Buzz off

Sheinah has a series of movies called "Hermie and Friends" by Max Lucado that her Nama buys for her. The latest one she got when Nama came to visit involves a bumblebee called Buzzbee. His niece and nephew come to stay with him and they have bad manners. The point of the show (similar to the VeggieTales series) is to teach moral lessons in 30 minutes or less. The lesson of this episode is learning manners. The little niece bee in the movie tells her uncle Buzzbee to "buzz off." Sheinah decided that this was a fun phrase to say and started saying it frequently. We reminded her that the girl in the movie had bad manners and that it wasn't nice to say "buzz off." So, Sheinah started saying "the girl in the movie says BUZZ OFF" so that she could still get away with saying it. Who knew that two year olds could figure out a way around the rules?

Skee Ball

Tonight after swim lessons we went to Grandma's Sports Garden for dinner. For those of you who are familiar with Duluth and the Canal Park area, you know that the Sports Garden has all sorts of games for the whole family. Tonight, Sheinah decided she wanted to play skee ball (click on the hyperlinked word if you aren't sure what skee ball is). Sheinah didn't quite grasp the concept of rolling the ball up the incline. She wanted to throw it like she throws other balls...and throw it she did. Of course, throwing a solid ball that weighs a couple of pounds is a bit different than the balls she normally throws, and a lot noisier too! She caused quite a ruckus with the skee ball game. We finally just let her climb up the incline and drop the ball in the holes so as to prevent any damage to the game or the other customers. :)

Baby moves

Travis got to feel the baby move for the first time tonight. The baby has been "feelable" for mommy for several weeks, but it's hard for people on the outside to feel little butterfly motions. The baby is moving enough now that non-mommy's can feel it :) Travis was pretty excited because last time he couldn't feel Sheinah move until after week 20. Go Travis!

Sheinah-isms Part Two

Sheinah has been proclaiming frequently how big she is getting...likely because Melissa says that every time she picks up Sheinah :) Today, this is what she told Melissa: "I'm getting so big...I'm a woman!" Honestly, we have no idea where she got this from. Later that afternoon, Melissa asked Sheinah to tell Travis what she said earlier. Interestingly, she knew exactly what Melissa was referring to! She proceeded to repeat her statement to Travis and then followed it up with the following comment "I'm a woman and mommy's a woman and daddy and Samson (our puppy) are boys." At least she has her genders figured out!

Sheinah-isms

One phenomenon associated with being two-and-a-half years old is that your vocabulary develops at a rapid rate. Apparently, such rapid development isn't necessarily directly linked with words learned from mommy and daddy.

Today, we began our annual summer tradition of yard-sale shopping. One of our finds was a fisher-price doll house for $2. It comes with a few little plastic people. While playing with the doll house, Sheinah brought the little girl to Melissa, pointed between her legs and said "there's her pee-pee" and proceeded to laugh hysterically. Now, we are pretty sure that we have not referred to that particular part of the anatomy as a "pee pee." In fact, Melissa at one point referred to it as the "not bottom" for lack of a better word. We've also used Zach's suggestion of the Hawaiin word "punani" (not sure on the spelling). Thus, she must have learned "pee pee" from someone else. Now, Travis is a firm believer that only boys have "pee pees" but Melissa didn't think she needed to discuss that with Sheinah right now.

One thing we do know is we've been hesitant to teach her the real word yet after hearing Annetta's story about Grace. Apparently, Barney and Annetta had been teaching Grace the proper terms for anatomy. Grace was in the bathroom at church and Brenda (one of our pastors) called her pumpkin. Grace proceeded to remind Brenda that her name was Grace, not pumpkin. Brenda explained that pumpkin was a nickname and asked if her mommy had a nickname for her. Grace told Brenda that her mommy called her "vagina." Very funny story...as long as it's not you and your daughter :)

We're open to any suggestions folks might have for the best way to teach kids the proper names of body parts...

Talking Back

We must apologize for the long delay in postings. With the end of the semester for Melissa and two back-to-back trips, we've just been amazingly busy. We'll be updating the blog in the next week or so as we get settled into our less busy summer schedule. We did want to take a moment to post a little something about Sheinah's latest stage of being two-and-a-half...the talking back stage.

Sheinah has been asserting her independence and her stubborn nature (wonder where she got that from) for a month or two. This past week, she really stepped it up a notch. Travis was gone to the store with David (Shannon's husband). Sheinah decided that Naomi had something she wanted so she just took it from her. Melissa told her that was not nice and asked her to apologize. She said no and yelled something (can't quite remember what). Melissa took her to the bedroom to deal with the issue. She told Sheinah that she can't talk to Mommy like that. Sheinah was sitting on Melissa's lap at the time, face to face. Sheinah looked Melissa in the eye, shook her pointer finger and said "No mommy, you can't talk to ME like that." What was Melissa's response? To laugh hysterically...because it was soooo cute! Needless to say, that kind of defeated the whole purpose of the conversation. Sheinah started laughing and then the whole discipline thing just went down the drain.

Ah, the joys of parenting a toddler...

New Ultrasound

Thanks to the wonders of Travis' fancy phone, we were able to video the latest ultrasound. The baby is 10 weeks and actually looks like a baby now! Sheinah was with us and was facinated by seeing the baby. The baby actually moved quite a bit but the video didn't really catch the baby moving.

Enjoy!