What we're up to

As mentioned in a previous post, Charlotte has a fascination with eagles, so today we decided to take her to the Armadale Reptile Park because they have a captive Wedge Tail Eagle there who can't be released due to wing injuries.

She was amazed and a little bit overwhelmed that it was a real eagle.

And then we wandered around and saw lots of skinks, bobtails, monitors, snakes, birds, kangaroos, dingos and ponies.

The other thing we did today was Kindy Dance Time. It's rapidly becoming her favourite thing to do. Unfortunately, the term ends in a couple of weeks until next year.

On tippy toes.

Swaying like a willow tree.

Lining up at the end and waiting her turn to "fly" to the instructor.

"Flying" to the instructor.

Made it! Getting her sticker.

Big goodbye cuddles for Miss Sherry.

Now this will anger some people

And in news that will rile the fatherhood organisations… lesbians make better parents.

Edited to add: it is our personal view that good parents are good parents, regardless of gender.

Yes, we're still here...

We're bad, bad, bloggers at the moment but it seems to be the last thing on the agenda, so the best I can do at the moment is some pics taken over the last couple of weeks.

In house news, our home is on the market and we've had two potential buyers through so far (we're open by appointment only at this stage). The frustrating thing is that we really can't put offers in on other properties we like until we've got at least a decent nibble on ours. So, house selling and buying has kind of been occupying our thoughts (and time) of late. Pics of the house and kennels at the end of this post. Geez, it was hard to clear all the clutter! You'll probably get a sense of why we can't continue to look after the amount of land when you see these couple of pics of just a portion of the backyard. We normally have pictures on the walls, but the real estate people told us to take everything down and take it right back to a clean slate, which is what we've done as much as is possible with a two-year-old and all their gear.

In TTC news, we've had two months off because we didn't want the stress of IVF and the stress of getting the house ready to sell at the same time, but we're now waiting for Sam's day 1 and then we're back into it.

When we walk the dogs, C always says, "I take Beanie" and she does a pretty good job of it too!

Having fun with our friends Marnie and Leonie in their pool.

Pop taught her to give the "thumbs up" sign a month or so ago.

And now some pictures of our house and kennels...

Sheep!

This morning before work Charlotte told me she was "drawing a sheep, Mummy".

"Okay, honey," I said, continuing to make the sandwiches for lunch.

Until I heard her saying, "Body, ears, sheep" and to my surprise and absolute delight, she had done her first drawing that included a head, body and legs!

She proudly pointed out the sheep's ears (top left-hand side of the head) and then told me he/she had 9 legs. I told her that sheep only have 4 legs but not to worry, maybe this one is genetically modified.

She's also asking us quite regularly to draw her an eagle and trying to draw an eagle herself. We have no idea why or what the importance of the eagle is and daycare confirmed this morning that they haven't been discussing eagles and nor do they have any in the room.

An update

I wonder if I'll ever find time again to write a proper blog post - you know, with paragraphs? In the meantime, here's some dot points of things Her Royal Cuteness is up to:

• She likes to walk on the different coloured pavement on the edges of pathways.
• She tells us when cars are coming and very bossily tells us to, "get off the road!" and drags Harvey Bean with her.
• She likes to try and dress herself - can easily put her sandals on now and often gets them on the right feet. If we offer to help her with her tops, she snatches them away from us and says, "Mine!" (actually, she says "mince" but we have no idea why).
• Speaking of sandals, there's only one pair she'll wear at the moment even though she has another two pairs, brand new and never worn.
• She will only eat vanilla (nilla) yoghurt - although we trick her and give her banana yoghurt and because it's white she doesn't seem to know the difference.
• She closes doors when they've been left open and sighs as if to say, "A girl's work is never done".
• She's constantly trying to feed the dogs and she's very specific about each of them getting an equal amount and will say to them, "Sammy, eat!" "Bobo, come and eat!" - you get the picture. She says to Bean, "Good boy, Beanie" when he's done something like take a biscuit from her and eaten it. She also calls Beanie, "My dog" and insists on holding his lead when we walk with them. "I take my dog," she says, strutting off down the road with Harvey Bean at foot.
• Everything is "Little, little bit" especially in relation to food and if she's offered a piece of food that is too large to her way of thinking she'll asks us to "Cut it, please," but if she picks up a knife by mistake to hand it to us, she immediately will say, "Not for little girls".
• The other night we went out for dinner and at the end of the meal we asked her if she'd enjoyed her dinner and she threw her hands up in the air and enthusiastically exclaimed, "Fantastic!"
• She dances all day long at day care and they often comment on how much she loves music, dancing and singing and of course, BOOKS! She now makes up little songs and sings them to herself.
• Her language is pretty amazing, even though we don't understand everything she says all of the time. She sings the alphabet song fluently and now counts to about 14 and she recognises some words when written down. She recognises her own name in writing most of the time. She knows most of her colours and tells us her favourite colour at the moment is green.
• She has an awesome memory - for instance, she saw a picture of Wave Rock today and I asked her where it was and she said, "Hyden". For regular readers of this blog you will know that it's at least 4 weeks since we went to Hyden and saw Wave Rock (or Hanging Rock as C calls it) and we haven't referred to it since we got back.
• She loves to water the plants and has her own, kid-sized, watering can.
• We went to a home open today and she walked into the kitchen and said, "Nice drawers" (and for the record, they weren't).
• She knows how to ring Nanny and Poppy with two speed dial buttons on our phone - she presses the "phone book" button and then Nanny and Pop's speed dial number. She has called them a couple of times without instruction or assistance.
• She knows how to put a DVD into the player and hit play.
• She's suddenly 95cms tall.
• She regularly says, "Sorry" to us for all manner of things - from pushing past to dropping things.
• She pretends to burp by saying, "Burp" and covering her mouth and giggling.
• She tells us when she's done a "pop-off" and finds it hysterically funny.
• She prefers the company of older kids.
• She will sit quietly and be read to for 3 hours easily- it's nothing for her to ask to have read to her 20 or more books.
• She loves 101 Dalmatians in book form and on DVD and now has a small collection of Dalmatian statues and refers to them as her "Dalmatians". If she sees a picture of a Dalmatian, she will refer to it as such and not just call it a dog.
• If she has a tanty and ends up crying, she will eventually pull herself together, but doesn't want to be hugged or cuddled. When she's over it, she usually turns to us and says, "I'm better now".

And now for a little, little story with paragraphs and all.

We were at our local Coles the other night and she was standing in the trolley (because her legs are too long to fit her comfortably into the seat bit of the trolley. A woman who works there who knows us came running over to our trolley and pointed out that Charlotte was standing on our sausages and she said to Charlotte, "How will Mummies make dinner tonight if you're standing on the sausages?" and she pulled them out from under C.

C was MORTIFIED. I don't think she realised she was standing on them and we certainly didn't. She tucked her head into her shoulder and refused to look up at the woman - at which point the woman started to feel awful that she'd upset her and tried to make amends by telling her how beautiful she was, etc. C wouldn't have a bar of it and refused to look up from her feet.

As we wheeled away I noticed Charlotte's eyes were very red and then she looked at me and the poor little poppet started to overflow with tears and she kept repeating, "I sorry, I sorry, I sorry". It was truly heartbreaking.

We had to walk into a quiet corner to tell her that we knew it was an accident and that she didn't mean to tread on the sausages and they'd cook up just fine. It took some convincing and a few cuddles but she eventually pulled herself together.

Books!

Tonight since dinner, Sam and I have read Charlotte 20 books. And now we have tears because we've told her that we've read enough and she really has to go to sleep. And when one of us goes to the toilet she comes running after us pleading, "Read Mummy/Mumma, read please!"

The child is completely obsessed with books and reading. The intensity of it is, well... it's intense and I'm not talking little picture books either - some of these books are 60-90 pages long!

Anyone else's 2-year-old go through this phase?

They start young, eh?

And the winner is!

Thanks for all your great Haikus - fabulous fun to read!

We're a bit bummed that we could only choose one winner for the Buyster Lighting $70 gift, but choose we have and the winner is...

Simone!

night light is broken
twin little boys screaming need
illumination

She managed to use 'light' and 'illumination' in the one Haiku which is pretty impressive (although this wasn't a criteria). I got a really strong visual image of her two boys screaming in the darkened room. Simone, email us and we'll give you the contact email to claim your prize (bohdana@iinet.net.au)

Again, thanks everyone!

25-months-old

Two years and one month is where we're at today. Seriously, where has this time gone and will it ever slow down to a reasonable passing-of-time rate ever again? I suspect not.

You continue to grow both physically and developmentally and your sense of humour is sublime.

Last week you became quite sick at day care and the carers rang us to come and get you late in the day. They said that you'd gone down hill quickly and that you had a temperature of 39 and you shivering. When we arrived they also mentioned that you hadn't lost your spirit even though you must have been feeling terrible. They explained two incidences to us; the first occurred when one of the carers was trying to take your temperature again and you didn't want to co-operate so you wriggled out of her arms and quickly said, "I feel better now" in an effort to deter her from pursuing you. The second happened after you'd drunk your second glass of water in quck succession and you burped. The carer asked you if you had burped and you said, "No! It was Anna!" (who, by the way, was nowhere near you).

Your mums thought their days of driving in the car with music blaring were well and truly over but it turns out that's not to be the case with you around. You sit in the back seat, throw your arm up in the air, pointing your finger to the roof and instruct, "Turn it up, Mummy!" and you keep doing this until our car is like a motorised boom box. What really amazes us though is that you sing to the songs and usually you know the words.

You've also taken to answering the phone if we don't get to it quickly enough and you've learnt how to phone Nanny and Pop and you've taken to referring to them as Nannypop - collectively. We've finally signed up with a real estate agent and our house will be officially on the market by the end of the week. As a result we've stepped up our house hunting and on the weekend when we pulled up outside of a house you announced, "I look at the house" and then when we entered a very dark and large walk-in robe in this house you said, "I don't like it".

Tonight in the bath you said you had a sore knee so I asked if you'd fallen over or if someone had hurt your knee and you said, "Mumma hurt my knee". The look on your face when Mumma walked in to hear you fibbing was priceless and you hid your head between your knees and then with a little grin on your face you looked up at Mumma and said, "No, not Mumma. Better now."

Let me let you in on a little secret darling girl... everything is "better now" since you've been here.

Our thanks to you...

We have found that every now and then something really cool happens – often surprisingly and out-of-the-blue.

Like the email we received today from Maree at Buyster Lighting.

She said some very kind things about The Muriels blog and asked if we would like to either choose a gift for ourselves to review or offer a gift to one of our readers to the value of $70.

Being the selfless people we are (HA!) we have elected to pass this very generous offer onto one of our readers as a way of saying thank you for your many years of support.

But there’s a catch.

We want you to exert yourselves creatively and in honour of my poem, Venus of Willendorf being selected for the Best Australian Poetry 2009 anthology, we want you to write a Haiku.

A Haiku is a Japanese form of poetry and has evolved over the years, but the form I was taught was 17 syllables in three lines – the first line has 5 syllables, the second line has 7 and the third has 5. It doesn’t need to rhyme. As an example, this is what’s printed on one of my t-shirts – it also happens to be a Haiku:

I can write Haikus
But sometimes they don’t make sense
Hippopotamus

Now, to make it even a bit more challenging, I’d like you to incorporate the word, “light” or “illuminate” or “illumination” into your Haiku. It can be funny or serious – and the subject matter is irrelevant – just make it stand out!

Time to get writing! Leave your poems in the comments section by next Wednesday, 28th midnight. We’ll announce the winner and reasons why on Thursday and the winner will get to choose any lighting of their choice to the value of $70.

Due to shipping costs, we have to restrict this giveaway to Australian readers.

If you don't have a Blogger account, type in any identifying name at the end of your comment(rather than leaving it as Anonymous) and then come back on Thursday morning to see if you've won!
Ooooooh, we’re so excited!