Hide and Seek

“I’m going to hide in my room!” Zuzu shouted joyfully to Grammie and me during our game of hide-and-seek, and ran off. Grammie counted nice and loudly, then we went to Zuzu’s room to find her. She was on the bed, sitting straight up, with a blanket over her head. She was very quiet and didn’t move while Grammie pretended to search all the corners of the room. With difficulty I muted my laughter. Did Zuzu believe she was out of sight? Why didn’t she at least crouch? Finally she couldn’t take it anymore and cried out from under the blanket, “I’m right here!”

Later, after Grammie had left, it was my turn to hide. Zuzu told me all the places where she wanted me to hide, then scurried away while I put myself in those places, then ran back and found me. Finally she ordered me to hide in her room. She walked with me all the way to her room, even closing the door behind me. A few seconds later she came in to find me—and didn’t see me. She must have expected me to sit on the bed and put a blanket over my head. Instead I sat behind her little dresser—in plain sight, had she bothered to walk into her room a few more steps. But in confusion she left her room, and began to look for me all over the house. I could hear her as she went, wondering aloud where mommy was hiding. At first I thought maybe she was pretending, the way Grammie and I had pretended earlier to draw out the search. But I could tell she was gradually becoming more distressed. So finally I called out, “here I am!” She didn’t hear me, and her cries were becoming louder and more pitiful. I wasn’t ready to reveal myself yet, because I thought the whole thing was funny. I kept calling to her, but hadn’t managed to get her to hear me, when the garage door went up. “Oh, there is daddy, I will ask him!” she said out loud. And that’s when Anders walked in, home from work, to find little Zuzu with a tear-stained face and no idea where I was. I got up out of my hiding spot and came out quickly so he wouldn’t panic.

All this time Bear was playing happily on the living room floor.

Girls and boys

GIRLS

Princess Ginny resting after opening Christmas gifts

     I was a slime monster. 

     Zuzu's friend, a boy, was over. "I'm Spiderman!" he said, and started shooting webs out of his wrists.

     Zuzu also started shooting webs out of her wrists. 

     Friend: "You can't do that! You're Captain America!"

     Zuzu: blank stare.

     Me, helpfully: "That means you have a shield and you can throw it around."

     Zuzu, frowning: "I want to be Cinderella."

     Me: "What skills does Cinderella have to defeat the slime monster?"

     Zuzu: blank stare.

     Me: "How about you dance with the slime monster and then Spiderman sneaks up and finishes me off?"

     This received an enthusiastic response and we performed said scenario with gusto.

     After this Zuzu switched to playing Maid Marian from the Disney cartoon of Robin Hood. If you've watched it dozens of times like we have, you know that Maid Marian's fighting skills are: 1) shout for help, and 2) throw pies. So that worked pretty well.

This same friend came over when Zuzu and I had our foam stickers out, making gingerbread-house ornaments for Christmas. I handed him a brown house shape and told him to join the fun. A minute later he said "this is a gun shop!" and held up his house, covered in exclusively blue stickers. "I want to make a gun shop," Zuzu piped up immediately. She made a new house, copying his but with purple stickers. When Daddy came home that day, I told Zuzu to show daddy her ornament. "Oh, is it a gingerbread house?" he said sweetly. "It's a gun shop!" Zuzu replied, to Daddy's surprise and amusement. But later that night, she said she didn't want it to be a gun shop anymore. She added heart stickers. "It's a heart shop," she said.

I took Zuzu to a class where one week the kids were supposed to hit balloons in the air with foam paddles. The teacher had put a small toy inside each balloon so the balloons would fall straight down again after bouncing up. It was fascinating to watch the way the boys behaved during this activity vs. the girls.
     -The boys began immediately. The girls just stood there until their parents urged them to action.
     -The boys used both hands to perform the steps, holding out the balloon and swinging with the paddle. The girls' first idea was to toss the balloons into the air, ignoring the paddles. Their next idea was to let their parents handle the balloon toss while they swung the paddle.
    -The boys fully understood the concept of taking multiple swings at the balloon to try to keep it in the air. The girls absolutely would not do this. Once the balloon was up, they believed it had to come all the way back to the floor before repeating the process.

I gave Zuzu dress-up clothes for Christmas, because she loves dress-up right now (I don't think I ever in my entire childhood loved dress-up ... ever). I MEANT to include some career-oriented garb like doctor and chef coats. But the princess stuff was a priority, and that was as far as I got. Some high-heeled shoes (ugh, she is going to twist an ankle), a couple tiaras, and several princessy dresses. She picked one especially poofy pink dress and wore it all day long, giving us a coquettish smile as she played with the folds of the skirt, waiting for compliments. And then she had a complete meltdown at bedtime when I told her she couldn't wear the dress to bed. "Not even princesses wear dresses to bed!" I kept saying. "Princesses wear pajamas!"

She wore the dress the next day too, and the next day. One afternoon Daddy took her down to the basement to watch TV with him. They chose a documentary about bears. I saw them upstairs again partway through, a potty break I think, and Zuzu was going around on all fours pretending to be a bear. When they went back downstairs, Daddy told Zuzu it wouldn't be safe for her to walk downstairs in her poofy dress. So she happily allowed herself to be carried, resting her blond curly head on his shoulder, her arms around his neck. "I like snuggling with daddy bear," she said as they went down.

BOYS

We had a couple friends over to play the other day. One was a two-year-old boy who pretended to be a dragon and began roaring. Bear stared at him with eyes that said "I love you," and roared back.

I'm sure all babies and children love it when their parents get down on the floor to play with them. Zuzu does. But Bear loves it in a different way than Zuzu. Roughhousing with us is something that he requires, in order to be happy and to feel loved.

Bear is practicing ball-throwing with diligence right now. He throws balls enthusiastically straight down into the ground, and then looks up at us happily for approval. He also tends to shout with each throw.

The Christmas tree he can undecorate!

I saw this idea on Pinterest a couple years ago: a felt tree with felt ornaments. Bear is pretty good with our real Christmas tree. He usually doesn't go near it if no one else is around it (because he doesn't like to be alone so he just always goes where people are), so his examinations of the tree are almost always under my supervision and usually pretty nonthreatening. But I thought it would be fun to have a hands-on version for him. He loves to swipe off all the felt ornaments, and finally succeeded in making one stick to the tree! He did it three times in a row! He has also made multiple attempts to stick felt ornaments to the REAL tree, which of course doesn't work and is adorable to watch.

Naturally Zuzu is also allowed to play with it, but it's a bit young for her. I'm having fun imagining ways that this tree could be adapted to work for multiple ages. Add buttons with ornaments that can be buttoned on, number the ornaments and make it an advent tree, make a felt nativity, make felt ornaments together as a craft ...

The site where I got the idea uses a cone shape for the tree. I used 5 flat panels instead. I cut triangles out of thick cardboard and duct-taped them together. I stuffed the inside with paper, then taped on a cardboard base. Then I cut the tree shapes out of a huge sheet of green felt. There is enough felt at the bottom of each tree panel to fold under the bottom a couple inches. I sewed all the tree edges together and slid it over the cardboard. I glued the felt to the bottom.

Zuzu's gingerbread party

I don't mind running errands with the kids, because they both do really well when we're out and about. But I do have a limit to the number of times I'm willing or capable to get them dressed and shod, restock the diaper bag, throw snacks in my purse, load the stroller into the trunk etc. This is true even when there's no snow on the ground and the temperature goes above 20 degrees. The hardest part is planning ahead and making sure we leave when we're supposed to, to take advantage of the brief window between naps and meals. (Otherwise we end up hangrily devouring soft pretzels and popcorn at Target at 2:00 for lunch.) I usually reach my errand-running capacity quickly with just our standard weekly activities like the library and the grocery store.

Therefore, I have not yet taken my malfunctioning computer to the Apple store to ask them to fix it. This errand would be higher up on my priority list if I didn't have the internet on my phone. But since I can still read the news online--er, just kidding, since I can still check Pinterest and Facebook--my computer continues to sit uselessly at home, and the crux of this is, that I currently can't upload all the beautiful pictures that my husband took of Zuzu's birthday party.

Zuzu just turned three, and we had a gingerbread house party, and it was frankly one of the cutest things ever. A couple of low-quality phone photos will have to do for now.

First, there was a giant gingerbread play house. Daddy picked up a couple empty refrigerator boxes from Sears, and I made this:

The paper plate roof shingles idea came from here, and the lollipops idea came from here. The kids were pulled in irresistibly toward it, as you would expect.

But that was nothing compared to the joy of watching six children decorate mini gingerbread houses around our table with their mommies. The mommies handled the frosting and the kids handled the candy, and the kids did GREAT and the houses were too darling to believe. (I have heard that transporting the houses back home was problematic--there was a less than 100% success rate with this. Sorry, guys.)

The gingerbread recipe came from here and the icing recipe came from here. If you're going to make a gingerbread house, you won't do better than these recipes, which both yield sturdy building materials, and make the experience fun and easy.

I made the houses in advance and included a surprise: the tops lifted off! And I filled them all with skittles. I figured the kids needed some eating candy in addition to some decorating candy. I'm sure the parents were all extremely happy about this, especially the ones whose houses did not make the home journey intact. You're welcome for the mess and the sugar highs. I also made doors and windows in advance and then the kids could stick them on wherever they wanted.

I didn't know how long the kids would enjoy the decorating process. It was MUCH longer than I expected. We aren't planning to do a birthday party every year, but maybe we'll do a gingerbread house party every year just to celebrate the season. It was so so incredibly fun.

Cute baby boy

Oops, my phone just deleted the blog post I was writing. I was talking about Bear but pictures are better anyway, so here's a couple.

"Probably because I'm cute!"

When Zuzu was younger, before she started communicating, Daddy and I would talk about her cuteness incessantly. And then we'd say, we CAN'T keep saying things like this when she's old enough to understand us, or she will be vain.

Well, YOU try living THIS child and NOT telling her she's cute. It can't be done.

Recently at the grocery store she was riding in my cart. A boy was standing down the aisle from us, older than Zuzu. He stood and watched us for a while, just casually staring for a minute or two until we turned a corner, at which point Zuzu asked, "Why was that boy looking at us?"

"I don't know," I said. Of course I was thinking, "Cuz you're CUTE!" but didn't say it. So she said it for me. She looked up at me with a big smile on her face and exclaimed, "Probably because I'm cute!"

So there it is. The results of our being too liberal with the cuteness comments.

Halloween: an excuse to give and receive

In some ways Bear gets the typical second child treatment. For instance, at this moment there are exactly 15 photos of Zuzu in the living room above the mantel, and exactly ZERO of Bear. And he's now ten months old. (I sure hope I get around to balancing the photo situation by the time he's old enough to look up and notice a thing like that.) In other ways, though, Bear's babyhood has looked more like the first child than Zuzu's, due to the fact that I was working when Zuzu was his age and didn't spend much time on crafty things. So he got a "My First Game" poster to hold up for the cameras at our annual Brewers weekend this summer. It was Zuzu's fifth time to Miller Park and she'd never had a sign.

She also hadn't had a handmade Halloween costume. Well, not a finished one anyway. Last year I did draw some black polka dots on a red shirt with a Sharpie. I was trying to make her a ladybug for the second year in a row. But eventually we gave up on that idea and sent her to daycare in a Packers jersey. "She's Aaron Rodgers!" We also decided she would rather pass out candy than go trick-or-treating. If you're wondering if we were just being lazy, yes, we were. 

Bear, however, got handmade hobbit feet for his first Halloween. And also a ridiculous over-the-top handmade wig (I sorta ran out of time to trim it down to size). He was Bilbo.

This year Zuzu was Cindy Lou Who. I added ruffles to a store-bought pink dress and got an oversized red Christmas tree ornament for her to hold, and made her practice the line, "Why are you taking our Christmas tree? Why??" She said it sweetly, if a bit too cheerfully, but she'd draw out the last "why?" perfectly.

All four of us went out into the freezing night for trick-or-treating, Bilbo the warmest with lots of layers. We watched Zuzu trot up to ring each doorbell, so excited at the prospect of being handed candy, her hair in pigtails, her Cindy Lou Who antennas askew, and I had that familiar mommy feeling of thinking one's child is certainly the most adorable in the world.

Halloween has never been my favorite holiday, but as I watched her I remembered why we go to the trouble. Not just because kids are adorable when they're wearing silly costumes. Some people like the scary part but that doesn't appeal to me. I think we do Halloween as an excuse to give and receive. It is delightful to give to children, who receive so well, easily and happily. We can't spoil them constantly, so we set aside special days to do it.

As I watched our neighbors open their doors to my little girl, big smiles on their faces, their voices warm and welcoming, their hands full of the gift of free candy, I realized that this is what I always want for Zuzu. When she goes up to someone, tentative, smiling, hopeful, I want her to be greeted by a kind-hearted person who will open their arms to give her something good. Life will be harder than that, of course. And that's why we do Halloween. The rest of the time, people may not be nice, or generous, or appreciative of the person a child is trying to be, but on Halloween they are. "Who are you?" they ask. "I love it!" they say. And then they scoop candy into your bag. It's a magical night for a child and that's a good thing.