Aurora Wells

Aurora and I took Daddy to the Aquarium today, and got loads of great photos (see more on Facebook). She’s old enough now to recognize what she’s looking at, and realize they’re what she sees on the mural in her room, or in her books.

Look, here we finally are! Traffic was horrendous and it took almost an hour to get here, so we didn’t arrive until almost 3pm. (They close at 5pm).

I think this is the first time Aurora’s seen real moving frogs, not just pictures in books. They’re so funny!

I used to stand in front of tanks at the aquarium and stare at stuff like this for hours. Aaah, well.

The aquarium has a toddler play area which includes a mock sealife rehabilitation clinic. It appears that seal rehabilitation requires a lot of hugs, in fact.

However, Aurora’s absolute favourite thing to do at the aquarium was to push her little cow around in a chair for more than half an hour.

We’re so glad Daddy could come with us this time!

It’s like the walls at home, but much better ’cause it’s moving!

Bye-bye, fishies. We’ll be back soon!

Between our colds and the weather, we haven’t gone to the park much lately. Aurora stands at the front door, trying to turn the door knob, like it’s her ticket to freedom. Of course, when I do open the door, she stands there, petrified, unable to take the 2-inch step off the sill onto the porch floor. We finally went on Wednesday, and didn’t even have to dry off the slide.

Aurora tried to edge in on a 3-year-old’s bucket (she loves carrying buckets around), but he was too quick for her.

No matter the weather, she’d rather pitch a gigantic fit than wear hat, hood, or mittens. Gosh, that metal must be freezing! This must be how you raise a Canadian baby like Brian, impervious to the cold.

Aurora watches a 5-year-old take his infant brother down the slide (behind me). What fun! Too bad there’s no swings.

Aurora’s cold has taken a turn for the worse, with 6-8 wakeups per night, difficulty breathing, and general miserableness. We mostly stayed in the house today, and I got a great shot of her favourite new facial expression:

Lately she’s been giving everyone (but mostly me) the evil eye. What does it signify? Is it a look of anger? Incomprehension? Annoyance? Discomfort? I wish she could talk to me and tell me what she’s feeling.

Otherwise, she was pretty happy today:

Playing with the cows (I love the tongue sticking out in concentration),

Playing with the fire truck.

By the way, this is what her first haircut looks like from the back. It’s a “bob”, according to Sonia, my (and now our) hairstylist.

Then we went outside for a walk, but it was pretty cold out, and she’s still not keen on wearing a hat or mittens:

But HOORAY!!! Spring is coming – I’ve got the crocus shoots to prove it!

I’d like to think that I’m raising my daughter in a non-sexist, equal-opportunities fashion, but her preference for activities at the False Creek Playgym this morning make me question that assumption.

For the first 45 minutes we were there, she was totally fixated on this pink stroller. Push the stroller, pull the stroller, put the dolly in the stroller, push the dolly in the stroller. Then, when she tired of the stroller, she moved to the “kitchen”.

What’s for dinner, hon?

Yum, grapes! This pretend play mimics my daily activities so closely, it’s frightening. Honestly, I do try to get her to eat something other than grapes from time to time! Maybe this weekend she can spend some time “helping” Daddy build the garage.

For the past two weeks, Vancouver has been caught in the grips of an almost continuous streak of foggy days and nights. It’s like they’re filming a vampire movie here, and conspired with the weather gods to provide some ambiance. I keep cleaning my glasses, hoping that things will clear up, but alas, it’s beyond my reach. Brian and Aurora and I managed to escape briefly last weekend to go snowshoeing up at Mt. Cypress. It was incredible, to drive up and up the Upper Levels Highway until, suddenly, we broke free of the fog and emerged into blinding sunlight. I looked out over the eerily flat blanket of cloud and detected not a bit of the city below. It was as if Vancouver had been simply erased, or had never existed in the first place.

Our little sweetie has also recently come down with a mild cold, which has been cutting her already spare appetite, making her a little crankier and clingier, as well as giving her a low-grade fever for two days. We’ve recently grown fond of “Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood”, because he’s not too jumpy to follow when you’re a bit under the weather.

Before she got sick, though, Aurora achieved the impressive feat of walking, on her own, halfway to the Community Centre. It was about a block, and she is only interested in doing it on the way there, when we’re going toward the park/play gym, never going home. We probably wouldn’t even have thought to attempt it, but I’ve been carrying her short distances (under four blocks) lately instead of using the stroller, and sometimes she indicates that she’d rather be put down. Aurora seems to have quite a strong independent streak already, but I’ve read that toddlerhood is all about the push-and-pull between dependence and freedom.

Also, I’m happy to say, my camera lens has been repaired. I promise to try to take much better care of my expensive electronic gadgets from now on. I caught some shots of Aurora looking out the window (with the aid of a conveniently-placed footstool) for you to enjoy.

My project this month, part of the decluttering resolution, is to go through all the 100-odd cassette tapes I’ve saved and whittle them down to about 10, getting rid of the rest. (I also have to load all my CDs onto the computer and put them into books, thereby clearing the space all those cases took up on the mantle.) This probably sounds like a no-brainer to most people, but I find that I am oddly attached to my decades of tapes, and cannot part with them easily. The inevitable progress of consumer technology marches on, and I have to give up the cassettes, but I don’t have to feel good about it. I often wonder what Aurora’s outdated technology will be. Will she have trouble parting with her mp3s, or will she just convert them to some other digital format before downloading them permanently into a chip embedded behind her ear (God forbid)?

Some of the tapes are easy. Big Country, Paul Simon, The Beatles, U2, etc. are all on CD & mp3, so getting rid of the tapes was not a problem. Likewise, the crap tapes we never listen to were also easy to chuck. A few tapes, like the ones of my high school singing groups, are treasures that can’t be replaced. However, about two dozen tapes are mix tapes, with unique songs and good compilations. With those, I am trying to recreate them as playlists on iTunes, so I can listen to them for years to come. This involves finding all the songs, sometimes purchasing a few, and saving the collections in this new format. One song in particular, “Melting Blue Delicious,” by the Wild Swans, is eluding me, so if anyone has it, please let me know!

You might wonder what any of this has to do with Aurora, or why I’m including it on her blog. Partly, it’s because I’m in the process of making a radical change to our lifestyle, from cluttered and disorganized to clean and calm, and it’s what is currently occupying most of my free time these days. I think that living in a messy house makes me and Brian feel more frazzled, and I want us to be as calm and easygoing as possible around Aurora and each other. Do I think that Aurora is more likely to take naps in a Zen-like environment? Not really, but maybe I’ll be able to deal with it better!

Besides, until I get my camera back (probably Jan. 26th-29th) I’ve gotta post something other than Aurora pictures!