Daphne got a hold of a dish towel this morning and put it around her shoulders.
She was trying to convince me that she was using it as a coat so that she could go outside–at least that is what I assume. The cape stayed on her all the way outside and didn’t come off until she saw some bunnies to play with.
Last night, Daphne and I went outside to enjoy the beautiful weather just before bed. Actually, it was way past her bedtime, but I was letting her stay up late because she generally sleeps better that way.
I was laying on our porch outside, and she was sitting on me. She wanted me to take my hair down, but I didn’t know why. I almost never take it down.
It turned out that Daphne wanted to get my hair bands out of my hair so that they could go in hers.
She sat there putting the band on top of her head and waiting for it to fall down. She just doesn’t understand why she doesn’t have any hair.
Daphne is quickly learning about “thank you” and manners.
However, she did learn another use for saying, “thank you” and being cute.
When she wants something that I am holding, she points to it and says, “thank you.” She does it as a preemptive way to keep me from saying no, and she assumes that she will get it anyway, so why not get the matter over with.
This worked today when she wanted the marker I was marking my garden with. A nice polite, preemptive, “thank you” got her exactly what she wanted.
This semester is not going as well for me as I would like. I am just hoping to survive the next two weeks and be done with it!
I have two research papers to write and some other things to do as well. I am working on a project for one of my classes that is a “green” or “eco” website. It is kind of a lot of fun. I have done the majority of the work for that class at this point, so I just need to do a little coasting to the end.
For my Native American Studies class, things are not going well. I got a D on a paper, which is completely unlike me, and when I inquired with the professor, she did not get back to me for 2 weeks, and when she did, she told me that she had changed the grade to a C. There is no explanation for the reason that that grade was increased or the reason that the grade was so low.
My only hope with that class is that I get by with a C in the class so that I can walk away from it and find a class where the professor is actually interested in teaching.
In all of this chaos for school, I was not looking very far into the future, and it turns out that I have a few hurdles to jump to make it to graduation.
1.) I got a phone call from the adviser at the school that said that they had decided not to accept 20 of the credits from Greece. The school is not accredited, so they would not accept the credits.
The good news about this is that there is a petitioning process, and the even better news is that I have gone through the process with my other credits from Greece, and they were approved. That gives me a great deal of hope that I will be able to gain the 20 credits back. I just hope that it does not take a long time to do it because I only have 2 semester of school left if these credits are accepted, and I want to make sure that I am taking the right classes (if I take the wrong type of classes, I just have to do them over).
2.) PSU does not give grand money during the summer. The truth is that I have been using my grant money to go to school, and it has worked nicely. However, they do not give grant money during the summer, which means that if I want to take summer classes that I need to pay for them on my own. This is less than thrilling for me, and it means that I will most likely skip the summer to go to school because our financial situation does not allow for me to shell out 2-5 thousand dollars for a semester.
3.) With the decision to not do summer school comes the devastating realization that I will not graduate for another year from now if that is the case. I was planning to finish up Christmas of 2008, but with the summer school not happening, it is more likely going to be June of 2009. It is a devastating blow to me.
4.) And so, I again need to muster the courage to continue on in the face of adversity with school. It would be a very dumb thing indeed to quit now when I have done my senior capstone and fulfilled the requirements for the degree and now all I have to do is just match a “number of credits needed”. In truth, no matter how much I don’t want to finish, 24 credits away from a 180 credit degree is a really dumb place to stop. I will persevere. I was sure that I would get a college degree, and I promised myself that I would trek on, but a lot of times, I feel like I would rather be investing my time into something else. My future self will thank me, I am sure.
So my To-Do list looks kind of like this
Car seats… car seats
These are things that have to be dealt with when you have a child. We had an infant car seat that Daphne used for about 9 months, and we recently switched to using the Britax car seat she is in now.
The government regulates heavily what you do with your child in the car. Though I think it is funny that they find it necessary to keep a child in a booster seat until they are 8 years old (or even longer if they do not meet the weight limit). I DO appreciate that there is a safely tested option for my baby when she is in the car.
I seem to be obsessed with putting the car seat in the car correctly and making sure that each time Daphne gets into the car seat that the straps are all perfect. I was yelling at Jared for some half-hearted attempt to put her into the car seat because “my two most precious possessions are in the car, and if we were to wreck….” He gets it, but it is still kind of an obsessive thing for me.
The safest thing for a baby in the car is to stay rear facing. Technically, when a baby is 1 year old and weighs at least 20 pounds, they can turn around and face forward (at least in Oregon). However, the safest thing to do is to leave them rear facing as long as possible. I know moms that have done it for almost 3 years leaving their kid in the seat until there just nowhere else to put the legs of the kid.
Though I don’t want to go that long, I do want to keep her rear facing as long as possible. She doesn’t seem to mind.
When we were driving home from California, I decided to put her forward facing. The amount of stuff we had crammed into the car made it clear that I would not be able to sit next to her like we had done on the way down so the only way to have access to her was to face her forward. We also thought that it would be an amusing new thing for a baby we planned to cram into the car for 8 hours.
To tell you the truth, it was not as exciting as we had thought. She liked to be forward facing, but the tilt of the car seat was not quite right, so when she fell asleep, there was a lot of head flopping. I think she can see better back facing, actually.
Alas, I will turn the car seat around and try to get another year out of her facing backwards, but I suppose some time she won’t be a tiny baby anymore either.
We decided to take a long weekend trip to California to visit Jared’s dad down there.
Jared’s dad’s name has officially become Papa Bob for all intents and purposes.
Jared and I have been married for almost 5 years now, and we have been together for almost 7. In all that time, we haven’t done a lot of family visiting together. He has come to Burns with me 3 times total and I had never gone down to California.
He talked about taking me over and over and over again, and so we decided to head on down. It would be good to get to visit with his dad and see the sites of where he grew up.
Man O man did I get the grand tour. We went everywhere. Most importantly, we went and took some photos with a big, giant tree, which is really cool. I had always wanted to play around in a Redwood forest, and we did for a little while.
I saw the house Jared grew up in and the town he grew up in and many of the towns around as well. They even took me by the hospital he was born in!
We had an awful lot of fun, and we got to hang out with Papa Bob for a while, what a treat!
We are now calling Jared’s dad “Papa Bob.”
We decided to take him out to eat while we were visiting for a little birthday celebration. As we were walking away from the restaurant, I was coaxing Daphne to say, “Papa” over and over again.
She was working on it, and she eventually, just blurted out a nice little Daphne, “Papa.” It was very sweet. I think that is the best birthday present that a tiny baby can give to her Papa for his birthday.
When I was in high school, I had to write a paper about communication without words.
When I started the paper, I was convinced that it was impossible to get anything done without using words because it just wasn’t’ possible. There was, in fact, a reason that the cave men decided to use their voice to delineate language, it is a basic thing that separates man from beast.
What I didn’t know was how important nonverbal communication would be just a few short years later.
You see, we are becoming masters at communication that has nothing to do with words. Daphne’s ability to think about things and want things is progressing much faster than her vocabulary, so she has formed a method of solving this for now.
If there is something that she wants that is in sight, she makes a fuss, not a cry, about it and points to it until you give it to her. Sometimes, her pointing is just in a general direction, and it takes some guessing. It is unmistakable what she wants though because the second you give it to her, you get a “hu huh huh” as a reward.
If she just wants something in general, she will make a crying fuss to get it, but as soon as you figure out what it is, you get your “hu huh huh” as a reward.
I have to say that I do have the most polite daughter.
Most people have to beg borrow and plead to get their kids to say “please” and “thank you”, but not this girl.
Daphne has taken it upon herself to say “thank you” when someone gives her something, especially if it is something that she wants badly.
Now mind you, this does not happen all the time, but the first time she did it, I was taken aback by it because I was shocked, but it quickly became clear that this was going to be a regular thing.
It is very sweet to hear her little “tak tou” when she gets something she wants.
Jared and I are working very hard to come up with ways to pay off the debt.
As we were packing to go to California, we were talking about clothing. We are both in grave need of some new clothing. I am holding out on getting a little thinner, and I think Jared is holding out on getting a little fatter.
I have had the same underwear since 2005. It has holes in it with the seams ripped out of many key places. It is my favorite underwear, and it is difficult to find an inexpensive replacement for it.
I told Jared that as soon as we were out of debt that I would throw out my underwear and buy some new ones. I will not do it a second sooner. I just hope that the underwear hold out that long…