You can't spell "balloon" without B-O-O

Things have been kinda quiet and routine on the home front this week, so I apologize for the lack of updates since the weekend.

I took Boo out to lunch today. She does really well in restaurants-- and restaurants are wising up to the needs of parents by providing crayons and coloring books. Boo likes to color, although she's limited to some Abstract Expressionist-esque scribblings. So she amused herself by coloring all over a local paper while I grabbed some food (she eats at day care, so she had milk and a couple of bites of my food). We played little games-- one was where she tilted her head back, and then I blew really hard on her face, and for some reason she thought that was just AWESOME, so she kept tilting back and giggling her little fanny off.

We were leaving and the waitress comes over with a pink balloon for Alison. "Oh, we just all think she is the CUTEST thing!"

So I'm carrying her and this balloon, which I have strapped to her wrist, out to the car, and of COURSE we're having a windstorm, so my skirt is doing the Marilyn Monroe thing while I'm juggling Boo and this balloon, which has become Boo's Newest Bestest Friend EVAH, and the BNBFE balloon is flopping around and threatening to take flight. I get everybody jammed in the car without mooning Lower Saucon Township and hit the road. Boo's holding the ribbon to the balloon and bapping it on her face, and every 300 yards she's losing her grip on the string and bursting into a wail until I get it jammed back into her little hands, and finally I realize that I have to steer, so I tell her to wait until we get home. She wails brokenheartedly, and then suddenly the sound is a bit different, and I look back, and she's crying, but there's NOT A SINGLE TEAR ON HER CHEEKS.

I'm like, "are you FAKING?"

She stops wailing, looks at me for a second, and then gives me a grin.

Are you ready for some football?

After only 5 short years in the Lehigh community, we figured it was time to finally check out a football game. Thanks to another unseasonably warm day, we had a lovely time tailgating with Boo and our friends Kathy and John (Kathy is a professor in the journalism department...and a native of Northern Virginia.)


Boo had a great time. Granted, she was more interested in chewing on her pom-pom than waving it, but she watched the game, climbed on the bleachers, gawked at the older little kids, climbed all over Kathy and John and ate a million potato chips.
(And Lehigh ROUTED Fordham. I think the final score was Lehigh 45, Fordham 14, with Lehigh playing the 4th quarter with the second-stringers.)

Buddies

Alison picked up something else at swim class besides a cold: a buddy, Sophia. She's a month older than Boo and lives nearby. Because the weather was pretty nice today, we met up with Sophia and her mom at the park and let the girls have a last good playground session before winter begins in earnest.

Have a good day!

Pic from last night.

Poll-er Bear

Happy Election Day! Boo and I just came back from voting-- in fact, she was the one who cast my ballot for me, thanks to the magic of touch-screen polls (and Mommy guiding her little hand). She seemed very curious about the computers and liked to watch the screens change as I cast my votes.

I remember going to the polls with my mom when I was really young, and watching her vote and knowing that she followed politics and cared about candidates really influenced me and made me a better citizen (I hope). By taking Boo with me, I'm hoping to set the same good example.

(The little election-worker ladies LOVED her, by the way. There's a shock!)

Word Power

Alison's spoken words are still quite limited to her "uh-oh" and "daw" and "daddy," but she understands a LOT more than she can say. If you ask her at snacktime when she's in her playroom if she wants to go get a snack, she runs to the safetygate and begins to try to unlatch it.

Yesterday, I got her up from her nap and noticed that she was only wearing one of the two socks I had put her to bed in. I asked her, "Where's your sock?" Without missing a beat, she pointed to the crack between her crib and the wall-- in fact, to a specific corner of that crack. I bent down and sure enough, there was the missing sock.

She may not be saying much, but she's listening...and taking notes!

You should be dancin'...YEAH

Alison has always done the little knee bounce dance move when she hears music. Today, she premiered THREE new moves, which she performed after a Redskins score to "Hail To The Redskins" (I'm not kidding):

The Loooow Knee Bounce, where she practically taps her fanny on the floor as she squats down-- I swear, that child must be pure muscle;

The I Hear Voices, where she waves her head around in every direction while shaking it and waggling her tongue; and

The Windmill, where she winds her arms around furiously while twisting in a salute to her Dutch heritage (although with the twist, it might more properly be called The Oscillating Desktop Fan).

And since I can post now....

Pics from last weekend courtesy of Navada. I think she looks eerily like me in the second pic (complete with "duh" expression).

Play D'oh

Alison has her first set of Play Doh (well, it's the Crayola edition, which is pretty omnipresent around these parts, given that Binney and Smith is in Easton) and we explored it yesterday. She ripped off little chunks and tried to feed it to Sam. I had to keep explaining to her that it wasn't dog treats. (She loves to give Sam his treats, and Sam is only too happy to oblige her.) She seems to enjoy playing with the empty canisters more than the actual Play Doh, but she's starting to check out the dough as well. She rips off little pieces and hands them to me, or puts them in the canisters, one by one. Then she loads the canisters into her shopping bag and goes for a prance.

On a milestone note, she is officially finished with hitting the bottle. We figure that since she has nine (!) teeth now, she's a little big for them. I will be packing them away today. She has quite the rocking collection of color-changing sippy cups to replace them.

Smoochie boochies

Alison gave me her first kiss this morning. I've being trying to teach her how to do it, and she never seemed to get the hang of it, but this morning she looked at me with a big grin, leaned in and *smack.* (Granted, she needs to get that pucker-up maneuver down...it was quite drooly.)

My My My My My Boo-gie Shoes

Boo and I went for her first proper shoe shopping trip on Tuesday. We went to Stride Rite, which has just opened in the new shopping center 5 minutes from our house. (Yay!) The salesgirl was very sweet to Boo, measuring her feet with that little slide-rule device they have, and Boo did very well also-- she only got reluctant halfway through the second foot. (For the record, she's a 4 1/2 extra wide). I bought her a pair of little brown leather shoes so she'd have a shoe for winter besides her sneaks. They're really cute and Boo ran around the store in them.

She engaged the salesgirl in her favorite game, Let's See How Many Board Books You Can Hold At One Time. The girl would take the one that Boo handed her, obligingly start reading it, and before she was even through the first page, Boo was off to the book rack again, pulling out another one. After two or three failed starts at reading, the girl caught on to the game.

I put a stop to things when Boo started developing a new game called Let's See How Many Pairs of These Shoes I Can Pull Off of the Racks.

(Alison's Grandmommy and Grandaddy were here last weekend-- I'll post pics and notes from that weekend next posting!)

Boo!

Happy Halloween from our little ghostling.