christmas concert

The Friday before Christmas was Abby's last day of school and the day of her Christmas lunch and concert. Parent's Council at the school puts on a full "turkey dinner" for the kids. I say Parent's Council and we certainly support it, but the whole thing comes together thanks to one of our amazing Council Moms and she in turn organizes an army of parent volunteers. ML and I were there first thing in the morning to help set the tables with place mats and napkins. We then moved on to buttering buns (me) and mixing up stuffing (her).



Finally the kids showed up for lunch and I got to be "table Mom" at the Abster's table. There was meat to be cut and chocolate milks that needed to be opened. Abby was very happy that I was there, but disappointed that I didn't get a chance to eat with her and her friends. Lunch for us volunteers was hastily eaten in the kitchen in shifts before we returned to our respective posts. For ML and I that was dishwashing duty. Our Christmas lunch is held at the community centre next door to the school which has a push through type diswasher, so I set up shop at the dirty end loading racks, rinsing dishes and pushing them into the dishwasher. ML held down the fort at the clean end, making sure all the dishes got back to their respective spots. With 160ish students, plus invited guests, parents, grandparents, staff and volunteers that equals a heck of a lot of plates, cutlery and glasses. Not to mention the stuff we used for cooking. Our goal was to get it all done as quickly as possible so we would be back at the school in time to see the kids perform their Christmas program.



Abby's class sang that Alvin and the Chipmunks hit - Please Christmas Don't Be Late. They were of course as adorable as anything. She also performed with the rest of her ukulele class, two songs - Must Be Santa and Jingle Bells. MyPie and I snuck up to the front to video it. I apologize in advance for the crappy quality. The lighting for the concert was not the greatest for us parents trying to immortalize our kids every moment. I think our school should hire The Widney Woman's fella to light next year's production. He's a rock star.



After a full day the girls and I ended up at ML's just hanging out and doing crafty things with Perler Beads. These were so much fun and they kept four kids (3-10) and three adults busy for hours. Check out my awesome snowflake ornament...

name that tune

For the past couple of weeks Maya has been singing this song that our sitter taught her. Only problem -- we had no idea what she was saying. At all. And we're her parents. We should be fluent in Maya. We spent a few days trying to decipher the code....



Go on give it a try. Just what is she singing?

*abby hit me/daddy hit me

So it's been, what, ten days or so since I first wrote about Maya's incessant chatter that none of us can understand. Well I am happy to say in the past ten days her vocabulary has just exploded. She now has a growing list of words she can and will say, like;

juice
diaper
car
outside
jingle bells
ho ho ho
Santa
thirsty
MINE!
Gora - which translates into Dora and she is usually bringing me the remote when she's saying it.

She is also talking in sentences which is exciting even if some of them are fragmented and only half understandable. Some of her favourites are;

Mommy/Daddy you help me?
Need help.
Daddy outside?
Daddy outside car?
Mommy Daddy car?
Abby/Mommy/Daddy tisses. (kisses)
Need go pee pee. - Yep, this weekend she started asking to go pee on the big girl toilet. She hasn't actually done the deed yet, but it's not from lack of opportunity. At this point she's happy to sit there just like her big sister does. And really, as far as Maya knows, that could be all Abby does too. This pee pee thing is tricky though because pee pee also translates into TV. So maybe some of those times a put her on the toilet she was really just trying to tell me, "Hey! Dad put it on Monster Jam and then left the room. Can you change the channel?"


Maya does have one special sentence and you can see her saying it in a very short video: Maya talks some more. This clip is only about 20 seconds long so even my dial up friends should have no problem watching it.

She says this* if she falls, trips, hurts herself in anyway, can't get her own way, can't have what Abby has, wakes up in the middle of the night, wakes up in the morning and so on. I am not sure where it came from because there is no hitting in this house. Oh and for the record it's always Abby or Daddy..... never Mommy. Didn't I tell you she was a genius?

chatty

Maya is a little chatterbox, but as I have mentioned here before very rarely does any of what she says make sense. Well at least not to us, I'm sure it's quite clear to Maya herself. That of course doesn't help with the communication thing and often leads to frustration on both our parts. The truth of the matter is Maya is very close to turning two and I'd be lying if I didn't say the whole talking thing wasn't causing me some anxiety. I don't think of it as something to be alarmed about, just yet anyway, but I do see it as something I should keep and eye on. She has finally started to use some sign language, but I find she mostly uses it as a "parlour trick" rather than actual communication. I actually discussed this issue with some veteran Mom friends just this week about how concerned I should be in regards to this and wouldn't you know it brand new sentences have been flying out of her mouth all weekend. Actual sentences!

New things we've heard in the past few days:

"Me and my Abby."
"Want go play wif Abby."
"Mommy/Daddy need help."
"Daddy/Kitty/Abby hurt me."
"Guy-Cull!" translation - Michael
"I will" in response to be careful.

She still won't use her own name and insists on calling herself Baby. If you do ask her to say Maya she always responds with "Abby". As for what's making me laugh lately, when you ask her what sound Papa makes she snores. Very funny. Don't take my word for it though, listen for yourself: Maya Talks.

Okay clicking on the link will take you to youtube to watch a totally adorable clip of Maya chattering away. I can't put the player up on my site because for some reason it renders the ole web based homestead here unusable for those of you out there still using Internet Explorer*. Please excuse her dirty face she just fed herself a chocolate pudding. It is a bit of a long clip (about a minute and a half), so I don't recommend it for my fellow dial up users. Everyone else, if you're interested, enjoy!

*Yeah why don't you just download yourself a better browser already. Come on all the cool kids are doing it.

let's go to the video tape

Hey remember when I told you Abby taught herself how to swim? And remember that I told you it wasn't pretty, but it got her from one side of the pool to the other? Well it's still not pretty, but if you'd like you can check out a short video of her swimming.

a whole pile of nothing

Well day one of holidays is officially behind us. It was a rather uneventful day. The kind of day where nothing much gets accomplished. Although Mike and Abby did take the van to the car wash while Maya napped and I did this....



Wasn't exactly the beach and a Corona, but I managed.

As for Abby she had old Duke's of Hazzard episodes playing on a loop as she was in and out of the house today. I tired to get her to sing the theme song, but Mike appeared two lines in and and she got embarrassed and in true rock star fashion declared the concert over, there will be no encores. Don't take my picture!

Hey want a laugh? Yeah, you know you do. Watch this video of my brother and sister in law's canoe trip this past weekend.

And that folks is why camping is for suckers.

This is the day.

Well it happened again, Abby was the only junior choir member to show up at church the last time they were scheduled to sing. And once again she marched her way to the front of the church and sang all by herself. Well I'm assuming she marched because she likes to march. You see neither Mike or I was there this time. With the warm weather comes busy weekends for Mike. So he needed to be out of the house and I needed to be in the house. With Maya. So she could sleep. Once again Abby was very proud of herself.

We're very proud of her too, but I do worry. I worry that if these older kids keep on missing practices and performances that the choir director will cancel the junior choir. Abby loves it very much and I'd been really rather annoyed if she had to pay for some other kid's laziness. Grandma Linda, who took her to church that Sunday, said the choir director wasn't planning on having Abby sing at all that day, but Linda suggested she at least let Abby practice it see if she'd be able to manage on her own. And she did, which didn't surprise me at all. She picks up the music amazingly quick at practice when you consider she's the only choir member who can't read. Luckily Grandma Linda was thinking along the same lines as I was so I'm hopeful that we would be able to convince the director to keep it going even if it's just Abby.

Obviously I didn't get footage of Abby singing at church, but I did manage to tape a special encore presentation.

Z Y X's

I am endlessly astounded by how much Abby is learning in school, not to mention how quickly. Before school she could recite the alphabet, but couldn't really recognize the letters. Now she recognizes all the letters and knows how they sound phonetically. Often times now when she hears a word, for example, Herbie, she says "Herbie, hu hu that's an h. Herbie starts with h." She's also starting to recognize words, popcorn words specifically. Popcorn words are words that pop up everywhere, like is, as, the, to and so on. That right there is enough to be amazed and proud of her for and then tonight she pulled out this:



I couldn't do it, believe me I tried.