Avery 3 years, 5 months

The newest funny things Avery says:

“Mom! it’s winding!” pronounced with a short i in winding and meaning the wind is blowing. It’s also a transitive verb: “Mom! My hat is going to wind away!”

“Sure, I can have…” as in “Sure, I can have a toy box like that.” after seeing a toy box she likes on TV. Or “Sure, I can have long hair to the ground like Rapunzel.” What she really means to say is “Mom, I want that.”

Avery’s latest favorite thing is to have me tell her stories about how Abby, Zoe, and Rosita from Sesame Street visit her at her house. Usually the stories have to involve a tea party, dancing, or going to church. She loves for me to tell her about how Abby, Zoe, and Rosita come to nursery with her.

The apple doesn't appear as big in the picture as it did in real life.

Avery really likes to wear dresses, which is a problem now that it’s cold outside. We have a fight every morning when it’s time to get dressed. One day I let her wear her thin and sleeveless little summer dress and threw her out on the balcony to play until she got cold enough to want to come in. Unfortunately it wasn’t quite cold enough out (It was probably 50 degrees or so) and she played for a good half an hour before I made her come in. I’m a little surprised no one yelled at me for doing it. Hungarians are very sensitive about children getting cold outside.

We found a hand-me-down winter dress that I will let her wear inside with tights now, but it’s gotten quite cold outside the last week or so, so I think it’s pants and maybe leggings underneath them until we’re somewhere warmer. She asks to wear the Winter dress everyday. Sometimes three times a day.

Avery has mostly given up naps at this point. She still takes one maybe once a week or ten days, but she’s typically up all day. She likes to watch movies while Evelyn takes naps. Or paint. She was really excited about finger painting for about a week and a half this month.

Avery is very into High School lately.  I think she got this vague idea of something called “High School” from a friend who has older sisters approaching High School age.  Now everything cool happens in High School and sometimes random stories begin with “When I was in High School.”  My favorite one so far is “I play with ponies in my High School.”  She meant “My Little Ponies”, not the real life kind which might be acceptable in High School.

Note: Rachel started this but had to get on an airplane before she put pictures with it.  So I thought I (Ivan) would finish it for her since all the pictures stayed with me.  So if it doesn’t end well, blame me.

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Avery – 3 years 2 months

 

The other day we were playing outside and the older lady that lives downstairs was outside raking leaves and grass. She bent over for something and Avery looked over at her and said “Ladies really do have bums!” Sometimes it’s REALLY a blessing to live in a place where most people don’t speak your language. I think that is still topped by the time she looked at a bearded homeless looking man on the tram and asked if he was Jesus. That was last Summer.

Avery loves to dress up. A friend of hers, Amy, lent her a white dress up dress a couple weeks ago and she’s referred to it as her “wedding dress” every since. She’s very into weddings. She says “When I get older, I can have my wedding!” I think this was begun by the movie Monsters vs. Aliens, which begins with a wedding and may have been brought back to her attention by our recent acquisition of Shrek 2, which also begins with wedding scenes.

She likes being a princess as well, and sometimes refers to her friends as her princesses. She asks when she will see her “princess Stephanie” and if her “princess Amy” will be at church. There’s been a recent addition of a little girl names “Princess Kenna” as well. All this dress up and girl-ness is a little baffling to me I’ve gotta say. I was always a tomboy and remember being sooooo bored with Barbies. But she hasn’t gotten totally into the princes yet, so I’m trying to stay calm.

Her favorite things right now are her friends, getting out of the house, going to see the fountain, peaches, berries, macaroni cheese (as she calls it), hot dogs, movies, and she says her favorite color is dark purple. (I’m pretty sure she stole her favorite color from Princess Stephanie, but she’s stuck with it, so maybe she really likes it.)

Avery has a lazy eye. We started noticing it a few months ago and the doctor commented on it when I took Evelyn in at 14 months and said we needed to get it looked at . Unfortunately, you can’t just take a child to an optometrists office in Hungary, you have to find an ophthalmologist if a child needs glasses. So we found one that didn’t speak English, but had an optometrist that could translate for us, made an appointment for a day when both would be working at the same time and took her in. Unfortunately, for a lazy eye you have to have a special pediatric specialist of some sort, so the doctor gave us two numbers to try. I’ve been trying the one for a week now and finally got an appointment for September 21st. So, after several months, we may actually get this worked out. I hope so, because I really don’t want the poor kid to see double her whole life or anything like that. The ophthalmologist said she would probably need glasses and treatment for the one eye that wanders. Sigh. It makes me sad to think of her cute little face with glasses.

So that’s our little Avery for the last several weeks. I had a list of funny things she says but can’t find it, so I’ll have to come up with another one I guess for next month.

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Avery – 33 months

Things she says:

“smash” for “splash”

“babulous!” for “fabulous”

“aligator” for “elevator”

Avery likes to make dancers out of food. Anything with a stem is a dancer. She picks up apples, peppers, tomatoes, and others by the stem and twirls them saying “See? It’s a dancer!”

Avery and Evelyn both got a nasty cold/fever that turned into a cough and a tiny bit of stomach upset. We took them both to the doctor and the next day Avery got an ear infection. So we went to the hospital to see the otolaryngologist who gave her some antibiotics and some nose drops to help with her runny nose. She was pretty miserable for a morning and would only stop crying if she was on my lap. She’s feeling much better now, though, and I think maybe we’re over the sickies for this Winter. I hope.

We recently got some hairbands from a friend and Avery loves to have her hair put in ponytails and clips. She likes to pick the color of rubber band we use. Her hair is just long enough to get pretty wild, but not quite long enough to braid or even put in a single ponytail, so she gets pigtails. She’s recently been very excited about having long hair and she tells her friends about how her hair is long. It seems to have replaced her comments about her “brown curly hair.”

Avery loves to help in the kitchen. She likes to stir things a lot. Sometimes too much. But our friend Tanya came over yesterday and made dinner for us and let Avery help the whole time. Avery was in heaven. She loves Tanya to pieces and they had a blast in the kitchen. I made the mistake of asking Avery if she was helping Tanya cook. “No,” Tanya said, “I’m helping HER cook.” Avery didn’t really care about the distinction too much. She was busy flipping over a mixing bowl (It was empty, no worries), but I thought it was cute.

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Family Within a Family

Avery has a doll and a stuffed Pooh bear that she likes to have say the prayer too.  Often Avery will call the dolly “Baby”, and Pooh “Daddy”.  When she does this she has started calling me (since I’m Daddy and my name has been usurped by a stuffed toy) Grandpa Steve.

Avery has become quite demanding about saying prayers.  It’s always her turn, which usually means that we tell her what to say, and then she repeats it.  The other night she wanted the baby (her doll) to say the prayer, and she commenced to say it herself with no prompting from us.  She thanked “Fadder” for the day, nursery, some of her friends, Mommy, Daddy and Grandpa Steve.  I was just glad that I got included.

She also spelled out her first word tonight.  She spelled “m-i-l-k milk!” in a baby book (she has the words memorized from the pictures).  I was really proud until she spelled the next word “h-i-j-k-m-o-p apple!”

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