What Are You Doing?

I'll apologize in advance to the people who mainly come here to see Sydney pictures. There are no new Sydney pictures in this post. But if you continue reading I promise you won't be disappointed.

On Tuesday last week (the day of my last post) it started innocently enough. A couple times during the morning Sydney asked me what I was doing. By the next morning it had become a full-blown epidemic.

Whatchu doing, Daddy?

What you doing, Mommy?

What are day doing?

Where day go?

What happened?

What's dat?

And various versions of those question get asked repeatedly throughout the day. She's hit the question stage and I love every second of it.

My favorite question version:

Whatchu doing, Daddy? (Doesn't give me more than a second to answer.) Whatchu doing? (About a half second this time.) Daddy, whatchu doing?

I've had that go on for six or seven questions before she'll give me a chance to answer her. She doesn't realize that sometimes I have to figure out how to tell her what I'm doing in a way she will understand.

Sydney still likes her pillow. It hasn't caused any problems for her and has pointed at it several times and made sure I knew it was her pillow.

In other news, I got a new cell phone a month or so ago. I don't know if I mentioned it before or not, but it doesn't really matter since I'm mentioning it now.

It has video capabilities. That really isn't new since my old phone did, too. But my new phone can use the videos for the phone's wallpaper where my old phone couldn't. Right now I have a video set as my wallpaper of Sydney taking a bite out of a grilled cheese sandwich.

Every time I flip open the phone and Sydney is there she says, "I wanna see girl". So I usually end up holding up my phone for her to see the video.

Saturday we went to a large park over in Liberty Lake, WA. There's a small playground area where Sydney played for a little bit. There's a pavilion near that where they apparently have concerts in the summer. A small hill spreads out in front of the pavilion. Up the hill the park opens into a very large field. In this field there was a group of about thirty seagulls sitting around.

Sydney saw them and got quite excited. She apparently thought the seagulls would want to play with her so off she ran.

While she was chasing seagulls and I was following close behind (in case she actually got close to a seagull - which didn't happen) I decided to pull out my phone. I figured a quick video would be a good test to see what I could do with getting the videos off the phone.

So I shot it, got it off the phone and onto our computer and uploaded it to YouTube. It's not the most exciting video, but it was a good test to see what I could do. It's only 24 seconds, so hopefully won't cause too many problems for the bandwidth-impaired that want to watch it. And here it is:



If you're wondering why I took that video instead of using the video of Sydney eating a grilled cheese sandwich. The short answer is that the grilled cheese video is saved in the phone's memory. The park video was saved to the memory card (purchased after the grilled cheese video). Since I have the grilled cheese video set as my wallpaper I didn't want mess with the phone by transferring it to the card. Especially since I wasn't 100% sure I would be able to upload the video. (The videos on my old phone were some weird video format that didn't seem to be compatible with anything but the phone.)

And last but not least, Marta, Anne's sister, will soon be a published author. (She's a newspaper journalist, so is frequently published in the paper, but this is in a book.) She wrote a short story that is going to be published in collection of ghost stories.

The book is called Legends of the Mountain State: Ghostly Tales from the State of West Virginia. You can also pre-order the book from that link. (If you are a close friend or family member to me and would have reason to expect a Christmas present from us you may not want to pre-order that. Or at least check to see if you should pre-order it first.)

Parallels

I have a friend whose blog I read. She updates it very regularly. She has three children and the youngest one is a daughter (with two older brothers) who is slightly older than Sydney. Just a little over a month older, if I remember correctly.

She updates her blog regularly. Like "at least five times a week" regularly. Sometimes multiple times per day. I would link to it but the site she uses requires signing up and then she has to approve you to read her blog. It's probably easier to just point you to her second blog, except she doesn't update that one nearly as much and generally only with general posts instead of everyday life and family stuff.

Anyway, it's been interesting to read about her daughter over the last two and a half years. Early on (and still some now) she has posted about some milestone her daughter has reached. I would read it with a little bit of envy and look forward to Sydney reaching the same thing. Other times I would laugh because she would post about something her daughter would do and Sydney does almost the exact same thing.

Just last week was one of the latter. My friend posted about her daughter singing "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star". Sydney sings it all the time. And, like my friend's daughter, she sings it like a two year old. It's recognizable if you know what you're listening to.

She's actually been singing it for several months, but not quite as long as she's been singing "Singin' In The Rain". She started early with that one because we have a little duck that sings it when you press its foot. (It also taps its foot and flaps its wings.) She's been hearing that since she was born.

At night "Twinkle" is usually one of the songs she wants sung to her at bedtime. On Saturdays (usually the only day Anne and I put her to bed together) she will point at one of us and instruct, "Twinkle". That person then starts singing and she turns to the other and points and says, "You sing". So we have to sing the song together. (She does that for whatever song we're supposed to be singing.)

On Sunday of Labor Day weekend we had a friend of Sydney's and his mom over for a play date and barbecue. Sydney has a little slide she got from Great Aunt Bev (my aunt) that she really enjoys.



You'll notice that she's in her diaper with no pants on. She and her friend, Hunter, were playing at the water table and she got a little wet. When that happens she wants her clothes off. Luckily her shirt wasn't too wet.

When she climbs on top of the slide Anne asks if she's queen of the slide. Sydney throws up her arms and replies something along the lines of, "I'm queen uda side!" As shown in the picture above.

And here's a picture of Sydney and Hunter standing on the stairs.



Sydney is sometimes resistant to change in her routines, especially when it comes to her sleep habits. We've tried before to get a pillow in her crib but she just wouldn't have it. The closest we came was one time getting her to go to bed with it. But a few hours later she woke up crying bloody murder and we had to take it out.

This past weekend was the first week of the football season. Sunday I watched football so Anne took the opportunity to use Sydney's nap time to work on a project she's had sitting around for a while.

We had bought a pillow and some Winnie the Pooh material several months ago. Anne cut the pillow in half and removed some of the stuffing. She then sewed the halves closed to make two smaller, thinner pillows. She then made pillow cases out of the material. With leftover stuffing and material she made a third, smaller pillow for the car.

When Sydney woke up from her nap she found her fun pillows with "Pooh an' Tiggah" (and the rest of the gang) on them. We explained that we would put a pillow in her crib for her to sleep on. She likes using the pillows on the sofas and our bed just fine. We even have one on the floor of her room for when we put her down there that she's fine with. It's just been the hurdle of getting it in her bed.

Sydney was very excited to have her own pillows. She seemed happy to have them and happy at the prospect of sleeping with one in her crib later that night. She even piled all three pillows against the arm of the sofa and reclined against them while looking at the new Clifford books Mommy had gotten her earlier that day.

The moment of truth came that night when I put her to bed. Mommy had already put the pillow in her crib while she was in the bath. I talked her through having the pillow in her bed and she was fine with it. After story, singing and snuggling I put her to bed. She was still fine with the pillow.

The night passed without incident and when I went in the next morning to get her she was happy. I asked her if she liked sleeping with her new pillow and she gave an enthusiastic nod yes. When Mommy came home that afternoon she asked Sydney about the pillow and Sydney was again happy about it.

She's had it in her crib and been using it (we only use one pillow at a time) since Sunday night without any problem.

Whew!