waaaaa-eeeee?

ema told me today that i've entered a new phase. i wasn't sure what she meant by that, but, as usual, i responded by asking "why?" it's my new favorite word. so far, ema and daddy seem to be doing pretty well answering my questions all the time, but every now and then, one of them just looks at me, smiles and mimics the sing-song way i ask: waaaaa-eeeee?

right now we're up in falls church. waaaa-eeee? because, ema tells me, we are celebrating the fact that daddy just sent off an article he's been working on for a long time. daddy tells me we've come here because they have a really cool memorial day parade, complete with shriners driving little cars. waaaaa-eeeee? who knows!

the hot dog store

this morning when ema came to get me out of my crib, i told her that i couldn't get up yet because i was driving the car to the hot dog store. i thought she was going to make a big fuss about how i had to get up right then, but she seemed to understand the importance of my errand and agreed to get in the back of the car (on the floor next to the crib). but even though ema and i had each buckled up, we weren't ready to go yet because daddy wasn't in the car. after we each hollered for him a few times, he finally joined us (i asked him if he was getting ready to go play soccer because his legs were sticking out, but i guess he just hadn't put his pants on over his boxer shorts). once he was buckled in, i drove all of us to the store and got the hot dogs. i told ema that when she gets little, she can sit in my booster seat and eat hot dogs just like me!

there i am!

for a long time now, i've been telling ema and daddy that i'm a kwerrel. for those of you long-time blog readers, you will know that ema is a walrus, daddy is a snowman, grandmom is a monkey and grandpa is a giraffe. the cast of characters has extended to all of my friends at starr's (elephant) house. so, this is nothing new. what's new is that recently, whenever i see a kwerrel, i will shout out, "there i am!" and if there are two kwerrels, i'll say with delight, "there's two of me!"

announcement: comment competition!

i don't know if you know this, but i love it when those of you reading my blog take the time to comment. ema is saving all of these entries and your comments for me to read when i grow up.

to encourage your comments, we've decided to create an award for the best commenter. the winner will be announced on the one-year anniversary of this blog (next month!)

so far, dodo karen is the early front-runner for sheer quantity of commentary. but the award committee will consider creativity of comments as well.

good luck to you all! (and more videos coming soon, i promise!)

reading to snoofy

daddy and i like to watch soccer together. i love to shout GOOOOOAL! whenever they get the ball in the net, but it just doesn't happen very often. so sometimes i get bored when watching soccer with daddy. one day when ema was out and daddy and i were watching soccer, i got bored and decided to go read some books to snoofy. after a while, daddy noticed that i was being very quiet and came looking for me. this is what he saw (click on the picture to see the video):

cw with hanna

yesterday (about a month ago) ema, daddy, lauri, hanna and i had a fun picnic in cw. ema has finally put the video online, so i can show it to you and can tell you all about it. we started with our picnic and after that we played in the hedge maze in the governor's palace gardens. it was so much fun! after that, we continued our stroll through the gardens and went down to the pond to feed the fish. it was such a nice way to spend one of the first warm days of spring. you can see the video if you click on the picture of me sitting in the governor's garden:

Neglect

Ema's been busy preparing a paper for a conference and went away to Cacago (Chicago) for a few days last weekend, so the blog and I have been feeling neglected. But she's back now and all is well in the universe again.
Here's what I've been up to since I last wrote....

I still spend four days a week at Miss Starr's house. On Tuesdays we go to music class with Jocelyn.

Savta came to visit me on St. Patrick's Day weekend. She helped me play with all my toys and read all my books, plus some new ones that she brought for me! Somehow I found time to show her around downtown and the museum.

Snow in April! I was very surprised to wake up one morning a couple of weeks ago to find the ground covered in snow. Daddy helped me make a snowman. He didn't last very long, though (the snowman, that is).
But it was a good thing that the snow melted, because the very next day I went on 2 Easter egg hunts. First at Hannah's house, then at Grandmom and Grandpa's.

puzzle puzzle bo buzzle

hi everyone!

life's been good here in williamsburg. spring is coming, so we've had some nice weather and some deceptively cold & sunny weather, like yesterday. ema, daddy and i went towntown (downtown = colonial williamsburg) to see the manimals, but when we got there, i just wanted to be carried because it was cold! ema and daddy bundled me up as well as they could and tried to get me to walk. it wasn't easy with two pairs of pants on! but i was happy 'cuz i saw lots of horses pulling carriages and we also saw some sheep. they had very curly hair -- even curlier than mine & ema's! ema told me that my wee wools are made from sheep's hair. i thought that was funny.

ema finally got around to editing and posting a video she took of me doing my puzzle. you can get it by clicking here. but you should know that it is pretty long, so it might take a while to download.

i love my puzzle sooo much! i always ask ema and daddy to do it with me. if you watch the video, you'll see that i'm getting pretty good at it, too!

the other thing i'm really into these days is rhyming. i spend a lot of my time making up rhymes that delight me. and i love it when other people make rhymes, too. a simple "okey dokey smokey wokey" is enough to send me into hysterics. so here's a video of me thoroughly enjoying ema's rhyming song, which i call "banana fanna."



the truth is, everyone around here has been making a lot of rhymes lately, but grandpa is the best at it. i don't know what it is about the rhymes he comes up with, but they always make everyone laugh, not just me. for instance, "funky chunky monkey." everyone got a big kick out of that, except for grandmom, a.k.a. "monkey."

pictures from aunt sue

hi again everyone! grandmom just sent me some pictures that aunt sue took when she was here visiting us over new years. i love these pictures, and i thought you would, too!

yorktown vaventure

today ema and daddy took me on a vaventure to yorktown. it was really cold and windy but we had fun anyway, which you can see on the video of the vaventure ema posted. she also posted one of me gettin' down with her while we were waiting for the pancake griddle to heat up this morning. i wanted ema to dance with me, which is why it is a bit shaky. and she thought she'd also post this one of me singing fee-fi-fiddly-i-o along with a book safta and saba gave me. and for you low-tech types, here are a few pictures that ema took of me while we were at yorktown:





daddy thought it was ironic that ema kept saying how peaceful it was at yorktown...

some new videos

hi everyone! ema finally uploaded some new videos for your enjoyment. you can always find links to all the videos she has posted here. but first, let me tell you a bit about the newest ones...

one day, i wanted ema to record me singing my abc's so that i could see it on the tv. to see that video, click here. when we watched it on the tv, i thought it was sooooo funny! i don't know why i sang the song that way, but i really liked it, as you can see in the next video.

the last new video ema posted is of me reading with saba. he thought he was going to read to me, but i wanted to show him how well i can read by myself!

enjoy!

saba's visit

last week, saba came for a visit. we had lots and lots of fun together. he brought me a lot of presents that i love very much. we spent a lot of time reading all of my new books and playing with my new wooden toaster and sliced bread set.



i also helped ema cook pancakes for all of us to eat! saba was very impressed with how well i can help when i stand in my tower.



but my favorite part of saba's visit was when i got to take him to the museum. i love going to the museum because i get to touch lots of animals.

tools, trucks, and thomas

i finally did it. i decided i was ready to wear underwear. ema had been telling me for a while that i was ready, but every morning when she asked me if i wanted to wear a diaper or underwear, i chose a diaper. but the other day, i decided i wanted underwear. my favorite underwear has tools on it, but the pair i wore yesterday had trucks. today, i plan to keep my underwear dry all day again (just like the last two days!) because i want to spend the whole day sitting on thomas the tank engine!

bush looks like a monkey... and he smells like one too!

today ema and daddy took me to a protest. i was excited to go, but was disappointed when we got there because i thought there would be lots of animals. i guess i got confused because ema told me about how we were going to demonstrate against president bush who was in town, and in every picture i've ever seen of him, he looks like a monkey.

but i had fun at the protest anyway. i got interviewed by a news reporter. apparently, i was the youngest person there. i also liked it when the cars and trucks went by honking their horns. even the budweiser truck drivers agreed with us!

i was very interested in the man with the big head and i wanted to go and see him, but then when i got there, i thought he was kind of scary. it turned out that he wasn't a he. it was a lady pretending to be president bush. and she was from california, just like kiva! if you look closely at the very top of this picture (directly above ema's head) you can see the feet of some of the other men i wanted to go and see. they were police men, but they had these big helmets on and they had these big plastic shields. there were about twenty of them and they were standing in a very straight line. ema said we couldn't go see them, that we weren't allowed to. she seemed surprised that they were there, since there were only about 100 of us there for the protest.

you can see more pictures of the protest here. and read the opinion piece by the reporter who interviewed me here. she doesn't mention me by name, but i'm pretty sure i was the only 2-year-old at the demonstration.

exciting news

hi everybody! i have exciting news. ema just heard that i have a new cousin in israel. the news is so new that we don't even know his name yet. i wonder when i'll get to meet him!

in other news, efrat helped ema figure out how to make the videos she's taken of me small enough to post. you can find a whole bunch of new ones here. if you have any problems getting them to open, i think windows media player can open them on both mac and pc.

let's see, what else can i tell you? well, we're getting back into our regular life routine. every day, ema or daddy drives me to miss starr's house and i get to play with my friends. on the way there and the way back, i like to look at all the pretty cars. but my favorite moments are when we stop at a traffic light. i know that "red means (s)top" and "green beans mean go!" and i like to shout it to the world!

video link

i have good news and bad news. the good news is that ema finally figured out how to make a way for me to post videos of myself on the web. (i know, i know, i kept telling her about youtube, but for some reason she didn't want to listen. she's not exactly of the youtube generation, you know.) the bad news is that she hasn't figured out how to make any of the footage she's taken with her new videocamera small enough to post, so right now, all i can give you is a short clip taken with her webcam back in june. you can find it here.

christmas came!

after we got back from arizona, we started hanging out at grandmom and grandpa's house a lot. eventually, we just sorta moved there and i didn't go back home for several days.

everyone kept telling me that christmas was coming, so i knew he'd be here pretty soon. the night before he came, i noticed that a few presents were under the tree, but the stockings were all empty. grandmom told me that santa was going to come and put presents in them, but i was a little confused 'cuz santa was lying on the carpet just like he usually does (see previous post). i wanted to just go ahead and open the presents that were there. i didn't want to wait. that night, i had a hard time falling asleep. every time my eyes got heavy and drooped closed, they would suddenly shoot open and i'd say "we're all gonna open presents!" eventually, though, i must have fallen asleep.

i woke up very early (it was barely light out at all) and started jumping up and down in my crib, singing "we're all gonna open presents" over and over again until ema finally came and got me. there was nothing she could do to calm me down, so she let me sing at the top of my lungs until we heard everyone else starting to get up. we went downstairs and there were tons of presents. so many more than there were the night before!

but we didn't start opening them right away... for some reason, horse (uncle mathew) had disappeared for a while and we couldn't start until he came back. we never did quite figure out what he had been doing while i was bouncing off the walls desperate to open all the gifts! here are some pictures of me waiting:

cast of characters

lately i've been extending my "alter egos" game to everyone around me. for a while, i was tigger, ema was roo, chachi was eyore, and daddy was pooh (which, he pointed out to roo, was fine as long as nobody heard me calling him that out of context). when we were in arizona, i decided that kiva was piglet, but after we got back to williamsburg, i reassigned that role to grandmom and told grandpa that he was kanga.

but now i'm squirrel (prounced kwoo-uh), grandmom is monkey, grandpa is giraffe, uncle mathew is horse (fuhs), daddy is snowman, chachi is santa, and ema is walrus. when ema told daddy that she is a walrus, for some reason, that made him start singing a wierd song with the words "koo koo ka choo."

hannukah in arizona

safta just sent ema some pictures from our hannukah celebration in arizona. i loved hannukah! the candles are so pretty and i love it when everyone sings.


by the end of hannukah, ema had taught me how to dance to one of the songs (banu choshech). i got to stomp my feet, crouch real small, then jump up as big as i could be. i liked it a lot.

the last two nights of hannukah we were with grandmom and grandpa. they happily joined in the celebrations, enjoying latkes and singing about how the latka ema gave them was "metuka." and by the last night of hannukah, daddy had even mastered some of the songs and he sang along with ema. i think next year i will know the songs, too, so we will all sing together.

here are a few more pictures of our time in arizona. the first is daddy and i playing at the kids center at the resort. the others are me modelling the devon-sized bathrobe they had waiting for me in our room. i loved it!

apologies

i know it has been a really long time since i've posted anything on the blog. here are a couple of reasons why it's been so long.

• we've been very busy.
• ema hasn't had time to help me with it since she's been working a lot lately.
  
• we went to california for thanksgiving, and then spent last weekend in arizona.
• ema got a videocamera for her birthday. since she's been playing with that so much, she hasn't taken many pictures, which means i don't have anything to post on the blog. but she's promised me she'll start taking regular old pictures again. and she also said she'd try to figure out a way for me to give you links to some video clips.
• we all got very sick when we were in arizona. i've never been sick like that before. water came out of my mouth! at first i thought it was funny, if a little wierd. after the 5th time it happened, i told ema i didn't want water to come out of my mouth anymore.