Aurora Wells

One of Aurora’s favourite and most-requested songs is Thunderstruck. Oh, actually, that might be by AC-DC. My apologies, but I get all those guys mixed up. So imagine my surprise at this snippet of dinnertime conversation:

“Aviva (Mommy), I like this music a lot. If I want to hear it again, what should I tell you I want?”

“Opera.”

By the way, Chris and Martin Kratt (Aurora and Daddy) are out in the backyard tonight, sleeping in a tent. Chris said he wanted to have another Creature Adventure, and he brought along his trusty Polar Bear, just in case things got scary. I’m taking this opportunity to read Bel Canto and listen to, you guessed it, opera.

Catching Aurora in a sweet moment when she was in a good mood and the afternoon light was beautiful. The look on her face is definitely an “Okay, Mom, I’ll humour you and not make a funny face at the camera” sort of smile.

They change pretty rapidly, but Aurora’s likes and dislikes at 3 & 1/2 include:

Likes: Girly stuff, for a change; Tinkerbell (as opposed to the days when she would only be Peter Pan, and Daddy had to be Tinkerbell) and all her fairy friends; My Little Pony; purple; rainbows; Moshi Moshi Kawaii (a Japanese “Where’s Waldo?” for little girls); baby dolls to dress up and feed bottles to. She also still likes the “Berenstained” Bears, the Mouse House, bouncing in place, telling “two-person” stories, and her favourite stuffed animal, Polar Bear. She is a die-hard, cutthroat Candy Land player, and she’ll play ten games in a row if you have the patience to go along with it. Favourite foods: fruit smoothies, candy and chocolate.

Dislikes: being scared, watching scary movies (although Halloween is hands-down her favourite holiday), being tickled, being shown what to do, and being told to go potty. Her food dislikes are too numerous to mention.

This week’s milestones: (Re)learning how to drink from a cup, doing a somersault unassisted in gymnastics class, and beating Uncle Jim in a running race. Jim claims that her remarkable speed and endurance were the result of drinking so much milk from a cup, and I have no reason to doubt him.

I think that I shall never see
A thing as lovely as confetti
Shaped like a tiny spread-winged bat
I’ll never love anything as much as that.
Its hue was emerald, texture shiny,
And found on the ground, a little grimy.
My closest friend, I loved you dearly,
Alas, you did depart so early
Into a crack in a friend’s car seat,
Not to be found – such foul defeat!
I’ll curse my mother with cries of sorrow
Until I forget you, upon the morrow.

Except that Aurora didn’t forget that tiny bat-shaped piece of Halloween confetti. A week later she told Daddy how much she missed it, when she found a stray ghost-shaped confetti piece on the floor.

Right now Aurora is very busy dealing with the issues of loss and decay. The red and white tulips that wilted in a vase on the table, the tiny christmas tree we made for the mouse house, even the villain in the Disney movie “Tangled” have all decayed and caused Aurora much distress. The idea that people can decay, I’ll admit, is an alarming concept. But cut flowers?

Aurora has a very steadfast and loving personality. I just wish it wasn’t so often applied to every piece of junk she finds on the street. We have a stick “family” on the front porch (she’s not allowed to bring them inside), and a rock collection (mostly gravel) on a shelf in her room.  After she goes to bed I dispose of the receipts, plastic straws, and broken balloons that she becomes attached to throughout the day.

Speaking of balloons, this was a tiny fraction of the reaction when despite my warnings, Aurora proceeded to play with “her favourite balloon” with knitting needles.

I’m not sure if it’s the influence of preschool, or just being half a year older, but Aurora has had a pretty amazing personality change in the past six months. While she used to be quite shy and hesitant, or just extremely reserved, she now happily converses with new people and other kids. Her new best friend Kate may have something to do with this. She lives across the street, goes to Aurora’s preschool, and has a Super Mommy, so we’ve been seeing a lot of her since we met last June. She’s about six months older than Aurora, and deals extremely well with Aurora’s personality quirks.

Kate likes Aurora and her puppy.

Girls just wanna have fun!

Playing hide and seek. At three years old, the girls are finally starting to get the hang of it. (Note tiny fingers)

They love playing with the Mouse House (who wouldn’t?). Actually, it’s Aurora’s favourite thing to do for the past month. Every day she wants to do Christmas, Hanukkah, and Halloween with them. Sometimes we even get to Easter before Mommy and Daddy beg her to stop. For Christmas we hang stockings (tape up Aurora’s socks) for the four mice and their adopted Spinosaurus son, Kynan.

Mama Mouse has made a nice lunch for Sister Mouse, Brother Mouse, and Kynan. Kynan, being carnivorous, prefers not to eat any veggies.

Papa Mouse entertains his guests, Woody and Mr. Potato Head, in the living room while two of his pets face off over the water dish. We’ll be sad to see the Christmas tree go, but its leaves are turning brown and falling off, so it’s only a matter of time.

For a kid who was wearing undies at 19 months, and who was dry most of the time until she was almost two, Aurora has been, shall we say, a bit reticent to use the potty for the past 16 months. I’ve also been a bit reticent about posting a blog entry about toilet training, because it’s been feeling more like toilet failing to me. Since Aurora started putting her foot down (in a big puddle of pee) almost a year and a half ago, we’ve tried everything from talking to rewards to total non-intervention to get her back on the potty. Okay, not everything – we never tried beatings for obvious reasons. Non-intervention was really fun, with plenty of puddles and diaper rash.

It’s not that Aurora would never go on the potty, she just didn’t want to admit that she needed to. If I caught a certain expression on her face, or a whiff of something unpleasant, and she was in a good mood, I could get her to sit down on the potty and pee or poo, but it was really unpredictable when she would go along with it.

So, January 1, 2011 rolled around, and we decided to get ‘tough’, as in, “You’re going to wear undies now, and go on the potty, like all other people your age and older do.” This involved a lot of screaming and “I WON’T!!!” for the first day, but then inspiration struck. I asked Aurora what it was about going that she didn’t like, and she was finally able to verbalize that it wasn’t the potty she hated, it was me or Daddy telling her to go and do it. “So, what if somebody else, like a duck, told you when it was time to go?” “I want a frog to tell me.” Hmmm, no frog sound effect on my iPod timer. “How about crickets?” Bingo!

So now, when I think Aurora might have to pee or poo, based on her fluid intake, time of day, and amount of last pee, I set the timer on my iPod to one minute (sometimes more), and let the crickets do the work for me. I mosey over to the kitchen or somewhere out of the way, and when the crickets start chirping, Aurora yells for me to come and help her go to the potty because the crickets say it’s time. Lovely!

Of course, this is just a baby step in the long road to toilet independence. Two summers ago, I felt so relieved and grateful that I was almost done with diaper changing (and washing, and folding, and carrying everywhere, along with a change of clothes, etc.). Now I am just happy to have a kid who doesn’t throw a temper tantrum when I try to change her. I don’t know how long the magic of the crickets is going to last, and I don’t know when she will eventually be able to tell herself that she has that “funny feeling”, but for now I’m just going to enjoy the peace and tranquility that the sound of crickets has brought to our household.

I gotta be brutally honest here: life here at Chaos159 is not all giggles and jellybeans. Although, I fear, there may be too much of the jellybeans. We’re having a real challenge in the eating department these days (the potty struggle is ongoing, too, but I’ll just talk about the food today). I wouldn’t bother to blog this, except that I have the feeling that I am not alone in these issues, and would like to hear some other war stories to bolster my resolve.

Has anyone else out there got a picky eater? I don’t mean your run-of-the-mill, I-don’t-like-brussels-sprouts eater. I mean a kid whose entire food repertoire includes only about a dozen healthy choices, another dozen less healthy ones, and those choices seem to get narrowed by the month. The situation is bad, real bad, and I admit that it is largely of my own making. When faced with a one-year-old who was not eating enough to make it above the 5th percentile in weight (and who later dropped down below the 1st percentile), I began to offer, let us say, more palatable choices. Like deli lunchmeats instead of unprocessed chicken & beef. Like crackers instead of whole grain bread. Like cheddar bunnies (the organic version of goldfish) and juice for an on-the-go snack instead of apple slices and water. Each little slip into less healthy territory added up, though, and now Aurora won’t eat anything but those more processed choices.

I think the worst part is that she simply won’t try anything new, or new in the past few months. Even though she ate fresh blueberries by the bucket last summer when they were in season, as well as cantaloupe, cherries, peaches, and a bunch of other delicious fruits, they are all met with lips clamped shut this summer. Brian and I shared the most awesome cantaloupe a few nights ago, and Aurora wouldn’t even put one tiny bite in her mouth. She used to pick and eat cherry tomatoes off our neighbour’s bushes last summer, too (of course I split them in half for choking prevention). I understood that maybe the fruit was less desirable once it was out of season, but now that everything’s delicious again, I can’t get her to give it another shot. And that’s just the fruit. Vegetables are even worse.

We’ve tried bribery and rewards to get her to try things, but according to all the experts that’s a good way to develop an eating disorder later in life. We’ve tried eating healthy foods in front of her and demonstrably enjoying them. My newest (and most painful) tactic is to serve only fresh fruit and yogurt for dessert. So far, this option has been met with hysterical cries of, “Where’s the REAL dessert?!?” Trying to limit her juice intake to only 1/2 cup per day, diluted with water, has resulted in constipation and dehydration when we rigidly stick to it.

So, until I hear any better ideas, I will try to be strong, and take the healthy path. According to the book my doctor recommended, I’m supposed to offer Aurora a variety of healthy choices at each meal and put absolutely no pressure on her to eat any of it. If she doesn’t eat it, just offer it again, and again, and again (they say it can take a lot of exposure to a new food before a child is willing to accept it). It certainly wouldn’t hurt me to cut junk food out for a while. I’ve heard that it takes three weeks to start a new habit or break an old one, so wish me luck for the next two and a half weeks!