Passover

We hosted a sedar the 1st and 2nd night and it was grand. Good food, good company, and good times.
Once we recover there may be more info.

Shabbat

Tovina was all ready to help with Shabbat.

Puddles!

Tovina has rediscovered one of her great joys in life.
Puddle stalking!
She dressed for the occasion in 2 skirts, rain jacket, and boots. Not so sure about socks.
Great joy was splashed upwards.
Short video below with some action shots but no sound. Cute, especially with the skirt flaring with every jump, though it doesn't come near the grocery list in my humble and unbiased opinion. (Still giggling about that one.)

Gardening

There are a lot of plants around the house and most afternoons when I come home from work Tovina and I do a little weeding. Sometimes she picks flowers. Here was the bouquet she picked for Shabbat last week.

Tovina wanted me to hold the 'flowers' for, well, forever as far as I could tell. This led to a fantastic opportunity to learn a new vocabulary word: Vase.
Upon learning that these amazing devices hold water in addition to flowers, Tovina was sold.

Grocery list

I took the grocery list off the fridge the other day and set it down before going to the store.
Then Michael called out a few things to add.
Then Tovina got in on the deal.


What ensued was about 15 minutes of egging on the 2 year old. There is 4 minutes or so of video on this event.
For a short highlight to see if you want to commit to the whole thing you can watch our short order cook repeating orders here.


Or Tovina's mother misspelling pomegranate here

(you might notice that Tovina stops writing at the letter I get wrong.)

Of course, if you are ready for the plunge, watch it all here.


Yes we were just picking things that we wanted to hear her say.

As an added benefit, when T and I finally made it to the store she stopped me when we walked past the ji (you might know it as ginger). Tovina, who was holding the list, pointed to it and told me we needed ginger root and it was on our list. Admittedly Michael had asked her to write it down but we didn't think she'd actually remember let alone recognize the stuff. I told her we already had some at home so we didn't need to get anymore.
She considered and then decided to accept my weak but acceptable answer.

New bed

Tovina's totally diggin' her new bed.
Tovina sized!

Naps

Tovina is in a battle with herself to give up naps.
Some days she succeeds
Some days she succumbs

Together

When Nola Bean was here for her visit last month the girls did many things together. But one of the things they rarely did was stand close enough together to get a photo of both of them taken.

Here we lured them both in with some hummus until the wild toddlers were within the necessary zone and then quickly snapped the photo before either of them could get away.

For this photo we tried a different tactic.

Dead Battery

Monday morning, as Michael had Tovina loaded into the car and was about to head over to Kindermusic, he discovered the car wouldn't start. Seemed to have a dead battery.

After he gave up and realized that there would be no driving in the car at that time, Michael got out of the car and unbuckled Tovina so she could also get out.

As Tovina stood up, she reached up and turned off the passenger light above her seat. Then she exited the car.

Based upon this observation, we are currently suspecting that the dead battery may be related to Tovina turning on that light Friday, 3 days ago, upon exiting the car.

In summary: I'm glad we live within walking distance to Home Depot.

Potty training and sleep habits

Tovina has been doing a great job with potty training. About a month ago I reported on her early, early  waking for late night pee brake. This week we developed a solution that is working very well.
She now just sleeps in our bed.
We realized last week that there was a connection between peeing at night and getting to sleep in Mommy and Daddy's bed. In the wise way of parents we decided it was easier to just bring her into our bed all night rather than train her back to her own bed.
I'm sure there will never be any problems with this solution.

But how is it working? I can hear you think.
Success! She has gone back to sleeping through the night. For about 5 days she also went back to peeing in her diaper at night but for the last 2 nights she has been dry come morning.

Aligators and turtles

While at the zoo we saw something that seemed somewhat... unlikely.

Is that a real alligator?
Yup

Is that a real turtle?
Oh yea - a mighty brave one at that. We nicknamed him 'lunch'.

We even saw 2 buddies of his climbing up the gator's tail as we were leaving. Clearly their view of the world's risk's differed from ours.

Penguin Parade

Made it to the Cincinnati Zoo with our guests (not pictured here). Lots to see and do but one of the highlights was clearly the penguin parade.

For this next bit, please think of "Walk like an Egyptian"*




*Michael almost talked me into an ambitious editing session wherein I would be dubbing Tovina's "penguin" for every Bangles' "Egyptian" but in the interest of sleep rather than cleverness, I leave it to your own imaginations.

More guests

Someone in the neighborhood was afraid we'd be lonely so they stopped by for a visit.

So many exciting things

It has been a busy couple of weeks. We
-hosted some (SEVEN) high schoolers for youth group convention at our synagogue,
-had some long work days and evening networking meetings
-enjoyed visiting with some friends from out of town who came in for a few days (Hi Karen, Eric, and Nola!)
-spent some general family time,
-and attended some Purim things (Tovina dressed up like a chicken again - though this time she tried to pluck herself.)

Now we are resting
Tomorrow we may blog