·:[ David and Claire’s Blog ]:·
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Today Claire and I took the day off to fully enjoy the family Halloween experience. Brynn participated in her daycare’s Halloween Day Parade as none other than a spider princess! We walked around the block while all the kids held onto a rope, and all the parents were madly taking photos of their children. I went a little crazy today with the camera, and 240 pictures lately have a few good ones.
Then later in the day we went trick or treating. I always enjoyed trick or treating as a child, and this is the first time I’ve ever taken one of my own children out. We joined a bunch of neighborhood families with similiar aged children and went from house to house scoring loot for Brynn. She wasn’t so good at saying trick-or-treat, but she sure learned fast how to grab candy out of a bowl. She also used her cuteness to maximum effect going back in the bowl over and over again grabbing as much as she could before being stopped.
I love handing out candy when children come by our house. The last couple years I have been offering chocolate coins amongst other various traditional candies like snickers, mars bars, hersheys, etc. The chocolate coins are in the shape of 50 cent coins with gold foil. Size wise they are smaller than other candy you could get. Also they are just milk chocolate, so nothing special really. They are shiny however, and for the last two years have been the most popular choice by far when children of any age come by. Even over ring pops! This year I tried offering only candy of a similiar gold color and other things just as shiny. It didn’t matter, the coins always went first. So now my theory is that the coins are the rarest of the candy offered. So next year I’ll get some other real rare and weird stuff and see how that fares against the coins…
As for Brynn’s candy preferences, that was a real treat to watch this year. That’s because she’s never actually had any of these candies before, so it’s clear she’s choosing for reasons other than what the candy tastes like. Unfortunately for her, she appears to have an affinity towards the look of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups (the size of the package maybe? or just the orange color?). Given her mother’s peanut allergies those candies were promptly removed from her sight when we got home. She also had a big thing for lollipops. That is one thing she has had before, so maybe that choice was just that she knows she like lollipops. Given the choice of lollipop over anything else, she always chose the lollipop. I look forward to seeing how her taste evolves over the years.

The last post was right before I went back to work so you can probably figure out that it’s been an exhausting six weeks. Evan is coming to work with me and going to the Children’s Center but that is only for one more week and then he goes to Brynn’s daycare. That will be very sad for me as I love going to see the little guy every three hours. It’s so nice to have a baby visit to look forward to when the day is going badly. Or even when the day is just… going. He’s been very mellow about the new arrangements. He’s not peturbed to be left with strangers, and he’s never overly thrilled to see me. He’s generally very happy and only cries when he’s over-tired and other babies are keeping him awake.

We just started him on solid food recently and he’s already gained over a pound. His appetite is enormous and he’s getting noticeably chubbier. It’s funny to compare him to Brynn because she was always so physically active. Brynn started rolling in both directions right around 4 months but Ev can still only do front to back. By 6 months Brynn was using the rolling to get herself around the place but Evan has no method for moving around. He’s barely able to keep himself upright while leaning against something and sitting down. Brynn was sitting unassisted around 6 months. Not that Evan is slow compared to other babies, by any means, but he is just fairly passive in general which is a big part of it. I’m convinced Brynn learned to roll and crawl out of anger more than anything. She was just never satisfied with wherever she was and was always kicking and arching and wriggling around unhappily.

There are a couple of other 5 month old babies at the center and they are so much bigger than Evan. Ev is long and skinny but he also has a really small head compared to these other babies. There heads are enormous and they have legs like tree trunks. I actually cupped my hand over Evan’s head and then used that measurement to compare to one of the mega-head kids. The hand shape I was making was about half the diameter of his skull. The infant room teacher and I are always laughing over the size differences.

The one thing that is good about having the kids close together is that they are absolutely enarmoured with one another. Brynn will just go up to Evan and lie there kissing and hugging him and saying “I love you! I love you!” They also do this thing where Brynn mimics Evan’s baby noises and it sets him off and they both sing the same tone together. Ridiculously cute. I have to get it on video. When they are in the car they sit there grinning at one another the whole time. When we drop Brynn off at daycare she always climbs out of her seat and over to Evan and then gives him a kiss goodbye.

Brynn is actually being really good lately. The whole tantrum phase has passed for the most part. She’s not done with them, but the frequency is much, much lower. It’s probably primarily a language thing. All of a sudden it’s all come together with her and she’s now speaking in 7 or 8 word sentences that are grammatically correct for the most part. She has a big vocabulary and says some surprisingly mature things sometimes. Her new one is “I need a binky to calm down!” when she’s upset. Probably time to ditch the pacifier if she can express her need for it like that! She’s a mini-teenager a lot of the time too. Running to her room and slamming the door. Saying “get away from me”, “leave me alone” and “you hurt my feelings!” She’s also really into princesses and pink things while happened so suddenly that it almost seems like it was built into her genetic code and that gene activated when she got to 2 years and 3 months. I had no particular thoughts on princesses before this and I don’t think I ever really talked about them (why would I??) but all of a sudden I’m buying princess everything because life is so much easier when your toddler has an obsession and you can buy those things to bribe them with. She has a princess pillowcase, shoes, dolls, books, tent, sleeping bag, tiara, costumes (x3), slippers, underpants, pullups and probably more. Almost all of those were purchased to shut her up or get her to do something she didn’t want to do.

She has also managed to figure out that David and I have names that are not just Mommy and Daddy and she takes great delight is using our real names randomly just to shock us. The other day in a store we had lost David, so I said “let’s find Daddy” and she takes off, shrieking “DAVID! WHERE ARE YOU? DAVID!” This morning she was sitting in her room and trying to get my attention as I wandered past. She was saying “Mommy, mommy!” but when that didn’t work she switched to “CLAIRE! CLAIRE!” and of course, that made me stop!

I put two new albums up in the gallery, including one with our recent visit to Kip’s Castle for a Harvest Festival. Brynn had great fun decorating a pumpkin and watching a puppet show. Lots of new Evan pictures, although he still looks exactly the same as he has done for months and he still has the exact same expression in all photos.