Amazing Adventures of Adagirl

I’m puttering about in the kitchen while Ada bathes (read: splashes) and I overdrop on this private conversation:

“Oh, what’s this?”
“It’s shampoo, daddy ducky.”
“What’s this?”
“It’s shampoo, mommy ducky.”
“What’s this?”
“It’s shampoo, baby ducky.”

The cutest thing ever, no? Lucky thing there’s a knowledgable girl around to explain things to her duck family!

Yesterday, Ada took a little yellow cylinder that goes to her shape sorter, stuck half of a plastic easter egg on the top, saying to herself, “Put the lid on. It’s a house.”

Just now she has the same yellow cylinder in the bath and is drinking from it. Another reason to appreciate our shower filter!

No, no, she’s the one embarrassing me!

Wherever we go, Ada instructs me to sing the “whatever phrase strikes her fancy” song. For example:

“Mommy, sing the red sign song!”
“Sing the goose is getting fat song!” (sometimes they’re real songs)
“Sing the ball is swinging song!”
“Mommy, sing the white chair song!”
“Mommy, sing the Ada and mommy and daddy carring the pumpkins in their hands song!”

And there I am–in public–singing a nonsensical song to tune that is a misnomer.

That’s not the only thing she does to make me draw unwanted attention to my uncalled for behavior. Just the other day at the park she hollered from accross the playground, “Mommy, say meow!”

In my usual nonconfrontational style, I excused myself from adult conversation to shout, “Meeoow!”

One of the fun thing about having Ada, is that all my life choices gain importance. It used to be that when I did a street clean-up with my community group The Way to Happiness (www.thewaytohappiness.org), I was just cleaning a street. This morning when Ada and I participated in the downtown cleanup (David is working on our house about constantly right now, so we had to go and represent), I was picking up trash AND raising a citizen with a social consience!

Of course, it’s as double edged as most swords, and I have to consider whether it’s really worth the comfort of a Steak N Shake milkshake, knowing that I am raising a fast-food consumer . . . but that’s a perk too, if less milkshakes is preferable, and I suppose that it is.

Right now I am trying to improve our quality of life by utilizing aesthetic and healthful items in our home, and simultaneously reduce our contribution to the deterioration of the planet by using and discarding fewer disposables. In my mind, this goes right along with my other plan to indulge in fewer commercial products and subsequently reduce our expenses. I’m so excited because once I get all my new systems in place, I will be living a lifestyle much more in-tune with my ideal, and one that will allow me to raise children with values that are close to my heart.

For example, I want to replace the plastic (as well as non-stick) food-use items in my kitchen with glass, wood, and stone. I am hankering after stoneware for oven-use, have already collected wood and bamboo utensils and cutting boards, and just bought four pyrex, glass, lidded containers to store my food in instead of tupperware (and sandwich bags). These things will be better for our family’s health, while improving the look and enjoyment of my kitchen. I plan to wean myself off of plastic baggies to throw away. I plan to make fewere kitchen purchases because I will be using and washing cloth (not paper) towels and napkins, using long-lasting containers (that I feel are also more appropriate for children who are learning what this world is made out of and how to treat possessions), and clean my implements with less soap and more vinegar and baking soda, which are also used in cooking, laundry, and general household tasks, resulting in less space used to store cleaners that I won’t be purchasing!

I am so excited to be making basically simple changes that will benefit my on all of my dynamics: self, family, groups, mankind, animals and plants, material objects, and sprituality. And I am especially excited that I will be raising Ada in a lifestyle that does not buy another toy everytime we go shopping with no regard for the resources used and abused in the making, using, and disposing of that toy; that my children will be raised in a home that is not cluttered with possessions, in which possessions are pleasing to see and satisfying to use; that our family will make, or barter, or fix and reuse as many foods, clothes, and other ammenities as we can before resorting to throwing out or buying new.

Ahem, for friends or family reading this, with whom we exchange Christmas presents, you can expect a less conventional gift this year, but perhaps a more special gift as well.

Today I bumped Ada’s head while negotiating her into her carseat. I hate it when I bump her! She cried, I held her, then when she let up on the tears, I asked her to tell me what happened. It sounds like an inappropriately innocent attempt to avert the blame from myself, but in reality, having Ada tell me about what happened really handles it so that she is not in pain or upset. As an added bonus, her emerging linguistic skills render these conversations terribly cute. But no gushing; this is serious business. She tells me what happened, and I acknowledge her and ask her to tell me again, until she is no longer upset.

“Tell me what happened.”
“Ada happened in the black car!”
“I see. Tell be about it some more.”
“Ada happened in the seat in the black car.”
“Okay. Can you tell me again?”
Reaching for her cup . . . “Ada’s apple juice make Ada feel better.”
“I’m glad! Do you want to tell me what happened again?”
“Ada’s apple juice makes Ada’s head feel better.”
“Good. Now I’m going to get in the front and drive.”
“Ada’s apple juice makes Ada’s body feel better.”

She’s happy, so we get buckled in and off we go. As we approach our house, Ada is choo-chooing and meowing (not uncommon). She says, “Choo-choo. Train. Meow. Kitty.” We park in the driveway. “Ada wanna go inside and pat our meowing kitty!”

Days ago Ada was talking to baby goat and I overheard them planning a trip to the doctor. The doctor! Where did she find out about one of those? We did take Throckmorton to the doctor for some shots about a month ago. And a month earlier we tood a (Throckmorton wounded) bluejay to the doctor at the animal clinic . . . maybe baby goat was the one needing a doctor, since all of our doctor experiences seem to be animal related.

Then, just two days ago, Ada was jumping on the bed and announced, “Ada’s ready to go to school!” and trotted into the living room. In this family, school is less likely than the doctor. We plan to homeschool and I should be very dissapointed to have to send her away every day to someone else.

I guess we’re on the fringe, but we’re not in a vacuum. School and doctors have entered the vocabulary. And afterall, I doubt this is the first time she’s been a kid in this society. She may have had lifetimes of school and doctors already, so there’s no point my trying to take credit for her information, or her plans at all!

I know where she gets it: mostly from us! Ad is unstoppable. Every time I turn around she’s learned how to do something. One of my favorite things she’s learned, is to be careful walking on wet feet or wet floors. We’ve had a couple of disasters when getting out of the bath and pelting full-on into the living room without waiting to be toweled off. Such disasters are easily remedied with nursing and a nap, but I took to telling her, as I got her out of the tub, “Dry your feet off on the matt so you don’t slip,” and “Wet floors can be slippery so be careful.” I didn’t stress it over much. I figured, at this age, my drying her, or carrying her was the preventative measure, not a stern lecture, right?

So I wasn’t stern, and now she’s careful on wet floors and dries her feet. I guess it was worth learning. I know she did, because I heard her in the bathroom saying, “Don’t slip on the wet floor.” I went in and discovered that she had climbed onto her stool and turned on the sink faucet. Such actions usually lead to a total drenching, as they did in this instance, and the stool and floor were as wet as her dress. She was perched at the edge of the stool, unwilling to step down into the puddle (smart, since dismounting is adventure enough for her with a dry floor). She looked up and put her arms up for me, saying, “Dry Ada’s feet off.”

I was bursting with love. Why love? Everything she does has that effect on me!

This morning, Ada decided to find her red devil ducky. She has seen how daddy searches for things missing, and implemented his method: she found our red flashlight that runs by being shaken, not by batteries (don’t ask me), she shook it, then she got on her knees and pointed the flashlight under the couch. It wasn’t on, but she said, “Find the red devil ducky,” and peered under there all the same. You got it, I melted into a puddle of love.

Ada is big into comparisons and similarities (and similes, for that matter) lately. “Ada wanna hop like a cricket!” It is also important to note that Ada has developed her own peculiar (!) method of hopping. In order to hop on one leg like she sees us do (on demand), she sort of gallops about, one foot hopping up and down, and the other following along behind to hold her up . . . it is gorgeous! She loves to go into our “new house” (the addition that is under construction) and hop all around the new living room, construction materials be damned!

When we watched Faulty Towers the other night, it opened with a view of the boarding house and a sign in front reading “Faulty Towers.” “It’s like a goat,” Ada told us. “The sign is like a goat.” And, lo, so it was! With two black posts coming down either side, and the body of the sign white and rounded in an asymetrical shape that provided a head at one end and made for fluffy looking fur all around . . . oh, I should mention that in our family a goat is what most of you would call a sheep. Yeah, we got that from Ada, and now it’s hard for any of us to keep it straight!

At the thrift store today there was some kind of kitchenware that looked like a white duck. Ada said, “It’s a swan. The swan’s got her head. It’s like a duck.”

Today she bit a pretzel and the broken off ends provided little pretzel legs. “It’s walking,” she told me. I wasn’t surprised, since I have heard about other objects in our house walking too. Then she said, “It’s an animal and it’s walking,” and I was just so charmed! She is sensational!

Just now as I write this, Ada is hanging out the window shouting, “Bye-bye, Throckmorton, bye-bye!” Moments ago she was hugging our kitty, and Throckmorton has made a quick exit. This story is neither here nor there, but I think Ada is just cute as pudding!

Let’s see . . .

Ada tells me, “One white horse with one brown horse,” and then, “One brown horse with one white horse.” Sounds like advanced mathematical concepts to me!

We watch Singing in the Rain with Grammy and Granddaddy. I’m amazed–it’s such a good movie! Why do classics always surprise me? Ada declares, more than once, “Singing in the raincoat!”

On our walk Ada informs me of a parrot in the sky. I’ve missed it, so I ask, “What color was the parrot?” To my knowledge, all the parrots in this area are green. I’ve certainly never seen another color flying around in this town. Ada, however, says, “A blue parrot!”

Ada sits astride her small blue “car” in our front lawn. Mommy is pulling vines off the azaleas. Ada says, “Ada’s driving to Home Depot to get some berries for this mouth.” She is gesturing at her own cute mouth, of course.

My husband is my hero. He’s building me a house. Half of it was already built (circa 1940s) but he is doubling the size, and it is nearing completion. It has walls and floors, ceilings, doors, and windows. It has a roof and a porch. It has a bathroom, laundry room, music room, and living room. It has closets.

The drywall is going up now. A little bit more on the ceiling, and most of the interior walls need to be done–are being done right now.

By this weekend I should be painting the living room.

Floors will go in after that. I want bamboo flooring. I secretly expect a bamboo floor. We’ll see. The bathroom and laundry room will be tiled, and the music room will have carpet, so it’s only the living room I’m worried about.

Living room color: I’m thinking blue. NOT light blue, but I think not dark either. A medium clear blue, like water. Maybe some green touches too. I would like to paint the ceiling yellow, but am not sure because the bamboo flooring will probably tend more towards red . . .

Wonderful problems!

David has been working on our house weekends (and, of course, weekdays), but we thought we’d go to the beach Sunday morning before he got down to work, just to remind us that it was a weekend.

I popped outside to admire the new addition when I got up and it was chilly! I wondered whether the beach were even advisable. Of course, by the time we were ready to go it was 10 or 11am, and fully warm enough. In fact, it was a most beautiful day–not hot at all, though not cold either. There was a breeze, the sky was blue, and the sea was full of little fish. As we walked along the shore we would see explosions of fish leaping out of the water, twenty at a go, and the jumping would go on for several seconds, then the waters would calm until the next explosion. David theorizes that a predator is swimming past and the little fish are trying to stay above the water until the threat passes.

When we went in the water, we found that the whole ocean seemed to be swarming with the little fish. They would scatter around our limbs as we walked, and swim into our legs when we stood still. It was fantastic!

Last night I set the thermostat to 78 degrees before we went to bed. When I woke up it was 76 degrees–the AC hadn’t been on all night! And today it is actually cool in the shade! It is almost noon and the thermostat still reads 77 degrees. A far cry from the 84 that I have the AC set to. Ada and I went for a walk and it was actually cool in the shade!

I think of myself as not speaking down to Ada. I think that I use grown-up words, and grown-up tones with her, though our home videos reveal a bit more condescension than I intend. And some of those toddler words creep into the common family vocabulary, such as uppy (as in, I want an uppy), and, of course, mommy and daddy.

That’s all well and good, but I realized that I tend to refer to myself in the third person as mommy. Come sit on the couch with mommy. Can mommy give you an uppy? Well, this isn’t grown-up English at all!

Ada uses all sorts of pronouns: he, they, she, her, him, it, and there are phrases that use ‘I’ and ‘me.’ Like, “I did it!” But mostly she refers to herself as Ada. Like, “Look at Ada!” and “Ada wants a popsicle!” (Almost all of her sentences end in an exclamation point).

Well, I’m making a concerted effort to stop calling myself mommy. I and me are back. Lo and behold, just Friday I heard Ada narrating her exciting adventures like this, “Ada’s rocking on the brown rocking chair–Ada’s too big for the rocking chair–I am too big for the brown rocking chair!”

Her grammar is astounding, pairing verbs with pronouns correctly (often).