That’s my girl!

A couple of quick Kaeta stories from this week:

The other day, Kaeta was playing with some Lego blocks. Karianne asked what she was doing, and she proudly announced, “I’m makin’ a robot!” That’s my little prodigy!

Today I called Karianne at home, but she was putting Jonah down for a nap and said she’d call me back. When I called back, I talked to Kaeta for a minute. At the end of the conversation, she said, “Putting Pooh Bear down for nap, bye bye!” I guess she’d heard Karianne say she was putting Jonah down and was imitating that!

A Two-Year-Old’s Imagination

Kaeta has started to use her imagination more. Last night, one page of her bedtime story showed a dog.

“That puppy dog goin!” she said.
“Where’s he going?”
“Goin’ ta get ice water!”

Also, she likes to play with her stuffed animals, usually by putting them to bed or changing their diaper. When she puts them to bed, she often lays a blanket on top of them (or, in the absence of a real blanket, a wet wipe. I came into the bedroom the other day, and there was a Pooh bear, a piggy, and Curious George, each lying on the floor facing the ceiling with a wipe carefully placed on its midsection. It was like an art installation!). She sometimes says a bedtime prayer with them: “Thank you God for taking care of us Amen.” We don’t know where she learned that prayer, though!

The other day, she was “waking up” Pooh bear. “Wake up, Pooh!” she said. “Today is a special kind of day!” That’s not something we say to her, but I guess maybe we should!

Kaeta stories

Here are a few Kaeta stories I’ve been meaning to blog.

The other day we had some friends over, and I had a beer with dinner. The bottle was still sitting on the table half-full as we were cleaning up after eating. I was putting a plate in the dishwasher when someone gasped — I looked up, and Kaeta was drenched! I thought she’d spilled some water, but then I saw the beer bottle she had dropped.

I picked her up and took her upstairs to change. On the way up, I asked, “Kaeta, did you drink any of the beer?” She said she had.

“Did it taste good, or bad?”

“Bad!“

Yesterday I was reminding Kaeta how to spell her name.

ME: K-A-E-T-A. Kaeta! Can you spell Kaeta?
HER: A-B-C-D… F-G… Kaeta!

In her bedtime storybook tonight, there was a picture of a band with four animals playing instruments. I asked Kaeta about it:

ME: What’s that?
HER: Piggy.
ME: What’s he doing?
HER: Playing drums!
ME: What’s the monkey playing?
HER: <unintelligible>
ME: It’s called a clarinet. Can you say “clarinet?”
HER: clare-net.
ME: What’s the bear playing?
HER: Hide-and-seek!

One good poop story deserves another

Kaeta is potty training, and she’s doing really well. So sometimes we let her sit alone on her potty for a few minutes and just check on her every so often.

The other day she was in the bathroom alone, and then we heard her messing with the toilet seat, so Karianne went to check on her.

She had pooped, then decided to empty it into the big toilet herself. She’d gotten the lid of the toilet up and was scooping the poop out of her potty with her bare hands.

Poop was smeared all over the toilet seat, on the floor, and of course on her hands and arms up to the elbows. What a mess!

I got poop in my mustache

If you don’t want to hear a poop story, you should skip this one. And the next one. In fact, to be safe, you might just want to go read a different blog altogether.

When you have a boy, everyone warns you about “getting sprayed.” From my experience, this is a valid concern, but Jonah has only peed on me a couple of times. But let me alert you non-parents to a much grosser possibility: projectile poopies.

Our friends the Wards were visiting us on the weekend of Jonah’s baptism. We were all getting ready to go somewhere, so I went to change Jonah’s diaper. Let me tell you, I never even saw it coming — it just shot out of him like a bullet. It wasn’t a lot, but some of it got way up on a shelf on the wall, and a little dot of poop hit me right on my mustache!

Karianne called something from downstairs, and I replied, “I’ve got poop on my face!” Even as the words were coming out, I realized I should not admit this — I might never get smooched again! Fortunately, she didn’t hear me. “What?” “Nothing!”

I let a couple of weeks pass, then spilled the beans. A poop-in-the-mustache story is just too good not to tell.

I have so much to tell you!

I’ve been meaning to blog a whole bunch of little things lately. Here are the non-kid-related things, and I’ll put some kid stories in another post.

Nerd Quotient
My nerd points went up big time this month — I had a short article published in 2600 magazine! 2600 is “The Hacker Quarterly,” and I wrote about how to decode some encoded information in the HTML source of a site called experts-exchange.com. I wrote under the pseudonym “Phatbot” (a Futurama reference), and for my trouble I get a 1 year subscription. Special Note to my Mom and Dad: Don’t rush out and buy the magazine, it’s really not that big a deal. I’ll show you my copy sometime.

Handiness Quotient
When Jonah was born, I decided I wanted to start working on becoming handier. We needed some shelves for our bathroom, so that became my first project. I bought boards, shelf brackets, a jigsaw, and some stain, and a mere two months later, I made these:


From a distance, they don’t look too bad! And I learned a few things (like: beveling with a jigsaw is hard. Next time around maybe I’ll use a router).