A Mindful Life

As the family photographer, very few photos get taken of me, especially me and Claire. When my mother-in-law visited around the new year, she took a bunch of photos. (She is an avid photographer and quite good!) I asked her to send some of the images so that I could post them on Flickr, and [...]

Below is the New Yorker cover for June 29, 2009. Claire looked at it tonight, and this is what she said (note: she is still confused on gender pronouns):
“Man scared. Man can’t see, looking. He klunked. Yes, he’s looking, he klunked.” Klunked is Claire’s term for falling over. I can only guess that the look [...]

I’m so happy to have my little girl healthy again. Husband took the video below this evening. He introduced her to Dave Brubeck, because she really like the jazz songs on her Music Together CDs. If the video doesn’t play, click this link to see the movie.

With the forecast today predicting that it will hit between 101 and 107 here, and given that we live in a house with no air conditioning, life will move at a snail’s pace around here today.
Claire’s fever finally broke on Friday (until then it was pretty high, around 103.4). We saw the doctor on Tuesday [...]

Poor sweet Claire is ill. We thought it was teething at first, because she said her teeth hurt and her mouth hurt on Saturday. Yesterday I saw very faint red spots on her legs during bath, and a small little pimple-like bump in the corner of her mouth. Today she spiked a fever, doesn’t have [...]

OMG, I haven’t got my child enrolled for preschool this fall! Nearly every other mother I know whose child is about to turn two has taken care of this. I haven’t since I thought we’d be moving and wanted to see where we’d be before I pursued this.
Oh no. My child won’t be ready [...]

She spins in circles and says, “I’m getting busy!!” and laughs when she falls down.
She adds plural ending to words that are already plural: gloveses, shoeses, kidses.
She adds “ed” to verbs in current tense to make them past-tense: “It breaked,” “I eated.”
She sits in her wading pool, looks up at the trees blowing in the [...]

From this (playing in her pool and having pensive moment)…

…to this (silly with stickers).

This weekend I made a magic wand for Claire out of a wooden dowel and some pieces of wood my father gave me years ago. I painted it a light shade of purple and used a second coat of translucent silver paint to add shimmer. Then I coated the tip in silver glitter and used [...]

But still a little on the small side! I asked Claire’s Grandma to make an art smock for Claire that she could grow into. Claire is modeling it in the photo below. It’s wonderful and adorable, and it will be of use for many years!