32 month update

It’s unbelievable but true, my baby will be 3 in just a few short months.  Here’s a little of what she’s been up to recently…

* Emilia is crazy about one of her warm-weather faves, blowing bubbles.  We have tons of bubble blowing stuff in the house now and we spend tons of time outside blowing bubbles.

*It’s the start of ‘birthday season’ around here.  Over the past few weeks Emilia has/had birthday parties to go to just about every week.  It’s craziness but she loves it.  She loves to see all her friends (currently we’re in a wave neighborhood friend’s birthdays) and of course the cupcakes aren’t to shabby either.  Of course the other day she did stop to ask “Mama, whens my birfday?”  Oops.

at Mari’s (neighborhood friend in polka dots) birthday party.  As you can see, she was the youngest and the shortest.

with Xander, another ‘hood friend at the same party.

* She’s all about books right now.  Our story time has morphed from a couple of stories before bed to reading stories from the moment she’s done with dinner until Papa comes home, and then again before bed.  Current faves are of course, Curious George, The Peter Rabbit series, Strawberry Shortcake stories, and Skippyjohn Jones.  What’s so funny is she’ll pick up on a phrase from one of these books (like ‘rodeo cowboy’ from George) and use it all the time in her everyday speech. (Mama, I is a rodeo cowboy) – of course she has no idea what that means, but it’s HILARIOUS the stuff she comes up with.

*The girl is ALL about ‘gol’ classes with Papa (her little weekly soccer practices in the hood).  Much to Marcus’ chagrin she INSISTS that the two of them wear matching jerseys and that the practice every night.

* The bilingual thing has really kicked in.  It’s pretty clear that Emilia knows exactly when we’re speaking in English vs. in Spanish.  She’s also getting pretty good at knowing what language she should be speaking in which setting (ex: we had Spanish-speaking friends over a couple of weeks ago and she knew she should be speaking in Spanish, yet at school she speaks almost exclusively in English).

*She recognizes the letter ‘e’ as ‘her letter’ (but if you ask her what her name is she still answers “Emi Puchis Pu” – oops.

*She’s still obsessed with her babies, especially Baby Jesus (holy humiliating – especially when she starts screaming “BABY JESUS – WHERE ARE YOU!!??” she sounds like a Pentecostal Christian at a tent revival.  I blame it on the Christmas Eve nativity we went to.

*She makes up stories now – about her friends at school, about us, about the dog, everything.  It’s hilarious.  It’s also a little tricky because you have to take what she says with a grain of salt.  (Example: When I picked her up from school the other day Ms. Susan relayed a story Emilia had told her about me being mad at home because Chola has peed on the rug.  Never happened).  The girl’s got an active imagination.

* On Fridays I try to take Emilia out for a special treat, inspired by my friend Anne.  It doesn’t happen every Friday but more often than not it does.  As a result Emilia has discovered a LOVE of red velvet cupcakes and I have to say – they are AWFULLY tasty.

*Food-wise Emi’s pretty hit-or-miss right now.  Some days she’ll plow through everything we give her.  Other days I think she survives on water.  I try not to stress about it too much and offer her what we’re eating and that’s it.  I refuse to start being a short order cook for her in order to get her to eat.  She’s big on fruits and veggies though so the real issue is getting some protein in her.

Two not-so-nice traits…

* The nail biting.  It’s incessent and disgusting and I’m at my wits end.  I swear she’s going to lose the little bit of nail she has left on her index finger.  The pediatrician says there’s no real remedy but at this point I’ll take any and all suggestions before I start calling child psychologists in the area.

* The tantrums.  Oh LORD the tantrums.  They’re more sporadic as we allow her to be a bit more independent in some things, but the other day was BAD.  She was irritated because she wanted to drive the car home (um, yeah, you’re two and can’t reach the pedals).  Then when I strapped her in the carseat she fully flipped out.  It was awful and oh-so-scary.  She carried on like this for 25 minutes (I timed it).  She was SO worked up and upset that by the time we got home I had to give her a drop of Benadryl to calm her down and to even be able to get close to her.  Eventually she let me pick her up and then she collapsed sound asleep in my arms.  Whew.  I hope we never experience another tantrum like that again.

you guessed it – another birthday party.  This time at Alara’s.  Emilia licked all the icing off the cupcake and left the cake.

our artist.

dia 40 – remember us?

Wow… this might be a new record in procrastination.  Yikers.

Our day 40 pics come from Easter Sunday.  We had our friends the Cankurtaran’s over for Easter dinner.  Before that Emilia and I went to church (Marcus went to the church of B of A for a few hours) and I tried my hardest to get a half-way decent picture of her in her Easter dress from Nana, but was not all that successful (obviously).

the easter basket – new toothbrush, stickers, coloring book with watercolors, hairclips and a scooter (which obviously didn’t fit in the basket).

outside after church (no, she didn’t go to church wearing her crocs).

scooter delivery happened post-nap.

the ice cream man shows up every day in our neighborhood… including Easter.  Emi & Alara enjoyed their treats for about 3 minutes before they’d had enough.

baby Tuana – aka the Easter bunny.

Emilia and Alara enjoyed a HUGE Easter egg hunt in the front yard.  Really, it was huge.  They ran out of energy (and interest) before they found all the eggs.

 the best we could do in terms of a group shot of the girls… nice tutus ladies.

Thus concludes my 40 days of penance.  I know I skipped a couple days on the blog, but that’s because either it wasn’t all that great or because it was a little inappropriate (ie: nakey shots) and I haven’t yet mastered the art of ‘censoring’ those pics.  Believe though, 40 days worth of pictures were taken.  I then had to take a hiatus from the camera and picture taking because by this point Emilia was on picture-taking-strike.

dia 37 – egg hunt

don’t you love our festive holiday apparel?

The Saturday before Easter our neighborhood held it’s annual Easter Egg Hunt.  Although it was not run nearly as well as last year, Emilia had a good time (once she got in to it) and retrieved her dozen eggs.

A note on her outfit – Saturday mornings Emilia’s ‘plays’ soccer with the neighborhood kids.  She was CERTAIN she was going to play after the egg hunt (though we had told her several times that ‘practice’ was canceled)… hence her very Easter-y outfit.

c’mon let’s go!

had to include this pic so you could see emi’s ‘easter basket’ made in preschool.  it’s a gallon milk jug decorated to resemble a bunny.  ms. phyllis and ms. susan are awesome!

checking out their loot – don’t you love kyrie’s accessories?

dia 36 - picnic

ladies who lunch.

On this particular day, Kyrie came over to our house for a while so her Mama could run some errands.  The girls had a blast enjoying the beautiful weather and having the first picnic of the season.

let me feed you a bite of hummus with pita emi…

dia 35 - cheese

This is Emilia’s ‘cheese’ face…

crazy hair optional.

dia 34 – driver’s ed

I feel like maybe I skipped a day? Hmm…

Probably the highlight of Emilia’s evenings is when Papa comes home.  She looks for his car coming down our street, then races to the mudroom door (that leads to the garage) to let him in.  Oftentimes she’s so excited to see him she literally will run around him in circles, kinda like Chola does.  It’s pretty cute.  Occasionally she’ll make it outside while he’s still in the driveway and he’ll pop her in the car and have her help ‘drive’ the car in to the garage.  (Editor’s note: I don’t approve, but apparently I’ve been overruled).

dia 33 -futbol

So some of the people in our neighborhood have put together a little soccer ‘league’ (for lack of a better word) for kids 5 and under.  Basically it’s just a chance to introduce the kids to the game and do some fun games with their soccer balls.  They don’t have uniforms or games or anything like that.  They don’t even pretend play soccer at this point.   This Saturday was our first trip to the soccer field.  Unfortunately we arrived a little late and of course Emilia wanted nothing to do with it.  She did however LOVE wearing her matching Liga jersey with her Papa. 

example: the kids are doing some drill where they run and kick the ball in to one of the nets.  emilia wasn’t interested, so instead she was playing on the sidelines with marcus.

by no means do i think my child has amazing soccer skills, but she does dribble the ball pretty well.  could be all those nights playing ‘gol’ with Papa in the playroom are paying off!

another drill – it doesn’t look like it but they were running from one end of the field to the other kicking the ball.

at least marcus now has someone to go to soccer games with.

dia 32

So my project has officially ended, but I still have 8 days worth of pictures to post.  Here goes…

Emilia is way WAY in to Legos right now.  She loves to build towers and then knock them down.  We got her some new legos for Valentine’s Day that are Kai-Lan themed which she loves because they came with little figurines of the different cartoon characters. 

dia 31 – mama, can i ‘majade’ con tu?

Translation of ‘majade’ – that emilia-speak for ‘maquillarme’ or to put on one’s makeup.  She just can’t get the word out correctly.

Every morning (the mornings I work and actually put on some makeup trying to look presentable to the world) Emilia asks to climb up on the bathroom counter and to ‘majade con tu’ or put on makeup with me.  Usually we just pretend putting on a little eye shadow and pretend mascara.  This particular morning though she went to town.

washing her face again before school was a bit of a nightmare.

yeah, i pretty much had to throw that eye shadow out afterwards.

dia 30

Almost there…

not the best picture – but i love how dark blue her eyes are here and how her chin is doing that weird serrano/velasco/jijon thing (we’ve started saving for the eventual jaw surgery).

final de dia 25, dia 26, dia 27…

… you get the idea…I’m throwing all the pictures in to one blog posting.  At this rate, it’ll be the 4th of July before I finish otherwise.

At the end of our first day, we went to one of these ‘shacks’ called “lolos” for dinner in Grand Case.  Basically they are little stalls lined up side by side where you sit at picnic tables and eat wonderful Caribbean cuisine – yum yum.  All this and you’re right beside the water listening to some live music.  Doesn’t get much better.

Here we’ve created a monster – an ice cream monster.  There was a lovely little French restaurant across from the Lolos in Grand Case that also served homemade ice cream to pedestrians walking by.  Eating ice cream became a very regular habit I’m sad to report.

DIA 26

Not a great shot of the girl, but one of only 3 pictures of me at the beach.

The next day, after a morning on the beach, we traveled to the town of Marigot for lunch and some sightseeing.  Marigot is the port from which you can catch ferries to St. Barths, Saba, and various other islands in the Caribbean.  Sadly, what with a 2 1/2 year old, we were unable to go on one of those adventures.  Next time, though, next time.

 checking out the menu of the day.

 

emilia loved walking down all the various piers on the island with Marcus and talking about all the boats they saw.

boat counting.

DIA 27

sign on our beach – no loose dogs, no nudists, no picnics.

So, St. Martin is a European island – half Dutch and half French and those Europeans certainly do love to sunbathe naked.  Our beach was apparently at “topless optional” beach which I always find hysterical because, quite honestly, the people who opt to go topless really should opt not to.  There was a nudist beach further down from us so we would see them on their daily strolls.  One can only hope they were using lots and LOTS of sunscreen.  Emilia, of course, didn’t even notice.

on this particular morning Marcus decided to join Emi and I on our early morning walk.

i love how she holds her hands.

oh A we can’t thank you enough for the portable DVD player.  what a lifesaver.  if only we had successfully charged the battery on it before our trip home (oops!)

another pier, more boats to count.

DIA 28

running on the beach.

emilia was pretty good about taking her naps in the condo without much of an issue.  this particular afternoon however she was just not interested, so we popped her in the car and of course she was sound asleep before we even got out of the complex.

our rental car – we wanted something a bit bigger but thank goodness we didn’t get it because the roads were all two lanes and TINY!

marcus scoring us some mangos from a roadside vendor… omg they were SOOO good.

who won’t wake up for some ice cream?

DIA 29

The day we left we had an afternoon flight which meant we had plenty of time to spend on the beach in the morning.

  in addition to their daily games of “gol” (aka soccer), emilia loved having races with her papa.  surprisingly, she won every time. 

 

goodbye st. martin – we will definitely be back!