Steelykid!
drorzel | October 7, 2010SteelyKid has a new friend, who she shows off in this week's Toddler Blogging:
She's a huge fan of Goldbug in Richard Scarry's Cars and Trucks and Things That Go, so when we found out that there's a plush Goldbug toy available on the Internet, it was a real no-brainer. She recognized it immediately, despite Goldbug-the-toy being approximately 100 times Goldbug-the-character.
Unrelated disgustingly cute toddler babble story:
Today was the first break we've had in a week of dreary rain, so we celebrated by stopping by the playground after day care. For a little while there was a really bright…
drorzel | September 23, 2010SteelyKid has been expanding her repertoire of songs lately-- it now includes "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" and "The Alphabet Song" along with "Ring Around the Rosey," "The Wheels on the Bus" and "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes"-- so for this week's picture, she decided to get in touch with her inner Bono:
Irish shirt, check; big sunglasses, check; open mouth, check. Get a world leader or two in the picture, and nobody would be able to tell the difference.
drorzel | September 16, 2010For this week's Toddler Blogging, a shot of Family Reading Time:
SteelyKid looks very serious, because she's going about the important job of locating Goldbug in Richard Scarry's Cars and Trucks and Things That Go. Grandma and Grandpa still have the copy of this that I loved when I was little, and introduced SteelyKid to it. If you're not familiar with it, it contains lots of very busy road scenes, with lots of different types of vehicles, and each drawing includes a little gold bug somewhere-- driving a bulldozer, riding in a car, hiding in a teacup. SteelyKid has really taken to the "Where…
drorzel | September 13, 2010SteelyKid returns today from her weekend at Grandma and Grandpa's, and there's going to be a surprise waiting for her:
She hadn't exactly outgrown her crib yet, but she was getting kind of big for it, so we decided to move her to a big girl bed. It's a "captain's bed" with drawers underneath the mattress, bought from the local unfinished furniture place (and finished by them, because we're not that fond of the smell of varnish). A closer look at the bedspread Kate bought to go with it:
Before you say "Why'd you buy her a bedspread from the boys section?" remember two things: 1) Kate and I…
drorzel | September 9, 2010SteelyKid goes to day care at the Jewish Community Center, which is closed today and tomorrow for Rosh Hashanah. Here we see her calling all her friends on the phone in her play house to wish them a happy new year, and let Appa offer his own greetings:
The two-day closing is, as you might imagine, kind of inconvenient for us But it's all good, because SteelyKid is going to celebrate the holiday with a few days at Grandma and Grandpa camp, so here's a special Toddler Blogging shot, with bonus grandparents for scale:
(Both of these were taken with my spiffy new telephoto lens, the Canon 55-…
drorzel | September 5, 2010We had a Barfy Toddler Incident yesterday, making a mess of Kate's spiffy new car seat, but that seems to have been a passing thing, perhaps caused by an excess of cranberry juice while on campus yesterday morning greeting new students. Thus, we went ahead with our plan to take SteelyKid to the zoo today:
We only went through the part you can walk through-- it didn't seem like we'd have much luck getting her to sit still for the "safari ride" through the rest of it-- and a lot of it was kind of shabby and depressing-- small chain-link enclosures, animals scrambling for food from visitors,…
drorzel | September 2, 2010For this week's Toddler Blogging, SteelyKid demonstrates her mastery of bubble technology. Appa is not that impressed.
Her other big new trick is bossing us around in great detail-- she'll put something on her fake grill, close the lid, turn the knobs, then say, "Daddy! No touch! Hot!" pointing at the grill, followed by a very clearly enunciated "Be careful!" complete with finger-wagging. That's a little harder to get a good picture of, but I'll see what I can do for next week.
drorzel | September 1, 2010Rubber dino, you're the one,
You make bathtime lots of fun
Rubber dino, I'm awfully fond of you
Doo-doo doo-de-doo
Rubber dino, fearsome roar,
Good thing you're a herbivore
Rubber dino, I'm awfully fond of you
doo-doo doo-de-doo
Every day when I,
get undressed next to the sink,
I find a
Little fella who's,
cute and yellow and extinct
When I squeeze you, water squirts,
Then I giggle, 'til it hurts
Rubber dino, I'm awfully fond of you
Doo-doo doo-de-doo
You're my favorite bathtime toy,
Watch out for that asteroid!
Rubber dino, I'm awfully fond of
Rubber dino, I'm awfully fond of,
Rubber dino…
drorzel | August 29, 2010We're trying not to let SteelyKid watch a whole lot of tv, but we've taken to showing her YouTube videos of old Sesame Street and Muppet Show skits as a way to wind her down before bedtime. this, of course, has let to her demanding to watch videos any time one of us is anywhere near a computer.
One of her current favorites is this clip of Viking pigs from the Muppet Show:
I've been horribly earwormed with this for days, now, and since misery has bosonic character, I thought I'd share it with you all.
drorzel | August 27, 2010Many apologies for posting this week's cute toddler picture twelve hours late, but we had a little bit of a meltdown last night, thwarting my plans to get a cute picture after SteelyKid had her bath. She's cutting some new molars (I swear, she's part shark, with all the teeth she's getting), and it's hard work being a toddler on the go.
She woke up cheerful this morning, though:
This is her taking a break from her new favorite pastime, watching old Sesame Street and Muppet Show videos on my computer, to mug for the camera. YouTube is a wonderful thing, by the way.
drorzel | August 19, 2010Many of SteelyKid's first words have been transportation-related ("Truck! Vroom Vroom!"), which makes the four-level wooden parking garage she got from her Aunt Erin even more awesome. And it's pretty awesome:
As you can see, she grasped the idea almost immediately. That's from last night, after we got it put together. Below the fold, you can see her demonstrating how to work the elevator for Appa:
Being both larger than the garage and capable of flight, Appa's not terribly interested. SteelyKid loves it, though, and that's the important thing.
drorzel | August 12, 2010Now that she's officially two years old, SteelyKid gets to sit in the big chairs:
She also insisted on the forced-perspective thing to make her look even bigger compared to Appa. And the string cheese. She's all about the string cheese.
drorzel | August 10, 2010SteelyKid had her two-year checkup this morning, which means we got new weight and length measurements for her. It's been a while since I did anything really dorky with her data, so here are a couple of graphs tracking her growth:
(Yes, they're in English units, not SI. Deal with it.)
Using the rule of thumb somebody mentioned a while back that a person's final height is double their height at age 2, this projects her to be a bit over 5'9", so that's a prediction we'll be able to test in another fifteen years or so. There's some fairly large uncertainty in these, though, especially today's…
drorzel | August 9, 2010As seen in yesterday's post, SteelyKid got a grill this weekend:
This led to one of the cutest toddler anecdotes to date, which I'll put below the fold for the sake of those heartless souls who don't like cute kids.
SteelyKid was running around with an ice cube in a paper cup, because ice is pretty neat, and Kate's mom asked what she had. SteelyKid sumped it out into her hands, and Kate's mom said "Oh, that's cold."
SteelyKid replied "I warm it up," took the ice cube back, put it in the paper cup, put the cup on her toy grill, closed the lid for a few seconds, then brought it back. "Warm it…
drorzel | August 8, 2010SteelyKid was down in Boston at her grandmother's for a few days, which was a nice break, but it's always good to get home to Chateau SteelyKid:
Notice the spiffy new grill in the right corner of the patio, Of course, when you're out of town for a few days, all sorts of work piles up in your absence:
The mower was also a birthday gift. It blows bubbles, sort of, but the bubble stuff leaked out and hadn't been replaced yet. The nice part of life in the suburbs is that when you're done mowing your lawn, you can grill up a tasty burger:
I love the look of intense concentration as she…
drorzel | August 7, 2010
Happy second birthday, SteelyKid! That wasn't taken on her birthday, but it's one of my favorite early pictures of her. Now, of course, she looks like this:
That is, when she'll hold still long enough to be photographed...
drorzel | August 5, 2010I meant to take a picture of SteelyKid yesterday, before she left for Grammy's, so we would have a Toddler Blogging shot for the week. Alas, I am a dope, so you will have to make do with this out-take from last week's shots, in which SteelyKid shares her opinion of her father's dodgy memory:
She's down in Boston at the moment, where we'll be heading tomorrow for her second birthday on Saturday. At last report, she was having so much fun, she didn't want to sleep, so, you know, whee!
drorzel | August 3, 2010SteelyKid's second birthday is Saturday, so we're getting her a few things. Given the recent video I posted, one of her presents was really obvious:
As you can tell, she's inherited her father's skillset. If the dunk picture doesn't convince you, this picture of her ace ball-handling ought to:
Not even two, and she can dribble it off her foot, just like her old man. She's a prodigy, she is.
The hoop and ball were a big hit-- we had to drage the ball along with us when we went out to dinner that night. The other big treat of the day was a visit from Grandma and Grandpa, who brought along…
drorzel | August 1, 2010Every couple of weeks, there's another bunch of stories about how e-books are transforming the world, and paper books will soon survive only as collectible fetish objects. It occurred to me this morning that I share a house with a reason why paper books will be around for a while yet, at least in some markets. In fact, I share a house with the cutest reason why paper books will be around for a while yet:
That's SteelyKid with an alumni magazine, not a book, but you get the basic idea. And a lot of the time, she's much less gentle with her reading material:
Kate and I have both largely…
drorzel | July 29, 2010I don't know if Dijon the giraffe has made a Toddler Blogging appearance yet, but in case she hasn't, here she is:
SteelyKid is in the process of explaining that Dijon is her giraffe ("My graph!"). Which she is, being a gift from Aunt Erin and Aunt 'Stasia. She's a rather heavy knit giraffe, and is awesome.
And that's all I've got for tonight's Toddler Blogging, as SteelyKid stubbornly refused to go to sleep, or even close her eyes for the hour and a half since bedtime, and I have a horrendous muscle spasm in my neck from sitting with her. Kate's tagged in on "Oh, God, go to sleep already!"…