cleaning, laundry, esme games

I felt like I was getting a chest cold last night - made a hot toddy and a hot bath and felt good enough to sleep finally. Not so bad this morning but I really feel like I'd rather be taking it easy -- instead I'm telling myself to clean up some things because I have two more days of work this week and I don't know if we'll be in the house much for the weekend.

I vacuumed and scrubbed Esme's room and put a lot of toys 'out of reach' in a bag in the clothes shelf. Esme just throws them out of the containers and never plays much with them anyway -- she is so much more often following us around now and rarely plays in her room for very long. I put a good number of the books up too - leaving her favorites and throwing away a lot of the torn-up magazines. Hopefully in a few months I'll be able to get her a little chair and table and make a 'reading area' to keep all the books in... but as Mark says 'good luck with that' -- Esme never leaves anything in the same place twice it seems. It's a given of the age ;)

Esme has really taken to her alphabet flash cards now. I tried to give them to her a few months ago but they were more interesting as 'throw in the air' fodder than looking at what was on them. Now she sits down and goes through them saying 'uh huh.... mm hmmm.... 'Q' etc etc..' She even takes them to the cats and dogs and goes through them as if the cat or dog understands what she is doing.. most of them just sit there and look at us like 'huh?' She also has taken great enjoyment in putting them in their box and taking them out again...spends about five minutes doing that then goes back to other similar games like putting her rubber frog in a box and shutting it - opening it, etc.. putting a cylinder block in a bottle and dumping it out. It's interesting to see how her mind works. It's always 'on' and she's always doing something.

In the bathtub she has gotten a new game with her soap crayon holders - which are like hollow pencils that have the soap crayon in them. She takes a superball or rubber duck and tries to balance them on top of the crayon holder. She has done that with some of her toys upstairs too - notably dice on wheel axles torn off some of her other toys.

I took up the advice of MichelleY (Piper's mom) on the book 'Go Dog Go' a few months ago. Esme loves it too, and can say the name and ask for it when she sees it nearby.