TimBlog

Duck Photos

tameushaw — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 00:52:13 +0000

Based on the covers of these books, you might not think they’d have anything in common.

At least, I certainly didn’t think so. The book on the left, with the ducks, is one she’s had for a couple of years now, and used to be one of her favorites. But she hasn’t spent a lot of time with it for a while now. The book on the right, with the polar bears, is much newer, and was a gift from friends of ours.

On Friday night, Eliana asked me to read her the book on the right. So we start reading. And we get to this page:

Eliana tells me to stop reading, and she runs off to her bedroom. A minute later, she returns with the duck book, turns to a page, and says “matchy patchy!” So I look closely at the two images. And I look closer still. Here’s the one from the duck book:

Needless to say, I was shocked that she’d made an association I never would have in a million years. When we showed Rina a short time later, she was also amazed. Yes, there’s a few differences (two too many ducks in the drawn version, for example), but it’s obvious the drawing was based off of this photograph. Such a scarily smart girl, that one is.

Here are the two pages side by side for comparison, click on the image to make it bigger if needed.

Eliana Writes her Name

tameushaw — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 11:56:52 +0000

Eliana has been learning her letters for a while now, but this is the first time we know of that she put them together in the right order to spell her name. Just this past Saturday at a play date, she startled her friend’s parents by showing she could read a little. And not even four years old yet.

Maya Really Walking

tameushaw — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 13:21:02 +0000

Last time, I mentioned Maya figured out that she could walk while holding onto something. Over the past week, she was starting to get the idea that she could walk unassisted, but would only take one or two steps before falling. Yesterday, right after she woke up, she started walking and never looked back.

That didn’t take long….

tameushaw — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 14:52:03 +0000

Might be time to spend the money and widen our driveway.

Currently, I park my car in the street. Have been for 9 years. Why someone couldn’t hit-and-run my old car, instead of the new one with fewer than 1700 miles on it, I’ll never know. That is, I’ll never know since they didn’t bother leaving a note.

Maya Walking

tameushaw — Tue, 31 May 2011 17:10:30 +0000

Just because Eliana can read and write now (sorta), doesn’t mean Maya’s not making her own achievements. Aside from teething (two, maybe three teeth in the space of a week) and probably having a bad cold as well, and thus being pretty miserable for the last few days, Maya’s also learning that she doesn’t need to crawl in order to get around. A couple of years ago, friends of ours lent us a walker-like toy with things to play with on the front. Eliana never used it that much for walking; she was just on the cusp when we got it, she figured out how to walk a day later, and never looked back except to play with the gadgets on the front. Other than that, it’s mostly sat around.

But now, Maya’s figured out that she can use it to walk, and now we can’t stop her. Almost literally; if we try to pick her up, she clings onto the handlebar for dear life. If we succeed in extracting her, she wails like there’s no tomorrow (which is usually how she wails, to which anyone who’s ever heard her can attest). The video below is her shortly after she figured out how to use the toy.

Eliana Reading

tameushaw — Thu, 19 May 2011 14:25:25 +0000

So, my last entry was about Eliana learning to write. So it seems fair to talk about her ability to read.

We had a parent-teacher conference a couple of months ago, and her teacher mentioned how Eliana is her little helper; when it comes time to pass out items to the kids in her class, Eliana can read their names off of the items and pass them to the appropriate child. Last night, I tested this ability, by writing out names of the kids in her class. Eliana only had trouble with the names that started with M.

The painful screaming in the background is her sister, who was unhappy her cuteness wasn’t being put on display. Okay, really she had just decided that she didn’t want to sleep because she had a new tooth coming in. We went to comfort her right after this video finished. Really.

Eliana Writing

tameushaw — Mon, 09 May 2011 23:17:39 +0000

Tonight, out of the blue, Eliana started drawing the letter A on her drawing tablet. We’re presuming they were learning this in school today, but her information sheet that comes home with her every day didn’t mention it. She then drew three As, and told us the three people in her class they were for (two boys whose names start with A, and one teacher).

Eliana Writing the Letter A

We already knew Eliana could read letters; show her an E, and she’ll say “that’s my letter!” or “that’s Elisha’s letter!” Show her an R, and “that’s Rivky’s letter!” And at our last parent-teacher conference, her teacher told us that Eliana was her little helper, passing out various items with the students names on them, and giving each one to the right kid. Such a good little reader, or at least memorizer.

Pottytraining

tameushaw — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 20:39:34 +0000

Last Saturday morning, we had a surprise. After I got Eliana up and changed her diaper, 10 minutes later she was telling us her diaper was full and needed to be changed. Sure enough, she was right, meaning she’d been holding it in. After we took off her diaper, though, she wanted to finish up on the potty, and then afterwards asked for underwear instead. We hadn’t planned on starting her training this weekend, but that’s what we wound up doing.

We kept her home from school on Monday, to reinforce her training while it was just Rina and Maya with her. She had accidents throughout the weekend, but they upset her, so that was hopeful. Today she was back in school, and her supportive teachers (their goal is to try to have every kid in their class out of diapers by the end of the school year) reported at the end of the day that she hadn’t had one accident all day! Of course, they took her to the potty every 30 minutes, but it worked.

Naturally, we had just bought an 80-pack of diapers on Friday….

Eliana: Jewish Mother in Training

tameushaw — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 13:37:10 +0000

Today, I confirmed that Eliana’s got the Jewish Mom gene. Getting ready for school, she told me she was hungry (which she usually isn’t). I offered her a Graham cracker, which she accepted. She ate half of it, and said “I’m done, here,” offering me the other half. I said “no thank you,” since I’d already snagged some cracker fragments from the box.

Her response: “Oh. You don’t *like* Graham crackers?” I explained that I already had some, and she was okay with that.

Eliana’s Reflection

tameushaw — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 15:00:00 +0000

This morning, Eliana joined me in the bathroom as I was shaving. She discovered she could see her reflection in the round chrome handle on our shower door. Fortunately I managed to get a video of her while she was being silly. I think it’s one of my more artsy projects. (If it only shows up as a picture, like in email, click on the picture to go to the blog page, and then the video should be watchable)