I Can Dress Myself

Mia has taken an interest in choosing what she wears each day. On a recent day, she picked out the lovely toile print dress at left. I suggested, "Honey, you're going to camp today. Don't you think you should wear shorts?"
She left the room and returned a few minutes later with a pair of khaki shorts, which she preceded to put on under the dress. Not what I had in mind, but what's the harm?
I then gave her the white ruffled socks. She again left the room and came back a few minutes later, socks pulled up to her knees. "Boots!" she announced with a grin. I had to agree they did look kind of like an odd sort of go-go boot.
After breakfast, I suggested she put on her shoes. I shouldn't have been surprised that she picked the hot pink crocs. This combo had to be saved on film. (No, she did not wear the crocs to camp. Fortunately, they don't allow crocs because they trap sand and bark on the playground, creating a nuisance for the teachers.)

Triker Chick

Mia has been learning how to pedal her trike. It has a tall handlebar in back so the parent can help push, and a canopy for shade on hot days. Dad is just out of frame, giving a push. I think that had something to do with Mia's big grin.

Big Girl Bed

We've been letting Mia sleep in the Big Girl Bed for a week now. I'd wanted to wait until she was toilet-trained, but she's grown so much that it was getting quite difficult to lift her in and out of the crib.
She thinks the Big Girl Bed is really cool. We've had some challenges in keeping her in bed, mostly at nap time. She likes to arrange her stuffed animals on the bed and sing to them. We don't mind, as long as she doesn't get up. Jeff and I have talked about disassembling and removing the crib, but not just yet. If we did that, we couldn't say, "If you get up again, you'll have to take your nap in your crib."

Dueling Mouthpieces

A few days ago, we babysat for another family in our babysitting coop. They brought their 2-year-old daughter to our house. I hadn't spent any time with A. before, so was a bit surprised to see that she uses a pacifier. I guess we were lucky on that front - Mia had apparently never been given a pacifier in the orphanage, so we didn't have to break her of the habit. Mia must have been envious of A.'s pacifier, because she dug out the pink plastic "lip whistle" that her speech therapist gave her last year and put it in her mouth. It is really goofy; it makes this whizzing sound when you blow into it.

4th of July

We had a simple but fun 4th of July. We started our day at the pool, where Mia practiced swimming underwater and using her paddleboard. After nap and dinner, we decided to finish off the fireworks left over from the package we bought at Target a year ago. Since the drought is over, I had substantially less anxiety about lighting fireworks in the backyard than I did last year. We had a lot of sparklers, which Mia was quite interested in. We decided to let her hold one, with Jeff's hand over hers for safety.

Blueberry Hill

Mia's China adoptee play group has a play date every week. We don't get to many of them - they are held on weekday mornings when Mia is usually at preschool or camp. This week we joined the group for a trip to a blueberry farm, followed by a picnic. Like many of these events, this one was 30 miles away. The drive took us through a rural-turning-suburban-sprawl area. The roads were narrow with lots of twists and turns. I had printed directions from Mapquest, and I had my Garmin GPS system as well. As usual, Mapquest and Garmin didn't agree, so I decided to go with Mapquest. (As it turned out, the Garmin was right this time.)
Oh, and did I mentioned that we were supposed to meet the group when the blueberry patch opened at 8 a.m. sharp? That meant I had to get up before 6 a.m., Mia at 6:30. Mia had been up until 11:15 the night before (her idea, not mine), which made the wake-up call particularly difficult. To tell the truth, I had little hope of waking Mia up, so I packed up her clothes, sunscreen, bug spray, etc. and strapped her in her car seat in her pajamas, with a Nutri-Grain bar and sippy cup of milk for breakfast.
We left the house at 7 a.m., and by 8 a.m. I was getting pretty frustrated by the obvious inaccuracy of the Mapquest directions. The Garmin was proposing that we circle back to an area we'd already passed, and I was pretty sure that wasn't right, either. Mia (who incidentally didn't sleep as I'd predicted) was loudly protesting that she wanted to get out of the car, and I felt the same. As I thought to myself, "I'm never again going on one of these junkets out here in the hinterlands," I decided to pump up my enthusiasm. "Mia, we're going to pick blueberries. Doesn't that sound like fun?"
To which Mia replied with delight, "Costco!!!!"
That is when I realized how little exposure Mia has to farms and vegetable gardens and berry patches. In my childhood, we lived within 4-5 miles of cornfields, grew tomatoes and radishes in the backyard, and picked wild berries when we visited my grandparents in northern Wisconsin. I vividly remember the times my grandparents took us with them to buy milk at a nearby dairy farm. (So vividly that I still practically gag when I recall the odor. My grandparents finally stopped taking me there, because I honestly couldn't help gagging and that embarrassed them in front of their dairy-farmer neighbors. When I discussed this once with my brother-in-law who is from a farming town in Minnesota, he said his parents always told him to think of that horrific odor as "The smell of money." That didn't help him, either.) Poor Mia, the only food she sees in the ground is the pots of basil, rosemary, and mint I grow on the deck.
With renewed determination, I stopped at a gas station, the first one I'd seen in 10 miles. The cashier helped me find the berry patch. (Garmin was right, I had to circle back.) By the time we arrived at 8:30, there was a long line of SUV's parked on the roadside, and the easy-to-reach branches of the blueberry bushes were already pretty bare. That meant we had to reach above shoulder height to get any berries. There were a few left on the very lowest branches, but Mia didn't have much interest in picking. She loved eating berries straight out of my pail, almost as fast as I could pick them. With my little blueberry-monster at my side, it took me about 45 minutes to accumulate 1 quart of blueberries. As we checked out and paid our $2.50 for the quart, the owner assured me we didn't have to pay for what she'd eaten. (I'm sure he would have been shocked to know how many blueberries the little blueberry-monster had consumed.) Mia tugged at my arm, wanting to go through the rusty barbed-wire fence to explore the owner's private vegetable garden. I felt satisfied that I am teaching my child that produce comes from farms, not from the walk-in cooler at Costco.

I Wanna Be Like Mom

One of the downsides of being an older mother is that I have to use reading glasses when I clip Mia's nails. I think they're a hassle - I'm still largely in denial that I need reading glasses. (I swear everyone is using ridiculously small font sizes.) Mia, on the other hand, thinks my reading glasses are way cool.