chicken progression

 Enter the chicken time machine... where we start at four weeks old (today) and go backwards.  Keep your wings and feet inside the vehicle at all times...

 Same type of side-eye, one week later (now above, 3 weeks old below)

   

and a week and a half... 

 

 

about a week in
 

after we had them for four days...

fresh from the big box store (above)

 

we have no pictures of eggs... well, of these chicks as eggs. **ha** 

Milestones

We've hit a few milestones for Esme in the past few days.  The one that I would not have believed a few years ago was we had to tell her to stop asking questions about the movie (are the boy and girl going to get married? where is his head picture on the flag if he is a pirate?, do the hanging pirates die because they have no food and water and can't get down?, what is carribean?) to Pirates of the Carribean, and please just eat her dinner and no more talking until she was finished.  Wow.  It really has improved that much since she began going to school. 

She also got a radio/cd player for her room.  Many children have this before this age now... but I did not get my first 'owned' one until I was nine years old.. and it was a tape recording boombox then.  I can remember playing with the one my sister had a few years earlier than that, taping 'radio shows' with my cousins.  Esme can get the cds (burned backup because she doesn't know how to be careful yet) out of her own folder and put them in the machine and operate the buttons.  I tried to show her how to operate the radio and 'search' for stations back and forth in the static.  I loved this as a child - finding the faintest stations on AM and listening to see if it was something I wanted, continuing to the next station.  I drove my sister nuts when I discovered classical music stations, talk radio and an occasional foreign language speaker.  Those were good times. 

Esme spent several hours 'dancing' and 'having parties' in her room last night drawing pictures and words on her easel while the cds played.  She found a country music radio station.  *eep*... and said she liked that one without the talking.  She came upstairs and drew stick figures at her desk of Daddy and Johnny Test and herself dancing to the music, then added Mom and Loula puppy for good measure.  She found her 'best pajamas' (a set from Christmas) and put them on and said it was a slumber party.  I think she even stayed up a little late, as she is still in bed much longer than usual for her.

This is a 'spaceship' house that she has been working on in Minecraft.  I remember maknig the base circle for her out of the blue material more than a month ago... and she has done a lot to it since.  She told Mark the colored things were antennas on top of her spaceship house.

The other thing I want to remember is she is asking for 'rock star clothes', with stars and spots.  And she is going to show me how she can be a rock star, learn all the songs on her guitar and xylophone and 'rock you star' to make everyone dance. 

It Can't Be Tuesday

I don't remember where Monday went... so can it be Tuesday?  I am fighting the wisdom teeth again but not as hard as in July - and it saps a lot of my energy.  That is probably why the weekend involved so much Minecraft and very little anything else.  All of the early risers in the household (Esme and the dogs and cats) don't help much in the sleep department.  Esme actually shut off her alarm this morning though and rolled back over and went to sleep.  She has a cold and is coughing some, but hopefully not as bad as a few days ago.  She told me the other day she was 'four of five' and she was trying to grow up, tall, just like me, and she would eat her food and grow up and be big, and she would have kids, and they would eat their food and grow up big and tall and... she wandered off. Those are some mighty lengthy plans kid.  She knows I am having trouble with my teeth and I have told her they are growing but my head is not - and that hurts.  She said her teeth were growing too, but her head and her hair were growing, so that was good, and she was going to have brown hair and her eyes would have green in them when they were grown up.  Her eyes are blue still, but there is a center of green peeking through... they might just change color within the next five years.  Mine were blue up until kindergarten, but I lost track of just when they turned hazel green, I think before eight? She has started looking at her teeth in the mirror often, brushing them more, and talking about how they chew food and help her grow.  I do need to find her a dentist soon - but having her learning about brushing her teeth on her own (after refusing with banshee screams for years) is encouraging.  Off to another fun day of work in an hour and a half .. all this week until Friday.

Note :  I let Esme play my Minecraft when I went to work yesterday.  I was down in the valley shearing sheep to get wool for my roof on my house.  I told her this and she kept shearing sheep.  When I came home and loaded my Minecraft she had taken the character back up in to the house (up a very long winding staircase from the valley) and had 'installed' half of my roof on the house where I had started.  That is a pretty good task for someone her size - it impressed me that she had put all that together, found her way back up there, and used dirt 'piles' to place and stand to reach the roof to put the blocks in.  She really pays attention to how we play and what we do - and she picks it up faster than I expect.  She was laying powered rail every few spaces with the regular rail for Daddy the other day without him telling her she needed to do that.  She really likes the railroad set in the game.

other note: She has been saying 'I can't' and 'I'm just a kid' a lot though, lately... about things like filling her drink cup, and blowing her nose, reading simple signs on chests in Minecraft that she knows the words for  - things she definitely CAN do.  I'm not sure who has put those words in her vocabulary. 

Fishy face growing up

She really is growing up, it is visible!
Arms and legs and hair... all longer.

Compare that with two months ago (early May) in the same dress...

The straps on the dress haven't changed - but where they fall on her have. It fits her 'ok' then, but fits now like it should. The dress should continue becoming more of a shirt until she outgrows it. The shorts used to fall below the knee, as well - and both of the pairs in the pictures were made at the same time with the same pattern.

Nova puppy has gotten bigger too, naturally ;) But I don't have a recent picture of the two of them together. That would really show it!