Child's Play

Life at 18 months is all about having fun. Play starts before breakfast and carries on until bedtime with a brief interruption for meals and an afternoon nap. (Thankfully Reese still takes a 1 and 1/2 to, sometimes 3 hour hour nap each day).

Here she is playing in the laundry basket while I make her breakfast.

Now that our first Chicago winter is upon us, we do most of our playing indoors and have been attending Tot Lot at the local park district field house. My mother used to take me to Tot Lot when my brother and I were young so it has been a saving grace for parents and tots for over 3o years. Basically they open up the gym for 2 hours each weekday and set out some mats and let the kids run around with balls, hula hoops, Little Tikes cars, tricycles, scooters, basically all the pulling, pushing, walker toys you can imagine.

Reese is not yet interested in interacting with the other kids but it has been good for her to be around them. She is learning a lot about sharing and taking turns.

At home she loves singing and dancing to nursery rhymes, has been getting into coloring and is showing a renewed interest in her toys. Here she is giving her farm animals a bath...

...something we had to do last week when someone tried to feed the cow and the sheep tuna fish, but she had so much fun, we did it again today.

So, that's our main objective as parents right now, provide Reese with as many opportunities to be creative, learn stuff and experience new things in a FUN way. It can be challenging but fortunately there are a lot of resources out there to help us out.

Even getting your 1st hair cut can be fun if you find the right place!

Halloween 2011

We had so much fun this Halloween. It's hard to say if Reese understood what was going on but she definitely enjoyed herself. Grandma and Grandpa hang up lots of decorations and amid the skeletons and pumpkins there were lots of black cats so Reese toddled around the house pointing and "meow-ing". A highlight of this Halloween season was getting to help Grandpa carve the pumpkin. Reese loved scooping out the "guts" and kept shouting "more, more!"
We have had Reese's costume for weeks. Grandma spotted it in a store in late August and we have been anxiously waiting the day when she could wear it . On Saturday morning when I was dressing her, she pointed at it and mooed so, we had a cow walking around the house for the entire holiday weekend.

When we finally went trick-or-treating, it took her a minute to catch on. She would ring the doorbell and then walk away before she could get her candy! By the 5th or 6th house she started to get the hang of it and got really giddy when people gave her handfuls of treats. It will probably be at least another year before she actually finds out what candy is so, in the meantime, Mike and I would like to thank all the Rogers Park neighbors for the delicious treats!

Happy Halloween!