The Eclectic Dabbler

Mara has been asking since Florida if we could paint her fingernails. As I was feeding Micah his lunch a few days ago, I heard her say, “Mommy, I painted my nails!”

I didn’t know how that was possible, since she was sitting in her highchair, eating a PBJ sandwich. But I should have known!

I glanced toward her highchair and witnessed intense concentration:

Sure enough, she had done it! If Mom doesn’t paint your nails, sometimes you just have to do it yourself!

Here’s the finished product. (Bleh!!!)

I shouldn’t have been surprised. Last week she was face-painting with her peanut butter (see picture below). And when I asked ‘why,’ she said “Because Jocelyn painted her face!”

Yeah, Mara, Jocelyn painted her face, but there was an actual design, and she didn’t use peanut butter!

And I wonder why Daniel always asks: “Where was her mother?!?!?!”

Tonight at our bedtime prayer, Mara and I had so much for which to thank God! We thanked Him for another stroller we were given–and baby food from Target. We thanked Him Daddy could grill hamburgers for dinner and we could have chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream for dessert. We thanked God that Grandmom & Grandpa could come over with the aunts and uncles and baby Sophia.  We prayed for Daddy to be safe coming home tonight and for the whole family to sleep well.

I stroked her cheek. “Goodnight, sweetheart,” I was saying, as she suddenly called out, “Oh! Pray about I don’t have an oval!”

At first I was perplexed, until Mara started to act it out. “Pray about I don’t have a hu-la-loop!” she said earnestly.

Ohhhhhhhh–a hula hoop!

Now that I understood she was asking God for a hula hoop, I had a couple of conflicting thoughts and tried, the best I knew how, to express those thoughts in words a two-year-old could internalize.

“God always wants you to ask Him about things that you want,” I told her. “But you know what? He decides about it. He might say ‘yes, you can have a hula hoop.’ Or he might say ‘No, you don’t need a hula hoop right now.’ Or God might say ‘Wait! You can have a hula hoop later, but not now.’ And if God says, ‘yes,’ you should say ‘Thank you, God, for the hula hoop.’ And if God says, ‘No,’ you should say, ‘It’s okay because I know God wants what’s best for me.’ And if God says ‘Wait,’ you should say, ‘It’s okay. I will wait.’”

Yeah, maybe I said way too much! But I didn’t want my daughter to get the idea that God is a genie that grants wishes or something.

Mara looked like she understood. So I prayed, “Dear God, Mara would like to have a hula hoop. Please help her to wait. Help her to thank You, if You say ‘yes.’ Help her to obey You if You say ‘no.’ Amen.”

We opened our eyes.

Mara’s eyes lit up with all the sparkle of Christmas morning. “I’m going to get a hu-la-loop!” she squealed, shivering with excitment.

Part of me sighed, thinking ‘She didn’t understand anything I said’ and then the other part heard the verse ‘unless you have the faith of a little child. . . ‘

She has no doubt that God will give her that “hu-la-loop”! . . .

. . .  I want to trust Him that way, for the good things He has already promised.

Elderly man in the grocery store, upon hearing Mara’s life story in the first few minutes after they ‘met’:

“Boy, she sure is a chatterbox! . . . Does her Mom like to gab a lot?!”

Grandma, does this remind you of any two-year-olds you might have raised??? I seem to recall someone in the church nursery in New Jersey, expressing relief as they returned your 2-year-old, saying, “Boy, she sure is a chatterbox!”

On a related note, my sister-in-law called me the “electric babbler”?!?!?! . . .  (Should I be offended?)  . . . She said she “couldn’t remember” what my blog was called . . .  I love you, Darla!!!!

I suppose Mara could be the “electric babbler” . . .

For some encouragement to those of you who, like me, blog so we can share and remember the simple treasured moments of our family life . . . here’s Shannon, one of my top favorite bloggers (Rocks in My Dryer), blogging today at Parenting.com.

You have to go to the Parenting site and read her post!!  What a great encouragement, not to focus on the format or get discouraged by inconsistency! But just to jot down something! It is so true that this is not “one more thing to do” but it’s something relaxing to record the memories, and know they will be preserved as part of our family story!

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So! Now that I’m all inspired (and while I can still remember), here are a few little memories from this week . . .

• We are practicing charts. Mara is supposed to say, “‘T’ says ‘t’ turkey.” But instead she said, “‘T’ says ‘ch – chicken’.” Well, I guess it would be hard for a two-year-old to distinguish a turkey from a chicken!
• Ironically, she never enunciates the “c” correctly. It always sounds like a “t.” So as we are looking at the A-Z book on the “C” page, she points to all the pictures: corn, cookies, cake, and says: “Torn. Tookies. And take!”
• On Saturday, Mara mentioned a friend from church. “Remember Mo, Mommy?”she asked. It always cracks me up when she says, ‘Remember  – - – -, Mommy?”
  

“Yes,” I said. “We haven’t had her over for awhile.”

“Can Mo come to our house and eat lunch?” she asked.

“I think that’s a good idea!”

So on Sunday at church, Mara saw her and said, “Hi, Mo! Can you come to our house for lunch?” I think that was the first time she asked anyone over.

Then today, I said, “I need to figure out what we’re having for lunch tomorrow when Mo comes over.”

Mara said, “Tortilla soup.” [That's what we had the last time she came over--I was surprised Mara remembered because that was about 6 weeks ago!]

• We’ve had a lot of rain this week, and we found an earthworm on the sidewalk out back. I told Daniel to show it to Mara. If I’m raising my girl in the innercity, I want her to at least know what a worm looks like!  Not to stereotype . . . But Mara was majorly creeped out by the wriggly earthworm. Micah, on the other hand, was completely intrigued. And after holding it for a few seconds, he tried to put it in his mouth. We had to take it away.
• Micah continues to eat his weight in food daily. That’s probably an overstatement, but not a huge overstatement! Today, for instance, breakfast: bowl of oatmeal & 1/3 cup applesauce. Lunch 3 – 3.5 oz containers of baby food (squash, green beans, banana berry). Dinner 3 – 3.5 oz containers (green beans, sweet potatoes, and banana plum grape). That’s down from the other morning, when breakfast alone was: a bowl of oatmeal, 1/2 cup of applesauce, a handful of fresh blueberries, and an entire can (14.5 oz) of pears!! Is that not insane?!?! Mara never ate that much!! Is my child normal? or am I allowing him to over-eat?!

Well, those are tonight’s random memories, without regard to format, as Shannon recommended.

Today Melissa invited us to a Thursday morning playgroup she and the boys have enjoyed.

I knew it would be a long day. Daniel has a meeting tonight, so we will see him about an hour today during dinner, after the kids literally saw him less than five minutes yesterday. Plus it is a rainy day, so we couldn’t walk or go to the park. So I thought it would be good for the kids to get out and do something fun with someone else besides Mom!

There were a bunch of toys in a large area–a wooden play kitchen; washer & dryer; baby dolls with cradles, car seats, and highchairs; a tool bench; all sorts of “ride-on” toys; a slide . . . What fun for Mara! Right away she met a little girl on the slide, and I heard Mara call, “Hey, Lily, come down the slide!” She already knows her name. At first, I thought she may have “named” the girl herself, as she has been quite imaginative lately. But when I met the mom, sure enough–her name was Lily!!

Mara loved carrying a baby doll around in the carseat–even better, setting the carseat in the shopping cart, and taking her shopping for food in the play kitchen!!!! I wish Daniel could have seen her. She really had fun! After 45 minutes or so, they had circle time, where they sang songs. Mara remembered that they sang “No more monkeys jumping on the bed” and “Itsy Bitsy Spider.” Then it was snack time: pretzels, cheese, graham crackers and juice in little cups. I was so proud of Mara–she didn’t spill her juice (or play with it!!). We also made it through playgroup and all the way home without a potty-training “accident.”  Those little successes are big with toddlers!

Playgroup was so  good for my shy little one-year-old! Everytime someone says “hi” to him, he clings to my shirt and buries his head in my shoulder with a coy smile.  But he really loved watching the older kids play, and he ventured over to the toys by himself, glancing nervously over his shoulder to be sure I was still there. . . He also enjoyed playing in the kitchen, where he could open and shut cabinet doors without Mommy saying ‘no.’ Maybe interacting with other children in a fun setting (with Mom nearby) will help him grow out of this clingy, insecure stage.

When we got home, as we were getting out of the car, Mara said, “That was a fun nursery!”

We’ll have to do it again.