Tuesday, August 07, 2007

Triangle Girl

Harry is a real little character, you may have worked out. She delights in putting together two words that make no sense at all (eg: "shoe/papa") but it is even funnier if the words rhyme (eg: "rumble/tumble"). I'm quite surprised at how pronounced her sense of humour is, she finds real pleasure in using new words and then almost immediately deliberately mis-using them. The latest great activity is to sing the last word at the end of the line from a wide variety of nursery rhymes. She can actually sing the whole song if you prompt her but she can't sing them in the correct melody, so she instead has Mama on constant rotation. But now when I pause at the end of the line of a song instead of hearing Harriet's chirpy little voice pitch in with, say, "frog" as the correct word, she'll say "Papa" or "car" or something equally absurd and go off in a peal of giggles! She's a crack up.

Do other two year olds do that as well? I haven't seen any do it but then again other toddlers don't seem to be quite as verbose as Miss Harry. When we went to the hospital the paediatric nurse made comment on how much she talked, so we thought that it's probably a pretty good indication that she really might be a big talker rather than just being our skewed view. In this photo Harry was at her favourite cafe (and ours too, the breakfast menu is incredible and the whole upper floor is dedicated to children, we love it!). They have quite a selection of dolls there and you can see in the background that Harry insisted on them all being systematically being stripped of their clothing, then stacked high on the table to 'watch' as she had her babycino.

Whilst we're still on the doll thing (and with Harry there really is no time when the doll 'thing' isn't on), here she is stopping on one of our river walks to give Doll some boobia. It's a hard job being a Mama but when Doll asks, Doll gets (she's obviously a demand feeder). These walks by the river at the end of our street have been so gorgeous lately, the weather has been crisp but fine and quite warm once the sun is out. Harry gets to have a ride in the Ergo, Papa's shoulders and lots of runs, yelling behind her "Mama no catch up!". Doll also gets some time in her own sling (really just a sarong I bought at Glebe markets a couple of weeks ago), but then once she tires of that she is shaken off her back quite viciously and Harry then continues running.

We went to explore down at the coffee festival at The Rocks a few weekends ago and Harry was a little out of sorts but seemed to enjoy hearing all the different little jazz-y type bands that were set up on various small stages. Her interest is definitely in percussion at this stage, when we see bands it's always the drums she comments on. She also loves to play her floor tom at home and on a recent trip to NanaGrandp's house (yes they are one entity according to Harriet) she even managed to walk away with some swizzle sticks that she is still using as drumsticks back here at home.

Talking about our Maitland journey, here is Harry and Grandpa seeing eye to eye on the issue of reading books. They were in there for quite a while chatting about books and Harry was educating Grandpa all about what the best books are to read and which ones she already knows by heart (and heaven forbid if you miss a word or two or try to replace a word here or there - you WILL be corrected!). It was while we were up there that I had Harry upside down and noticed the huge chunk of white searing across her upper left gum. Considering the nightmare screamer she became as an infant when teething I honestly can't believe that she's dealing with this tooth (and now the upper right one is making an appearance too) with such relative calm.

I just can't impress upon people just how BAD Harry is at travelling. On our trip up I was forced into singing for the full two hour drive. Sure, not normally that stressful (nor fun though). However I was losing my voice and could barely crack out the first verse of Teddy Bears' Picnic above the sound of the car. Harry ended up screaming until she was red in the face, refused to sleep and was generally pretty fractious by the time we got to our destination.



Next day we had a big day out with Nana, making trips to a really cool park that had a train and the all-important swing set. Then at the beach we all had lots of fun running around, Harry was very focused on rubbing sand over her feet and Nana ended up shoes off, rolling up her jeans and getting wet with Harry at the beach while Mama was the wet blanket staying fully clothed (and keeping the camera safe and dry). By the time we wandered up to have lunch at the cafe we realised it was 1pm and after the horror day drive yesterday, Harriet was totally circular and hysterical.

Well, she only broke one plate when we were there, and I only cracked it once on the drive home with Nana. But gee she looked pretty cute when we were there - she was sitting on the bench screaming out "BABYCINO! BABYCINO!" in a way I'd never heard before. When we got home I realised it was because she was so exhausted - she slept for about three hours when Grandpa had come specicically early to play with her. Talk about bad timing.

By the time we drove home Harry seemed to be on more of an even keel however, which was a bummer for Grandpa who didn't really get to see Harriet in full form (and, can you believe it, she slept for over an hour in the car on the way home!). We had a 'pizza picnic' with Georgia that night on the floor of our house and Harriet was in raptures watching her doll doing the cancan.

What stuff is she doing at the moment? Well she hasn't ever really been a big counter, but I think we've underestimated her knowledge of numbers quite dramatically. She told us that you ahve to be "five" to be a "big girl" and when Lily (who is nearly five and bright as a button) was doing some counting Harry then piped up with "eighteen" being "higher" than "five". She then counted to five today and continued on with "six, seven, two, ten". Actually I guess I could have written there that she counted to seven... *sigh*...who has the issue with numbers? But it's more that I'm surprised that she seems to understand the numbers themselves.

She's also right into the alphabet at the moment and now when she asks me to draw something she also asks me to write it. No big surprise there because she's been asking me to write words for at least six months now. But now she wants me to go through each word and sound out the letters. I can ask her which letters are which (phonetically, not by their 'name') and she can do most of the usual suspects (like 's' and 'm' and 'r' and 'b' and 'o' which seem to be a bit easier to pick out for her).


Hee hee, I know I'm evil but I had to snap this photo before placating her. This is the expression she pulled hen I told her we had left Doll at home (we were only about ten minutes' drive away from NanaGrandpa's house). She got over it pretty quickly actually and was content to follow around the evil gaggle of geese that ran the park we stopped at.

One cute thing Harry is doing at the moment is talking in her sleep. This afternoon when I went in to resettle her from her afternoon nap (she's having one about every second day now, so I do get the occasional read of the newspaper, I know you must all be so relieved), she was saying "soda water" and stuffing her blanket into her mouth. Riiiighhhht. And other somnulent phrases have included "Grandpa top", "sock thing" (this is the name of one of her favourite book characters - Lisa your Kipper book has been a HUGE and I mean HUGE hit!) and "keez-mo" (her name for Squeezmo, one of our cats, the doofus one).

And just in case you were wondering where Harry got her beautiful blue eyes from (I am still not convinced they're going to last but anyway...) here she is with her spunky Papa who is working in Melbourne at the moment. Harry points to aeroplanes in the sky and says quite matter-of-factly "Papa in plane. Go airport to pick up. Saturday.". Apparently everything happens with Papa on a Saturday because that's when he is normally home all day. It's pretty cute. I'm hoping to persuade her to come with me to the airport on Wednesday, otherwise it's a sad old wait for Papa at the airport for the next three days.

I was just about to hit 'post' and realised I hadn't explained the title of this post! Harry found the triangle in the music box a few weeks ago (I told you she loved percussion) and I told her it was called a triangle. She looked right back at me, gave it a good *DING* and yelled out "Triangle Girl!". Oh and she is obssessed with opera - sopranos only, tenors hold no interest for her. Choral arrangements are ok as well, but when we get in the car I usually have the request for "op-rah Mama, op-RAH!" (and no, we're not talking about a talk show host here). I know Great Aunty Judy will be more than a little happy about that! I'm not into opea at all, so I had to go out and buy a box set of popular opera arias to give her the opera fix she obviously craves. Today we worked out a great new game called 'opera drumming'. She plays the drums, I have to sing along in a soprano (*ahem* well I try) voice and I have to make the lyrics all about how we're playing a great game called opera drumming.


OH and she also loves to tell me that what's she's doing is a "game'. She pushes her stroller away from her and runs after it. Harry makes sure she turns around whilst running to say "Stroller game Mama". *phew* lucky she's got me in the loop on that one. Here Harry is sharing the bouncy toy at the park with Tara. I'd just like to point out that Tara is only four months younger than Harriet. This may give you an indication of how tall she is, but probably not much, I need to get more photos of her with friends up here.

OH and again I nearly forgot to post that she is right into imaginative play. I can hand her a 'wipe' (ie: hold out my fingers as though they're pinching a wipe) and she takes it and uses it. She'll hand me "yucky poo" or a "tissue" like this as well which of course I have to reject and be disgusted by, eliciting a peal of giggles. But this is great because if she wants something and I can't get it to hand very quickly she will be quite happy to take it from me in the form of pure air and then play around quite happily with it.

Ok, that should be about all for now, I'll be back on with some more day-to-day stuff from now on I promise! Sorry Michelle!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Arrhh your back in full swing! Sam loved that Kipper Book too as did all my preschool kids (Sam took some convincing to "lend" it to Harry let me tell you)Great to have something to read at work again ! See you at the birthday !
xx Lis

Juniper said...

She sure is a cutie! My kids were huge talkers as well, and it always surprised everyone when we were out who weren't expecting it.

You must let me know (privately) what cafe that is that has a great upstairs for kids - we are often in Sydney in the inner west (friends who used to live in Newtown and Marrickville, but now live in Summerhill) and it is always nice to know of new places!

Loving the clothes you loaned me BTW!

Anonymous said...

Mia is so with Harry and the changing on words...at the moment she just loves to sing songs like 'old McDonalds Farm" and then instead of syaing "had a cow" or similar animal she'll sing "had a Mia" with the biggest smile on her face. Then she'll go on to make up what sound Mia makes for hte rest of hte verse. Then there'll be Mummy or Pappa or Poo Bear, and we all get different noises...it is adorable. And by all account daycare tell us that she is the only one out of the 12 in her room that sings along the whole songs, the others apparently just listen to the carer & Mia with not so much as a word muttered. GO figure. It will be so good to see Harry & her together - I hope they get on...;o)