Chalk & Chocolate

So the other day Seara and I were playing with sidewalk chalk and I drew the lovely mural above. A couple minutes after drawing it I looked back and noticed that the white lines inside the cloud were smudged (look more carefully at the picture). Well, I found Seara and quickly understood what had happened ...


For those of you who don't get to see Seara on a regular basis, let me explain her to you. She is not a social person. She much prefers being a fly on the wall and watching people. She also prefers to play alone most of the time (I know parallel play is an age thing, but this is beyond that). She is extremely independent and will only do what I say if the word "chocolate" is involved. We're working on that. :) But, she is also very rambunctious, active, and creative. She really likes jumping - she does it on the floor when excited, and off things while playing. She runs around like crazy all day and stays very, very busy. She also loves Pixar movies, but I don't let her watch them much any more because she would do it all day long. Her language development is really progressing, although she will NOT speak in front of others unless she feels really warmed up to them (which takes 2-4 hours with her!)

So last week at my parent's cabin Seara and I were down in the bunk house with my mom, and there was this lit light bulb hanging down from the ceiling. It was right in Seara's range, so she said "light!" and reached to touch it. My mom quickly stopped her and told her "Don't touch, its hot!" And Seara replied, "Hot light." Now why, you ask, is this significant? Well, Seara says a whole ton of two and three word phrases, but every one of them is a phrase that we say and she repeats. That was the first time she ever made a two word phrase on her own. The other thing she has figured out recently is the word "I". When she does something obedient I tell her "You did it, Seara!" and she says back to me, "I did it!" Thats pretty exciting to me! (Now go ahead and laugh at my lack of a life.)

Oh, I forgot something - she is such a night owl!! Talk about driving her morning-people parents crazy! She still goes to bed at 7:00, but lately she's been staying up until about 11:00 pm! Crazy girl! So we have to wake her up at 7 am for family scripture study. She used to nap from noon-ish to 2:00, but now she won't fall asleep until around 2, and she wants to sleep until 5:00, which means that she's not tired at 7:00. But, if I don't let her nap she gets so over-tired that she just screams from about 7 to 10 pm. And, if I try to let her take a little short nap, and wake her up, she'll be all ornery and scream for about two hours. So, for all you seasoned mothers, what in the world should I do!?

Elijah is exactly opposite from Seara. He is a very, very social little boy who always wants to be where the biggest group of people is. He loves to see and play with other babies, and he'll grin and talk to any stranger who pays attention to him. (Seara always scowls and hides her face.) He will play happily on the ground now (yay for my very tired arms!), but has to be right in the middle of the action. For example, if I'm cooking dinner and Sam and Seara are in the kitchen as well, Lije better not be in the living room looking on! He must be in the middle of the kitchen floor. He has come to the age where he will only eat if you give him what everyone else is eating. Strike that. If you give him what Samuel is eating. At breakfast Seara and I will have Cheerios, and we give him some too, but if dad is eating toast he will NOT eat Cheerios. Just toast. Anyway, I can't quite figure out the rest of his personality yet because he is too small still. But I'll let you know what else I discover.

ADDED LATER ON:
So this afternoon Seara went down for her nap at noon and finally drifted off at about 1:30. I let her sleep until 2:15, and when I woke her she began her screaming as usual. And I mean SCREAMING. So what do I do? I put her in her chair and gave her a chocolate ice cream cone. She screamed up until the moment the ice cream was in her mouth, but as she ate it she slowly calmed down. By the time she was done she was just fine and ate a huge lunch. Please don't tell me I'm going to have to do this every time, though! Oh, funny thing happened while she was eating lunch. I was doing something and wasn't paying too much attention to the kids (Sease was obviously trapped, and Lije was crawling around). Well, suddenly I hear Seara say in a high-pitched, ultra-sweet voice, "Lije, no babe!" I turned to see Elijah getting the books out of my bookshelf, which the kids aren't allowed to do. She was imitating me - that's just what I say when I see him do that!! That made me crack up!