school bus

 Waiting for the school bus (in the wrong place)...

Running for the school bus on the side of the county road... she was nice enough to wait for us to speed up there in the car... but I should have followed my instincts first about where we should be.. and I didn't - because I didn't want to seem too anxious etc etc... instead we almost didn't get her on it at all.  Now of course my Mom worry is that she'll fall out of her seat on the first corner etc etc... but the rest of it I have to leave up to someone else and her own responsibility...

She's off to a real first day of Kindergarten.  So much, all at once.

quotes: 'When I see the bus that is 90 I will stay away from it.. when I see the bus that is 18 one and eight I will go on it and I will sit and say Hi Miss (name), I am Esme.  But not the bus that is 19.. or the 20, or the one hundred!  That is not it.' 

Sunflowers in the garden

Updates

One more thing of note! She is now eating almonds and peanuts without having them broken up for her. We say 'chew' and she bites into them and asks for more. I still watch her closely with them but am amazed she is eating them so well. She also likes Skittles and rarely we give her a few. She tried to say 'skitteh' today when we prompted her - came out really weird but she's trying!

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We've all had the same brand of sick all week, Mark and Esme and I. And because it keeps lingering on in me I've been working the past few days sick myself, which apparently doesn't matter much because now half the store has it. *sigh* now I have two days off again. We won't get to see Grandma or Grandpa until we're all better because they definitely don't need to catch it!


Milk and cereal bar for breakfast, followed by as much
dry cereal or graham cracker as she wants


I need to contact the office where Esme gets her toddler checkups and see if she needs one this month. Some people do 15 month and some wait for 18 months.

Esme is 15 1/2 months now, and she has been doing new things again. For a while now she has been able to 'wrap up' in her own towel after a bath and keep it on her while she walks around. That might sound minor to some of you, but for a mommy that is a big thing so you can get dried off too and dressed without worrying about her getting cold or tripping over the towel (like she used to). She also said 'wrap up?' last night when I told it to her - which was cute!

And yes, she is repeating more things now - which is amazing to hear. She chooses what she wants to repeat and when, but it is much more definite now than her babbling before. 'Movie', 'two', 'green', 'hand', 'bok' (box), 'duckie' etc etc.. are all ones I can remember right now she's said within the last few days. She doesn't actually use the words yet (except duckie) later but she keeps asking about them and repeats them sometimes when I say it. Sometimes we hear her walking around singing 'sound songs' like 'ei i oh! ay ay oh!' to herself. Her favorite word is still kitty.

She can recognize a drawn picture of a kitty, and not just the ones in the books. When I draw a kitty with the crayons she looks at it and says 'mrao?' In the bathtub I had drawn a kitty with her soap crayons and the next day it was still there and she immediately pointed to it and said 'mrao' when we got in for the bath.

She is recognizing 'missing' things - like a page in the book I skipped because the pages were stuck together with cereal bar etc... she wants me to find the page. She also has connected socks with shoes and when I put her socks on because it's cold she wants her shoes on too.

She is waving 'hi' and 'bye' to us and when Mark or I come home from town (or first thing in the morning) there is a 'hi' fest from Esme of 'hi hi hi Dada hi hi hi'. We are still both Da-Da or Da-Dee.

The other night we were going through a seed catalog and Mark pointed out the flowers to Esme and was saying 'pretty' to them. She stopped and looked oddly at him and said 'kitty?' because there was no kitty on that page and she knew there wasn't. Then he repeated 'pretty' and she said 'prittee?' practicing the 'p' noise and she was interested for a while in finding the 'pretties.' However last night she wasn't very interested in trying that again.

I bought her a little toy piano for five dollars and she really loves pushing all the buttons. She pushes a button and then scrunches up her shoulders and looks proudly at it sideways like 'I did that, that was me *giggle*' She has said 'Ididit' to several things she has turned on, closed, etc... which I'm not sure how in the world she picked up because I wasn't trying to teach it to her.

She plays by herself with her big rubber ball now and has great fun throwing and bouncing it around.

Stuff Esme can do at nearly fourteen months

Breakfast means emptying your bowl of dry cereal on the shelf

Esme can do these things when she feels like cooperating. When she doesn't want to cooperate she just runs around and makes noise and throws stuff... typical toddler.

New stuff she just mastered:
1.) Put up both hands and say 'RAR'.
2.) Try to repeat words we say - although her pronunciation isn't good at all.
3.) Put several pieces of her huge baby Legos together and take them apart.
4.) Find me a book to read. I ask her 'find me a book, read this?' and make a hand sign like turning pages in a book.
5.) Find her kazoo when I imitate the noise it makes, even if she has to look hard for it.
7.) Wave 'bye-bye'
8.) Pretend to wash things imitating me.
9.) Suprised me by finding a specific book twice when I asked her for it. 'Brown Bear Brown Bear' book, bypassing other books to find that one in her toybox.




I just read her this book and came back to find her paging through it upside down. She only gets a few 'real' books to have in her toybox because she still rips the pages sometimes. This one was a quarter at the flea market and she has been very good to it since getting in trouble for ripping the first page.

Old stuff she's been doing for over a month and some more:

1.) Respond to our sign for 'Hungry?' with her own sign for yes or no.
2.) Sit in her chair when she sees her food tray or when she hears us say 'sit in your chair'
3.) Go up and down the entire staircase (under supervision)
4.) Ask 'where is Esme?' and she finds her blanket to hide under.
5.) Stack about five or six blocks before tipping them over.
6.) Draw on her sketchpad with crayons (mostly lines and dashes)
7.) Put things in a bowl or bucket when we ask.
8.) Clap when she sees us or people on TV clapping. The TV surprised me.
9.) Imitate our hand signs and things we do with our hands and feet, she is doing more of that than she used to.
10.) Tell us she needs to be changed with a hand sign.
11.) Put her puzzle and sorter blocks all in the right places.
12.) Pick up her books and sit in her chair looking through them.

She drinks from her sippy cups, eats well from her tray but not really well with a spoon. That is mostly because I don't have the time usually to let her make a mess with the spoon. She is really good at it when she is eating oatmeal with me from one bowl and can watch me use my spoon.