By Jason
I’m getting some fun video clips of Athena with my phone, so here’s another video-heavy post.
The weather never gets really bad in our part of California so despite the extra rain we’ve had lately we’ve been able to head to the park on weekends. Here’s more swinging, and a few escape attempts:
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| From Jan and Feb 2010 |
This is a video I’ve been meaning to get for a while – Athena is an extremely good climber (a bit more on that later, too). At the playground she regularly finds her way up on things that older kids don’t dare to attempt. Here you can watch her make it all the way to the top of the slides with Ann just spotting:
With one of us at top to keep her from jumping off and one at the bottom to prevent tumbles, Athena can even go down the slide by herself:
Here’s Athena playing with her toy laptop. She used to just mash the keys, but now she’s much more particular about what she presses. The lcd screen has a really poor viewing angle so she’s picking it up so she can see. I tried to show her how to change the angle but according to her it must be opened all the way.
Her favorites are the letter D, which elicits an excited “Duck!”, and the letter M, which shows a mouse for Athena to “squeak” at.
The weekend before last we went to Cupertino Square Mall and I let Ann do some shopping while I chased Athena around. Her first obsession was the escalators, so we rode them up and down about 10 times before I was able to carry her far enough away that she forgot how to get back to them. It was at that point she found the coin-op rides, obsession number 2. Her favorite was the bulldozer, clearly superior in her eyes to the pony, corvette, and spaceship. Personally I thought the spaceship was pretty cool. I plunked down the $0.50 for the ride but She really seemed to enjoy it more when it wasn’t running:
Later we ran up and down a big ramp to JC Penny until the little decathlete was exhausted. She was pretty well-behaved in the store when we went to meet back up with Ann, even handing me some fallen clothes hangers to hang back up.
The other new thing in our little girl’s life is class at The Little Gym. She and the other “birdies”, the youngest group, meet every Saturday morning for activities to build their coordination, listening, physical confidence, and independence. She has no problem with the latter two – she can always be found pushing on the door to get into the gym before class starts and spends most of the class running around the space and climbing on things. Ann and I were a little worried about it in the first class, but the teacher made a point of saying that any kids wandering around exploring on their own should be encouraged and that she would start participating more as she saw us doing the activities. She does love two of the activities, the big parachute and the bubble machine.
I don’t have any video from the gym uploaded yet, I’ll have to get some. Athena absolutely loves it. Last week she scaled a climbing wall, again with Ann just spotting. It was inclined, and only maybe five feet of climbing, but still – she’s only 14 months.
One more story I have to share, apologies if you’ve already heard this one in person but it really is remarkable. Periodically in her feats of daring-do Athena will fall off of something and get hurt before Ann or I can get to her. At that point (after making sure she’s alright and whatnot) we generally take the attractive nuisance away so she won’t be tempted to make another attempt.
Athena has figured this out. So now, when she falls off of something, the first thing she does is check to see if Ann and I are watching. If we are, she wills herself not to cry, pacing around the room with this “I’m okay, nothings wrong!!” look on her face. She’s not suppressing crocodile tears – I saw her take a face plant off one of the small stools and it must have really hurt. Since I had run over to try to catch her she gritted her teeth and just refused to cry about it.
What kind of 14-month-old kid does this? Athena is extremely strong-willed, in everything, whether it’s scaling furniture or refusing to eat. It’s fantastic but also terrifying, especially when she decides she doesn’t want milk for days on end. We’ve been very consistent in ignoring tempter tantrums so she hasn’t started throwing a lot of them, thank goodness, but I’m a little afraid my kid is already tougher than me.
One thing I know for sure, is this kid has quite a life ahead of her. No one’s going to stop her.
One last fun picture:
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| From Jan and Feb 2010 |