Santa Anna -- Day 862

Well, we thought that our slightly hyperactive girl needed a bit more excitement, so we decided to take her to see Santa at the mall. You should have seen the smile on her face. She waited in line with -- how should I say it -- ants in her pants.

Then when the time came to get on Santa she hesitated for a bit but then got right up. She told Santa what she wanted, and it was a modest request: soap. Ok, she ended up chatting away and adding to the list. She also wants a brush and because of a police officer nearby, a police hat. Well, that one may be a bit tougher, but we managed the rest of the stuff. She has been asking for soap for her bath for so long, how could we deny that baby pleasure?

Oh yes, we also had a photo taken. By the way, the trick to get Anna to smile is not to say 'smile' but ask her to laugh at the camera. Just a little trick to pass on.

It was also funny on the way to the mall when we took the metro. Anna kept saying, "Santa knows when...," and then filled in the blank with whatever she thought Santa was aware of. This time it happened to be: "Santa knows when you are yawning." Apparently, she had just yawned. She often makes up her own lyrics, and last week she was saying, "Santa knows when you go down the stairs." He also knows when her Nya-Nyas are sleeping and when she goes wee-wee. I guess Santa is a pretty omniscient old fellow.

By the way, my new camera came in this week, and I am now learning how to use it. Special thanks to Charles and Judy for contributing towards the present. It is a pretty slick camera, so hopefully I can capture our fast little girl better. Once toddlers get too quick, point-and-shoots no longer really do the trick. I think this one will work out well though. Even without really understanding the thing yet, I can do much more than with my other digital camera.

Lastly, in a couple of days, we all will be flying to North Dakota for Christmas, so there probably won't be any posts for the next 10-14 days. Anna sure is excited to get on the airplane and can hardly conceal her giddiness. Even though she had a cold the last time we flew and her ears hurt quite a bit, she hasn't stopped calling herself a pilot since. She's enduring the pain for a career as a pilot.

The Time-Out Couch -- Day 857

Since we live in a rather small place, we don't have many places to 'discipline' Anna. What we ended up using as our time-out/calm down place was our sectional couch. Sometimes it is also called the 'quiet couch'. By the way, it is also the jumping couch. We allow Anna to jump on our couch because we live above someone and Anna simply loves jumping on the floor above where her bed is. We know it isn't a good practice to promote, but we've had to compromise -- we let her ruin our couch, and we get better neighbor relations.

The idea of the time-out couch is now hardwired into the little toddler psyche. Just the other day I was playing play-do with her and asked her what she wanted me to make. Anna says, "A time-out couch." So I do it. Then she asks, "Now make Daddy giving Anna a time out." I do that too. Then I had to put her two Nya-Nyas on the couch. I'm left a bit baffled by this. Does this mean the time-outs are effective, or is the transformation of our disciplinary routine into a play-do reality just one step towards losing all effectiveness. I'm still not sure.

A few days ago, Anna also took our nativity scene Jesus and said, "Jesus needs a time out on the couch and he wants his Nya-Nya." Ok, maybe it is coming together a bit more. In one of my last posts I said that our nativity Jesus was a 'she', but it now appears that Anna is acting herself out through our nativity baby Jesus. It's not so much baby Jesus as it is miniature, olive-wood Anna.

I have been slowly figuring some other things out. For instance, people with glasses are now pirates. Before I thought it she applied this label more randomly. Anna will often point at a stranger and say, "He's a pirate." Now it appears that glasses are the feature that trigger this. The other day, this exact event happened on the train, but it also took on another dimension. Anna was just staring at the man (pirate) sitting across from me. Then she says, "Where'd his hair go?" Yes, the man was bald and Anna just kept asking rather loudly where his hair went. After about four minutes of this she stopped, but when our stop came, the man also got off. So there we stood waiting for the train door to open and Anna starts up again, "Where'd his hair go? [pause] Where'd his hair go?" When I got off the train I decided to put some distance between us and the main with no hair.

Anna is getting really excited for Christmas. This year it has hit her how important the idea of Christmas is -- well at least how important Christmas toys are. Toy catalogs have flowed in and every box now is somehow a present for her. We only have one present under our tree, but Anna today was hanging around it with her Nya-Nya and then I heard a rip. I looked over and Anna says, "Nya-Nya's opening his present." Good try. I had to do tape job and inform 'Nya-Nya' that he had to wait until next week.

Anna can also sings Rudolf the Red Nose Reindeer, Santa Claus is Coming to Town and some other carols. She also is fully aware the Santa knows what she is doing at all times. The other day she was coming down the stairs and says to me, "Santa knows when you go down the stairs." I'm sure he does. I have used the all-knowing-Santa concept as a disciplinary technique on a couple occasions, but I felt so bad after seeing the complete trauma it caused when she realized that Santa may exclude her if she didn't act well.

Well, I had better go. I don't have any new pictures so I will just put some more beach photos up. I did order a new camera so hopefully I will be getting better pictures in the near future. Of course, it will take me a little while to figure the new device out.

Do I hold or do I go? Day -- 852

Anna is in the process of potty training -- though this seems to have been happening for about a year now. She actually went potty at school and held it long enough to get to the toilet on time, and that was a first. Usually she goes in her diaper, THEN she tells us that she has to go, so the sequence is still off a bit. Sure, this isn't a problem, but she then demands to sit on the toilet, which amounts to her just sitting there for around an hour and giving up because there is nothing in the bladder.

While in Texas I bought her some big-kid pants and you should have seen the smile on her face. It was priceless, but then I had to tell her that she would need to wear them over her diaper until she potty trained herself. She resisted a bit at first, but now thinks that is a cool alternative while she works on the timing issue.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that when she went potty at school, she told her teacher that she was going to get a call from Elmo. If you remember, I had scheduled a call from Sesame Street, so Elmo called her and told Anna how proud he was of her. Her teacher thought that was a neat thing and was thinking of introducing that into her class.

One major benefit of potty training is that I have a bit more leverage. The whole child raising game is often just a series of leveraging attempts to get her to do what you want her to versus what she wants. Of course you want to do this with the least amount of effort and without making things worse.

Recently, Anna has been rebelling against me and my punishments are having diminishing returns, but you should have seen her get in line when I said I would take her big-kid pants away because that's what a 'baby' does. That was one silent baby. Of course, I am probably doing something harmful and setting back potty training, but I will have to deal with that later on I guess. For now it is working.

There comes that time when you don't want her to be 'toddler' and still want her to be 'baby', but there also comes the time when the advantages of transforming her into a toddler (i.e., big girl) are more than the advantages of baby nostalgia. This time has definitely come.

As for other news, on Sunday we went to the Gospel Brunch at the Corcoran art museum. It was really nice and having a bunch of loud gospel singers belting out tunes meant that Anna was in no way the loudest person in the room. Actually, she loved it so much she would clap her hands, dance, and generally get excited. After she was done eating, we went up to the singers area and Anna then played peek-a-boo with one of the singers. She got a lot of smiles and then would tear off towards Dad as if she was being chased.

Another funny point was when she came to the realization that the songs -- a lot of which were Christmas songs -- were talking about baby Jesus. Anna lets out a loud commentary at one point saying, "They are singing about Jesus." She was so proud she knew what was going on. Anna has been learning her Christmas story not only from some books we have, but also from an olive-wood nativity scene we bought in Jerusalem a few years back. Unfortunately, Anna has determined that Jesus' room is on the roof and he regularly takes a brutal tumble and slides across the floor. Jesus is taking his licks. Oh yeah, Jesus is also a girl and has a Nya-Nya just like hers.

As for the Christmas shopping, our eBay Fisher Price stash is growing. We pretty much have Christmas done and now I have my eye on a few birthday presents. I figure this may be the last chance to get some of this stuff before we go overseas.

Just some other tid-bits. Anna's identity is currently a pilot and her favorite place to go now is the National Botanical Garden, which has set up some really great train sets. It is even better than last year. They also have a display where you can smell various spices, which she loves and the whole garden is filled with models of the monuments of Washington, DC made entirely out of wood. Yesterday, a lady was showing how they made them and let Anna feel pine cones, moss, cinnamon and other materials used in making the wood models.

The pictures are from Texas. The first is of Anna riding the plane at what she called the 'yellow park', the second one is of Dad and Anna (there aren't too many of these), and the last one was during the Texas Grandparents' 40th anniversary party. Anna calls her lego structures 'mountains'.

Well, I had better go. Below are several links to videos that I took while in Texas using my digital camera. There is no sound, and each is only about 15 seconds long. It will give you some idea of Anna's first experience with the beach.

Sand 1
Sand 2
Sand 3
Sand 4
Sand 5
Sand 6

An eBay Christmas -- Day 847

So instead of getting Anna some Christmas presents from Target or any other department store, Kerry and I decided to each buy her some vintage Fisher Price stuff that we had as kids using the eBay auctioning service. Anna loves these toys and she has already had endless hours of fun with them in both Texas and North Dakota.

Unfortunately -- at least on the North Dakota side -- most of these vintage toys were liquidated after my brother and I left for college. We still call this episode (with not just a little bit of regret) the 'Great Rummage Sale'. You see, this event put on the auctioning block dozens of years of childhood gifts and memories and disposed of them in one 'bargain-filled' day. Fisher Price toys, BB guns (ok, maybe it is better those are gone), fossils, Star Wars toys, and so on and so on. Oh yeah, my hockey skates too.

Anyhow, the miracle of eBay now allows us to rebuild these childhood playgrounds -- at least with some patience and for a price. I searched the auction site and found the perfect toy for Anna. It was the early 1970s Fisher Price village. You know...the one with the mail system and fire trucks. It had all those store fronts and the working traffic light. Here's a picture if you don't remember.

Anyhow, collectors also want these toys, so I started bidding and potentially paying much more than the the Target toys were ever going to cost. You see these bidding games (they are games), are completely nerve racking because you are competing against professional collectors and it is anonymous. You can't see a face or read a person's mood; you are left only refreshing the computer screen every five seconds during the last 20 minutes to see if you are still the highest bidder and have 'won'.

So there it was, 50 seconds (I really need that fire truck)...40 seconds (I think I am going to get it)...30 seconds (yep, I have it) and then it happens...a big red 'X' appears telling me that I am no longer the highest bidder. I scramble to out bid the person, but I don't have time. In the end, that person won and I lost. If it hadn't been so private (on my couch), it would have been somewhat humiliating. I felt like I had lost my child's toy, but in reality I had just lost -- well -- my old toy once again. Great.

I was actually quite put off after this. In the real shopping world you don't compete with others (unless it is the day after Thanksgiving). Christmas shopping is bad enough that allowing competition to complicate it is just insane. And whereas in normal shopping you settle on something and buy it, here I had to start all over again after losing. Losing meant 're-shopping' for the same thing all over again. It is sort of like looking for bargains in one city and then when the sale goes away, moving to another city to look for the same bargains there. It seemed like a monumental waste of time.

Anyhow, before I lost that auction, I had also entertained sending links of other auctions to family members for them to buy/bid on gifts for Anna. But after the whole experience, I just didn't want to subject anyone else to the same process. Target is probably better.

But I still couldn't let go of the gift idea, which I still thought had merit. So I started shopping around a bit more on eBay. I picked out one auction with fewer professional collectors and staked it out with a proper strategy. What kept me going were two things: (1) I still wanted to get the toys and (2) the only people more cut throat than collectors are Dads buying presents for their little girls. Don't get in our way people.

So I waited for the last hour, got a bit edgy, and placed my bids. I had five tabs open on my computer and was quickly hitting refresh on all the different pages. In the end, I had done my research well and I ended up winning four of five auctions, and the vintage toy that would have cost me $130 a few days ago, now cost only $36. It felt good, but I will honestly say that I will try avoid this experience as much as possible.

I still have to get Kerry's vintage gift, and there are a couple of missing pieces that I will try to locate. In the end, however, I have learned two things: (1) eBay and Christmas are not good matches (it feels like you are gambling for gifts) and (2) don't mess with Daddy when he needs vintage Fisher Price.