Lilacs, Sentences, Seashells!

Oh, Lilac season is just about gone. We relished in it this year, bringing in bunches and bunches of the fragrant blossoms just about every day. Our entire home smelled like Spring! Next we'll see our Peonies pop and then the Irises. Vi and I also planted some sunflowers this year, and we should have well over a dozen stalks climbing our fence.Ah, Summer!

Our vegetable garden continues to astonish me. The cucumber seeds Vi helped me plant a few weeks ago are coming up, and our zucchini plant is flowering. Even a bean seed our little friend Tyler planted - in a dixie cup! - has sprouted. Plants have such a will to live; it's inspiring to me.

Vi has blossomed, too. Her pieced-together communication of pointing, signing, and nouns has expanded to manners and sentences. This morning she said, "Hop! Ah-pen po-do, PEEEEEESE," roughly translated to "Help! Open the play-dough, please!" She seems to have mastered the three-word sentence that fits this format: I (verb) it/you. Examples include I found it, I got it, I see you, and so on. She will climb into her stroller and say "I push you," when she actually means to ask ME to push HER. Or, "I chase you," when I am chasing her.

Her eating and sleeping habits are about to change. Dan and I rounded a parenting corner this weekend, really deciding to be IN CHARGE in these areas. Repeating the rules as often as possible - we eat when the sun is up, we sleep when the sun is down. Last night she was refusing to eat, but we pushed through the resistance (which came in the form of tears and thrashing and screaming...my, my, she'll make a fine 2-year old) to get her to eat. Once she started, we had trouble getting her to stop. I had been operating on the assumption that she would self-regulate; if she wasn't hungry, she wouldn't eat. This exercise proved that there was an element of behavior associated with the pattern:S he is often too eager to explore her world - a characteristic I'm not hoping to change. I just need to give her better boundaries - this is dinner time, not play time.

After eating us out of house & home, she slept until 4:30 am. (Of course, Dan woke up at 2:00 like a trained seal.)

We had a camera-less outing to the beach on Saturday. (I know, I still owe you other pictures that I somehow managed to capture!) Vi was daring enough to let the ocean tickle her toes, but not enough to walk on dried seaweed. Or around it. Seriously - she'd come to a patch of the crunchy stuff and stall out, reach up for a lift, and refuse to move! She liked finding seashells, and piled them all into my shoe to carry around.

We found an abandoned My Little Pony kite on the beach (No, Jasper, you can't have it), and we found a bicycle with a child's seat on craigslist for next to nothing.

Bikes, Kites, and Beach-combing? This is going to be the best summer ever.