rain, rain, go away

today was a fun one. (please note that there is heavy sarcasm.) madelyn was a little energized this morning and the cold, rainy forecast meant that we were going to be inside for the day - i knew that i was in trouble. somehow she managed to find everything that she shouldn't be into and break the top drawer of her dresser all before 9am. i made the executive decision that we would brave the weather and head to the park. it wasn't supposed to start raining until around noon, but it was cool and overcast.

when we got there we had the park to ourselves. madelyn spent some time yelling at the wind blowing through the leaves, hiding from and peeking at mom, and of course picking up sticks, leaves, and mulch. after a while her friend, jason, came with his mom and were surprised that anyone else was there. they were having the same 'need-to-get-out-of-the-house' morning we were. and then her friends michael and dylan came down to play too with their mom. right when michael and dylan got there it started to rain. it was just sprinkling so we stayed for a while longer. we finally left when maddie came down the slide with her teeth chattering.


a new game maddie has taken up at the park is shaking the trees. she will look up and the leaves and shake the tree (and herself). she has been playing with the mulch under the trees for a while and i lately i have been trying to get her to notice the trees (we count the trees as she points them out on walks). in a few more weeks the leaves will start to turn and she will be able to make them fall down with her shaking. i am sure that will make the game that much more enjoyable!

this afternoon was a big eating day for maddie and just when i thought that she was done, she obviously wasn't! i keep all the table chairs away from the table (so they they can't help my little climber). madelyn was so determined to eat that she got her favorite ravioli out of the cabinet and brought it to the table, then she got a chair and pushed it to the table, got in it and sat down. she was waiting for me to get the ravioli out for her. she just gets her mind on something and does everything in her power to make it happen. i love that about her! (even though it can make my life very difficult at times.) love.

are you ready for some football?

we are ready for the great winter pastime - football! i think that this is one of the reasons people were inspired to finish off their basements - to create a football watching den to pass the long winters.

in honor of the beginning of the season, matt and maddie got all dressed up in their chargers gear for church this morning - matt even brought his chargers travel mug. since we are in packers country sunday mornings bring out a lot of jerseys, car flags and decals, and other team gear. we are one of the few families not in green. since the packers don't play until tomorrow there wasn't much in the way of green this morning.

once madelyn has her shoes on, she is ready to go - now! (and sometimes even before her shoes are on.) she calls out "go" and heads straight for the nearest door. and if you don't follow close behind she comes back to you repeating "go, go, go" the whole way. once she gets to you and tells you "go", back she heads to the door. she gets more and more agitated with each back and forth (not that she doesn't calm down when we explain that we have to do such and such), but we try to put her shoes on at the last moment to avoid any frustration.

i am pretty sure that she turned the doorknob to open our bathroom door yesterday - which is a little bit scary. i distinctly remember closing it about 15 or 20 minutes earlier and then the next thing i knew she was in there playing with the contents of the cabinets. we already have safety covers on all the exterior doors, but we might need to get some for the interior doors that we don't want her to be able to open (i.e. my office door).

she keeps us on our toes. love.

we can cross off interior design

an interior designer madelyn is not. we went tile shopping today and madelyn selected this as the tub of her dreams. matt and i both cracked up when we walked past, but maddie was in love. tile shopping with a one year old is not for the faint of heart. luckily one of the stores had a little play table with books and coloring books with crayons that kept her in one place for more than 5 minutes. she actually behaved very well and didn't touch anything that we asked her not to.

after some napping and cleaning around the house, we headed out to our annual neighborhood block party. this year one of the neighbors (ava's mom) arranged for the teacher of our music class to come and do a session during the block party to help entertain the littler kids for a while. what was exciting for me was that matt could see maddie participate and help get some video so that we can share with all of you - my loyal readers.

madelyn loves miss sarah (the teacher) and is often right up next to her. the nice thing is that miss sarah says that madelyn is just like one of her kids and that maddie is fine getting in to everything. the benefit of the classroom is that there is a table where all the supplies can be put out of maddie's reach, but she does spend a lot of class time trying to reach everything on the table. she is getting really good at doing all the motions and participating, but today was not as stellar a performance. enjoy!

here are some more pictures from the block party tonight. love.

they had a two person bounce house that maddie really enjoyed. especially when an older kid would get in with her to do some actual jumping.

she enjoyed riding a train with a whistle and it was even self-propelled. it took a little bit for her to get the hang of steering it but she managed to get it going in a circle on her own. the train whistle also reminded me that i taught her how to blow a real whistle today. she didn't like how loud it was, but tried it a few times anyway.

madelyn's new thing is to squat down and look up at people so that she can make eye-contact when she greets them. here she is saying "hi" to miss sarah while she was getting set up.

here she is 'riding in cars with boys'. (you might notice that she is actually pushing him out.)

enjoying her first juice box. she wore more than she drank, but really enjoyed the straw.

reading books with daddy and ava.

"hi, crickets"

this morning maddie and i took an early trip to the park around 9am. i had to bundle her up a little because it was 50s/60s after all the rain yesterday. we had the park all to ourselves and i was glad that i had the foresight to bring a towel to wipe down all the equipment that was still wet.

we actually spent more time enjoying the wildlife than playing on the equipment. madelyn likes to gather up all the fallen sticks and leaves blown down from the wind. and then she was strolling all over the open field part of the park. she kept squatting down to examine things on the ground and pointing at things asking, "what's that?".

"what's that?" madelyn asked with a general gesture at the wooded area.
"where?"
"what's that?" madelyn asked with a more specific point and a little frustration.
"trees."
"what's that?!" this time with a little scream in the question and pointing in the same place.

that was when i realized that she was pointing at the sound of crickets coming from the woods.

"that is bugs saying 'hi' to you."
"hi" with a wave at the woods.

isn't that cute? madelyn has been way more into noises. earlier she had been asking me about the various bird calls - that is how i figured out that she was asking about the cricket sound. matt and i are going to have to hone our listening skills to satisfy madelyn's quest for knowledge.

we went to the park several times today. it turned into a really nice day and i am facing the fact that we are running out of 'park' weather so every day counts. when we went this afternoon there were a lot of maddie's neighborhood friends to play with. her friend ava is almost two and was saying "bye" to everyone as she and her dad were leaving. i was asking maddie to say 'bye' to ava and in typical maddie fashion she was waving to ava from her swing. and then she called out "bye" clear as a bell to ava while waving! it toally surprised me! she said 'bye' once or twice several months ago, but this was the first time she had said it on request to someone who was leaving. and she said it in her big girl voice, not a soft baby voice. that voice surprises me every time. love.

with the flip of a switch

madelyn has a lot of toys that make noise (thanks, grandparents) and i have enjoyed that most of them have on/off switches or at least a volume control. that way i can turn them off when i am on the phone, need a little less noise, or just can't hear a song/noise one more time. this week madelyn has discovered that a lot of her toys have an on/off switch and she can take control of whether they are on or off. the way she tests each switch is to activate the toy and then search for the switch before the song ends. if she doesn't find it in time she will activate the toy again so that she can flip the switch mid-song to off.

it has been cute to watch her carefully examine all her toys to try and find their on/off switch. she squats down and tries to look on the underside of her larger toys and flips the smaller toys over looking for the switch - this has become a new game for her. we may have to resort to removing the batteries this winter...

another on/off activity is turning on the clock radio in the guestroom so that she can dance to the music. she usually just goes in and turns it on, but i can ask her to do it too and she will run back to start dancing. she will even dance next to it if she misses the button to actually turn it on. i have been trying to get some video but she always looses focus on the way to the guestroom whenever i have my camera handy.

it rained all day today, so maddie and i had our first taste of what winter could be like for us being forced inside for the day. i did take her to check out another local library that some of the neighbors like and they did have a really fun children's section. madelyn worked really hard at trying to solve wooden puzzles like two older boys sitting at a little table with her. i think that

we will make more visits to this library in the future. madelyn was excited about wearing her rain jacket and is curious about her long sleeves after not wearing them all summer.

thanks to shannon for maddie's sock fairy book and fairy bunny doll! she was inspired after reading about maddie's great interest in socks lately. madelyn loved the fairy bunny and gave it kisses (choking a little on a stray feather - more of a cough than a choke really). maybe daddy will read her the book tonight before bed, and i will read it to her tomorrow before nap time. love.

tonight's post is going to be a hodge-podge of stories from the past two days - i just wanted to warn you that i am going to jump around topics quite a bit.

this weekend i tried to have madelyn 'help' me with cleaning by letting her hold the spray bottles (chemical-free) and use a similar towel to mine for wiping. she really liked when i cleaned the front windows because the are the type that fold-in (i don't know what the proper phrase is). i mean she really liked it. now every time i open the windows she want me to fold them in and expresses it with a little fit and all.

yesterday the high was around 94 and then a cold front moved through to leave us with a high of 72 today. when the front moved through last night matt and maddie were at the park. it was still pretty sunny out and i was surprised to see that it was raining. here is a picture of matt and maddie after their walk home with the wagon in the rain. matt said that madelyn kept turning her head to the side trying to keep the rain from hitting her in the face. her cheeks look extra big with her hair wetted down.

speaking of leaving the park... madelyn has decided that she will just get in her stroller/wagon when we ask her if she is ready to go home. this is huge progress for us. once she started walking she fought leaving more and before walking we delt with not wanting to leave the swing. when we are ready to go we just ask her if she is ready to get into her stroller and she walks right over.

today madelyn had some fun playing with the hand-down doll stroller from the neighbor across the street. the funny thing is that she does not put any of her dolls or stuff animals in the stroller. she strolls around with her rubber duck, then a baseball. she just cracks me up. and later she spent some time serenading the dogs. i got the camera because both dogs were sitting next to each other and madelyn was banging and 'singing'. the dogs shifted around a bit when i came back and her song lost some of its momentum, but isn't she cute performing for them? and she really is doing it for them and not just near them.

with all the flying we have been doing, i tried to teach madelyn the sign for "airplane". (the sign is the "i love you" hand gesture going from one side of you to the other in an upward motion.) madelyn can't get her fingers into the right position, but she waves her hand in the general motion whenever she sees an airplane in real life or in a book. today she took it a step further when she heard one flying over our house. without any prompting from me (she heard it first), she started doing the sign and ran to the screen door and looked up at the sky to see the airplane. she always seems to surprise me with her ability to put concepts together and apply them. (not to brag.) love.

you should see the other guy

we feel pretty sure that madelyn had another growth spurt - mainly because her face keeps running into things. she has also outgrown almost half of her 18 month clothes even though she still doesn't fit into the bloomers and waists. she fell asleep on our drive home from the outlets yesterday and slept for a little over an hour. because of the extra, late nap, bedtime did not go very smoothly and somehow madelyn bumped her head. i can't figure out what she hit it on, but she definitely hit it hard! and it became more and more colorful as today went by. and then this morning she fell out of the kitchen chair while eating her breakfast, reopened a cut inside her lower lip (from a slip in the bathroom last week) and added some more scrapes on the outside. the whole left side of her lip is swollen and dark red and with the lump in the middle of her forehead, it looks like she was in a pretty nasty fight.

it didn't help that she got less sleep than normal last night and then took an earlier, shorter than normal nap today. she was pretty cranky. and since she wasn't at her best, balance-wise, there were a lot of head bumps and crying. for my own sanity i did whatever i could to keep the mood light and keep her occupied with safe activities while i tried to get some of my long list of chores done around the house (matt was doing some entertainment wiring and insulating in the basement all day in preparation for drywalling next week). what worked? jumping. i am not sure why, but she thought my jumping up and down or just kicking out a leg was hysterical. she is a little calmer in this video clip, but you can see how entertained she was. since i am jumping while filming, you might skip it if you get motion sick. enjoy. love.