteem, sleep, dental health and heart health, etc. He went around and did little activities and got little trinkets and then got a prize at the end for doing all of those. He chose a cheetah print fan. Cheetahs are his favorite animal. Sadly the 25 cent fan lasted about 24 hours before it broke. Stian was crushed and I spent about 30 minutes this morning trying to fix it - rather unsuccessfully.

All in all, Spring Fest was great. Though it would have been better had it not been raining so hard. We went to the library later in the day and Stian had to get a book on Madagascar hissing cockroaches and thinks we ought to get one as a pet. Umm, no.

Piggies

This is how Silje's hair looked when I picked her up from school yesterday. Cuuuute! One of her teachers was experimenting. I laughed when I saw her. She has them in again today because she had quite the funny hair this morning after having these in all day yesterday. I am going to need some practice though - slippery hair + little tiny rubber bands + wiggly baby made this a bit of a challenge. I had grand plans of doing two little french braids before the piggy tails, but there was no way that was happening.

Easter

Look! The Easter Bunny found Silje a little brown haired girl with glasses driving a car! It's perfect! The only genre of toys that Silje has shown a real preference for so far (other than things that make noise) are cars. This is probably because she sees her brother playing with them, but she can't have matchbox cars yet, so this is more her speed.

Hmmm, after looking at these pictures I think it might be possible, just maybe, that my children need haircuts. That might just be crazy talk though.

Beach Bum

Awwww. Karin sent me this picture she took of Silje napping on me in Princess Cays. Silje took a number of naps like this while we were hanging out on various Caribbean beaches.

Everyone who walked by us while she was napping - and there were lots - had to stop and ooo and ah over her. In fact Silje got an incredible amount of attention on our trip. She gets lots of attention in general, but it was kind of over the top on the cruise. I wonder sometimes how Stian feels about the attention that Silje gets. But in general he seems to really like her, so he doesn't appear to be holding it against her yet. And if Silje isn't with us then Stian gets lots of attention.

Karate

(The picture quality here is pretty awful. It's a scanned image of a digital print that wasn't that good to begin with and then I think they had it hanging on a wall somewhere for awhile before they gave it to us.)

 Stian's been doing karate now for awhile. I honestly don't remember when he started, but it's probably been almost a year ago now. The karate teachers come into school and for an extra fee the kids who want to take karate classes once a week. At first Stian claimed he didn't like it. He would ask us every week if he could quit. We don't really know what that was all about. We asked the director and assistant director at his school to observe him during class and tell us what they thought. Every week they would report back that Stian looked like he was having lots of fun during class. He was very enthusiastic and smiling and one of the more engaged kids in the class. So we persevered even though Stian kept asking us to quit.

Now he suddenly really likes it. He even says he wants to be a sensei when he grows up. This is kind of huge because usually he says he wants to be nothing or goose poop if you ask him what he wants to be when he grows up. So he must really, really like karate. The picture is obviously of him breaking a board. He's broken maybe 5 now in different ceremonies. I believe he has another board breaking ceremony coming up too.

Overall I've been pretty happy with the program. They teach them karate moves, but also life lessons like perseverance and respect and leadership. They also teach them about bullying, which is good. The part I'm not so crazy about is the stranger danger stuff. I wonder if that wasn't the part that was kind of freaking Stian out in the beginning. He worries a lot about "bad guys" and I think focusing on that was not the right thing for him. Of course he needs to know about the stranger danger stuff, but I think he's still a little young for it, and really, the vast majority of strangers he meets are nice people who would never harm him - no sense scaring the poor kid half to death at this point when he's never really away from a parent or teacher.

School Pictures

I picked up their spring school pictures tonight. Not too bad. Stian looks pretty cute. Silje doesn't look bad, but we obviously have much cuter pictures of her (like from the previous post with her in front of the lilacs).

Beautiful April Evening