Thanksgiving

We've been having a good Thanksgiving break. Grandma Bobbie got into town last weekend, and she and Cailan have been playing non-stop. I got off work early on Wednesday afternoon, so Chris and I went for a pre-Thanksgiving ride at Mary's Loop, while Cailan was still in daycare. Thanksgiving Day was rainy and cold - a good day to stay inside and keep warm in the kitchen. I didn't leave the house all day. We made turkey, stuffing, gravy, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, green beans, cranberry sauce and of course pumpkin pie. Mmmmm.

Friday morning we went downtown so Bobbie could experience some of Cailan's favorite places: Main Street Bagels, where we all had delicious cinnamon rolls, the toy store, where we bought a dinosaur puzzle for Cailan, and J.B. Hart's music store, where we played lots of pianos. Friday afternoon we built a spice rack! When we bought our house, it had an attached carport right next to the kitchen, and there was a window between the kitchen and the carport. We enclosed the carport to turn it into a garage (or more accurately, a bike storage room) and we took out the window, which left us with a bit of a hole in the kitchen. We thought it would make a great place for a spice rack but it has taken a long time to actually execute the idea. But Friday, with Bobbie around to keep Cailan occupied, we were finally able to finish it.


Saturday, we decided to take a little day trip. We went to Moab! It turned out to be a beautiful day, with temperatures somewhere in the 50s, no wind, and lots of sunshine. We went to the Moab Brewery for lunch, where all the adults had garden burgers and french fries. Our garden burgers came with some kind of garlicky dressing made with cilantro and ground sunflower seeds - it was so yummy we were even dipping our french fries in it, and I might have even finished mine with a spoon. Cailan had cheese ravioli, which he liked pretty well. Then we went to Arches National Park.

Looking at the La Sal mountains betweeen red rocks at Arches

Double Arch

Chris, Heather, and Cailan looking at Double Arch

Heather and Cailan at Turret Arch

Turret Arch

On the trail back to the parking lot

Cailan was very sleepy when we first started hiking at Arches, but at some point he completely woke up and was bubbling over with energy. He was climbing up and down rocks with no hesitation, and he ran down the stairs coming back from Turret Arch!

Dino mania

It is all dinosaurs, all the time, at our house right now. Cailan pretty much eats, breathes, and sleeps dinosaurs. You probably think I'm exaggerating, but you wouldn't if you were the one putting him to bed listening to his stream-of-consciousness dino-babble as he falls asleep. When he draws, whether he's sitting at the kitchen island while we cook dinner or outside in the driveway with the sidewalk chalk, it's dinosaurs. He re-named all his stuffed animals with dinosaur names; this one was hard for us, because it is really difficult to call a frog "Deinonychus" or a zebra "Hypsilophodon." When he plays with letters, either the magnet letters on the refrigerator or his foam bathtub letters, all he spells are dinosaurs. When he plays with legos, all he makes are dinosaurs. When Chris took him to the library, he ran in and announced to the librarian at the circulation desk "I'm going to find some dinosaur books."

I've shared some pictures of his bathtub dinosaurs. Here are a few that he has made on the refrigerator.

Tyrannosaurus

Huayangosaurus

Heterodontosaurus

When Chris saw heterondontosaurus, at first he thought that Cailan had given up before finishing the word. But then he saw the clever wrapping around to the side of the refrigerator. I guess when you're only almost-three, it's hard to judge exactly how much room you're going to need for a big dinosaur name. My favorite so far has been ichthyosaurus, spelled "IKPHYASAUR." Cailan still says most of his "th" sounds as either "f" or "d", so he spelled icthyosaurus the way he says it. But why he chose to use a "ph" for the "f" sound is beyond me.

And finally, some Lego dinosaurs:

Tyrannosaurus rex and Euoplocephalus

Corythosaurus, Parasauralophos, and Brachiosaurus

Here he is, exhausted but still able to mutter a few dinosaur names:

A perfect Saturday morning

This was an almost perfect Saturday morning. Cailan woke up at 6:30, calling for Mommy but in a happy voice, not the demon voice that makes me bury my head under the pillow. (This is the part that was only almost-perfect; in a perfect world, he would have slept until after 7:00.) Chris called to him and told him that we were still in bed and he could come snuggle with us. Cailan kept calling for me - he never gets out of bed himself, even though his bed is just a mattress on the floor - so finally Chris went in, picked him up, and brought him back to our room. Cailan walked across the room, around to my side of the bed, singing "Where is Mommy? Where is Mommy? Oh, there she is!" and he climbed up beside me. He crawled under the blankets, rested his head on my pillow, put his hands on my neck, and said "I'm warming up!"

We snuggled in the bed for awhile. Cailan, when he's not throwing a tantrum, has been very affectionate lately, bestowing me with lots of slobbery, open-mouthed kisses. He has been tickling me all the time, too, with very gentle fluttery touches on my face an neck, saying in a really high voice "Dee dee dee dee dee." It makes me laugh, not because it tickles, but because he is so funny and cute while he's doing it.

Chris got up first and started making breakfast while Cailan and I cuddled under the blankets for a bit longer. When I got out of bed, there were home fries in the oven and a cup of coffee waiting for me - thanks, sweetie! Cailan and I read "An Alphabet of Dinosaurs" and "Amazing Dinosaurs" while the potatoes finished cooking. After breakfast, we took the blue tandem and the Chariot downtown to go to a "yard sale" at one of the bike stores. They had both new and used bikes for sale, lots of shoes, a large and strange collection of parts (including two sets of pedals with tiny LED lights in place of reflectors: the faster you pedal, the faster the lights blinked), and some bike clothes. I was infatuated with the pedals but didn't buy any; Chris found a very nice pair of not-too-tights for only $10, so they came home with us.

We went next door for some muffins. It's a nice coffee shop and bakery and was hopping at 9:30 on a Saturday morning. Cailan asked for a blueberry muffin, and it was huge. It looks like they put cupcake papers in a muffin tin, then pour batter into the tin so that it overflows all the individual cups and makes one solid muffin on the top, which they then cut apart. Each muffin then looks normal on the bottom but the top is a giant flat square, kind of like a graduation cap. Looks strange, but tastes good. There were a couple guys playing folk music in funny hats; one of them played a guitar and the other played an accordian, a guitar, a banjo, a harmonica, and sang, though not all at once. He also had tiny, circular, dark-tinted spectacles and a dashing feather in his hat.

Next stop: toy store. Cailan only makes it about 10 feet into the rather large toy store; he is stopped in his tracks at the dinosaur display. There is a set of shelves from the ground to my shoulders and probably 6 feet wide, filled with toy dinosaurs. OK, to be honest, there are a few other types of animals, including jellyfish, Sally Lightfoot crabs, hammerhead sharks, and rockhopper penguins, but it is predominantly dinosaurs. Cailan likes to pull down one individual from each species, identify it, fly it around for a bit, and then replace it so he can move on to the next one. After he goes through all the ones he can reach, he asks for help for the dinosaurs on the taller shelves. The store employees all recognize him and seem to be fond of him. It probably helps that, so far at least, Cailan always puts the dinosaurs back in their places. Apparently not all kids do this. While Cailan and Chris were playing paleontologist, I scanned the shelves for Christmas ideas. I also picked up some stickers, with the idea of making a sticker chart for potty trainig.

We finally peeled Cailan off the dinosaur display and went across the street to a shoe store. We have been buying most of Cailan's shoes from Target, but they have been falling apart disappointingly quickly, so we decided to shell out some money for actual shoe-store shoes. His new pair of shoes are high-top blue Keens. I don't know if they'll hold up any better, but they are very cute and they're easy to put on.

Last stop was the instrument store. Chris and Cailan go there frequently on Cailan-and-Daddy days. They have a large selection of nice electric pianos, which of course Cailan loves because of all the buttons and the different sounds they can make. They also have acoustic pianos, some nice and some not so much. I found an upright piano that sounds good, has a nice touch, and wasn't terribly expensive, but it is still a lot of money. Not sure where in our house it would go, either. Maybe someday...

We biked home. It was sunny and starting to warm up. The trees here are mostly done with their colors and are busily dropping their leaves, so I had that feeling of a crisp, autumn day. When we got home, I hopped off the tandem and onto my single to go get my hair cut for the first time since we left Tacoma. I was pretty happy with how it came out: getting rid of those split ends gave it a lot more bounce.

18 Road

This has been a very busy week in the Diddiwah house. At the beginning of last week, we got new windows installed throughout the house, replacing the old, drafty single panes with double-paned windows that slide easily and seem to do a much better job of keeping noise and cold air on the outside. Hooray!

Also at the beginning of last week, Cailan caught a cold, his third one so far this fall. On Tuesday, we watched the election coverage with Cailan, slightly feverish, snuggled on my lap. He was asleep before Ohio was called for Obama. Wednesday he had a pretty runny nose and started coughing. Thursday morning he woke up with crusty eyes and a very stuffy nose – he stayed home that day from daycare. It was one of Chris’s teaching days, so I worked in the morning but came home for the afternoon so Chris could get to campus. That evening Cailan almost fell asleep in his dinner. Friday he was extra cranky; he and Chris butted heads for most of the morning, prompting us to order a book called “Your Three-Year-Old: Friend or Enemy” through interlibrary loan. By Saturday, Cailan was starting to get over his cold. We went to the mall and ordered blinds for the new windows, then spent the entire afternoon raking leaves. Our city does something kind of different for leaf pickup: you just sweep your leaves into the street, and once a week a big vacuum street-sweeper comes along and sucks them up. I guess it works in the dry climate here; in the northwest, we were always cautioned to keep the leaves out of the street so they didn’t clog up the sewers during the autumn rainy season.

Sunday was a very big day for Cailan. In the morning, we had our first playdate here. Cailan and I had met some neighbors on Halloween, a mom and a 3-year-old girl. We exchanged phone numbers, and I invited them to come over and play. Cailan was very excited about it and was talking about it all weekend. It went pretty well. They are still too young to really play that much together, but they seemed to have fun chasing each other around the house. It was funny to watch the differences between them; she was much more energetic, more often in motion, moving from one thing to another very quickly, and capable of jumping! Cailan is so placid by comparison, content to sit and play with Legos for long stretches at a time, though there is a constant stream of chatter from him. Sunday afternoon, our babysitter came over for a couple hours while Chris and I went biking. It wouldn’t have been my first choice, having both a playdate and a babysitter in one day, but that is how it ended up. Cailan had even more fun with his babysitter than he did with his young friend. They made lots of Lego dinosaurs, including a 4-foot-long Euoplocephalus. We paid the price of overstimulation at bedtime; it took him forever to relax enough to fall asleep.

Our bike ride Sunday was fun. We went to an area near Fruita known as 18 Road. We rode the trails Joe's Ridge, Kessel's, and Prime Cut on that map. It’s kind of a bleak landscape, very monochromatic, not much vegetation, just these big hills of brown dirt. But it makes for some pretty fun riding. The trails are pretty narrow, with lots of swooping, twisting and turning, and some very steep ups and downs. To get to the trails from the parking area, there is a 2-mile climb up a dirt road. It’s a gentle climb but on Sunday it really pointed out the difference in conditioning between Chris and me right now – he was climbing at a steady easy pace and I was struggling and puffing to keep up. It turns out that I have come down with Cailan’s cold, so maybe the onset of illness made me tire more easily, but Chris has been getting a lot of exercise lately and I simply haven’t. I need to change that. Anyway, we rode for a couple hours and almost 10 miles, until big storm clouds were gathering over the mesas southwest of us and the temperature started dropping. I rode down some (for me) very steep and exposed hills and was thrilled that I didn’t chicken out!



After Cailan was finally asleep, Chris, Utah, and I were piled on the red couch watching Nero Wolfe. Well, Chris and I were watching and Utah – who had gone on the bike ride with us – was sleeping. Then he suddenly sat straight up, panting loudly with a very wide open mouth. He stumbled when he got off the couch, and then when we let him outside, he fell down the back steps. We were pretty worried that something was seriously wrong – I was looking in the phone book for emergency vets while Chris was looking for signs of injury on Utah’s body, but within 5 minutes Utah was breathing normally, his heart rate was normal, and he was able to do all his tricks. We went to bed, and he was completely fine in the morning. Did he have a nightmare? A panic attack? I’m so glad he is okay.

A story

Cailan told Chris a story today:

Once upon a time there was a dragonfly that had so much wing that he could fly.

Grannickie

Cailan has invented a new game. He dumps all his jumbo-sized Legos out of their big plastic box and climbs into the box. Then Chris picks up the box with Cailan in it and flies him around the house. He swings Cailan from side to side, and around in circles, eventually crash landing on a bed or a couch and spilling Cailan out in a pile of giggles. Cailan calls this game Grannickie.

Spell check

Cailan has loved playing with his foam bathtub letters since he was a year old. We ended up buying him two sets, because with just one copy of the alphabet there aren't that many words you can spell. For a long time, of course, he just played with them and said the names of the letters. Eventually he started stringing them together in words, but they weren't words pronounceable in English. Now he has started making recognizeable words.

In September, he learned to read the title of his favorite book: The Big Book of Dinosaurs. Soon after that, he was trying to spell it with his foam letters in the bathtub. After a few times with me coaching him, helping him sound out the words and figure out what the next letter should be, he was able to put the letters together himself. This is a big bunch of words, so it wraps around the bathtub:




The spelling is a bit off on the last word, but I'm calling it close enough.

Last weekend, Cailan was taking a bath and playing with his letters, as usual. I was in the bedroom across the hall, folding laundry and popping my head into the bathroom every couple minutes to keep an eye on him. Once when I looked in, he said "I spelled diplodocus!"


I realize there's an entire syllable missing, but I was stunned that he had gotten so close without any help at all from me.

Tonight during his bath, he started working on diplodocus again. I was in there with him the whole time. He would say the word, then say the first couple of syllables, slowly sounding it out trying to figure out what the next letter should be. Once he knew the letter he needed, he'd fish around in the alphabet soup in the tub to find the right letter and slap it up on the wall. Here is what he came up with tonight: