Blatherings

Tags:	consumerism, crafts, entertainment, environment, insanity, milestones, parenting, peo, python, sesame street, television
Time:	01:37 am

1) Peo now can either spell and/or recognize if you spell out the following words: Peo, dog, cat, ant, bus, milk, and Costco (yay for early branding!).

2) One of the first things Peo does each morning is confirm what day it is. She almost always gets it right, long after the advent calendar incentive has been gone. She even gets that it's 2008.

3) Peo misses the Christmas tree and has started demanding that it be Christmas season again so it can come back out of its box. I had to make her a Duplo tree today.

4) In her bath tonight, she put her washcloth on her head Python Gumby style. One corner near her eye dripped, and she kept trying to catch the drips, but because it was so close to her eye the depth perception was off and she kept snatching in mid-air several inches away. Then she started banging a plastic half-cup measure on her head and singing, again, a la Python Gumby.

5) Ivy (

nightxade's daughter) sent Peo a Dragon from the Russ Shining Stars line (I'd give you a link to the pic but the stupid website is flash-based so I can't do a specific link). As she took it out of the box, it looked at first like a blue cow (and looking at the Cow from the same line, we can see why, since it's the same base pattern). But then we saw the wings and said, "Oh, it's a Dragon!" And Peo firmly declared, "No, DragonCow!"

DragonCow is suddenly Peo's obsessive toy of choice. It goes to bed with her. It comes downstairs with her. It rides in the car with her. It gets hugged, kissed, and attended to with great detail.

Her only complaint is that she wants to move the firmly embedded metal star from its foot to its tummy, no doubt because of her recent love of Seuss Sneetches. I've convinced her that it stays on the foot, but she reminds me several times a day that it should be on the tummy.

The only toy she's ever loved so much so fast was the Ernie puppet!

Oh, and on Christmas day, when Peo saw all of the presents under the tree, she declared that they were all from Ivy. All packages, in Peo's mind, either come from or go to Ivy. Ivy=Santa/Post.

6) On the Vol. 2 Old School Sesame Street, there's a point where the little boy asks Grover to count a single penny in his hand. Peo finds this underwhelming, and ALWAYS shouts to the TV at that scene, "Count to 12!"

7) In a recent Parents magazine, a supposedly helpful tip from another parent was to help teach FOUR YEAR OLDS to recognize letters by putting toys in bins with the first letter of the toy on it, ie so you put a robot in the R bin to teach R is for Robot.

Let me repeat...FOUR YEAR OLDS.

I told this to Corran and he said that his tip to teach FOUR YEAR OLDS to recognize letters was to start reading to them when they're five days old, whoops, too late if your kid is already FOUR YEARS OLD AND DOESN'T RECOGNIZE ANY LETTERS!

I mean, I get that Peo's smart and all, but seriously...are there normal-intelligence, not-delayed-in-any-way four year olds out there that can't recognize letters? Because if that's actually normal, we're so hosed for public schooling!

8) Same genius magazine had on one page tips on getting rid of too many toys from the house after the Christmas onslaught. They talk about sorting the toys into safe/usable and junk piles, and donating the first and chucking the second. All I could think was, "Hey...sure, donating the safe/usable stuff is cool, but you could also resell it if you need cash, or investigate your local Freecycle, and don't throw out broken/old stuff before seeing if someone on Freecycle or toy refurbishers want it first." After all, I see pretty bad-condition vintage Fisher Price Little People go on ebay regularly to the folks who repaint them as pop icons/characters and then sell them as art.

Seriously folks...you'd be amazed at how something you think is junk could be used by someone else. Before chucking old toys, look into your local Freecycle or craft community to see if anyone wants them. Waste not, want not!

9) Even better...same magazine on the very next page has its "green" shopping list, but most of the products were of dubious greenness at best (ie a broom that's supposedly made of recycled materials, but it doesn't specify how much of it is recycled, and if you go buy a new broom you don't need just because it's got recycled bits in it, that's more wasteful and harmful than if you clean/repair the broom you've already got and keep using it for longer).

And I'm getting really damned sick of this trend. Greenness has become trendy and everyone's jumping on the bandwagon, which would be cool if not for the fact that a significant proportion of products marketed as "green" aren't, or are so minimally green when a much greener alternative would suffice.

People who care about being green still need to research products properly. Anything else is mindless tokenism.

10) Speaking of being green and wrapping back around to Peo's insanity, she makes me sing the first verse of "It's Not Easy Being Green" almost every night, but she doesn't quite get it, because then she usually asks for "It's Not Easy Being Purple" or my favourite unrealistic variant, "It's Not Easy Being White." Who's been letting my baby watch Fox Spews?! :D

11) I brought out my old Yamaha electronic piano thingy the other day for Peo to play with, since she's become obsessed with pianos. She played so happily for a good long time, then consented to me putting it away. Then she demanded I produce a guitar. Well, I didn't have one, so in about five minutes SUPERCRAFTYMUM made her one out of a tissue box, rubber bands, a paper towel roll, and some tape. Piccies to come another day.

Oh, and DragonCow likes to play the piano too.

That's all the updates I can think of for now...I'm exhausted and not spellchecking or reading for typos...

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