Noni, Top Chef

Lately I've had a helper in the kitchen. Whether she's stirring a pot of red lentil soup or flattening some pizza dough, Noni has taken a sudden interest in cooking. If I'm making a recipe that is too complicated for a three-year-old helper (she still has some work to do on cracking eggs), we pull her plastic kitchen set into the hall and she keeps me company by coming up with her own make-believe creations while I cook.

I give Monica Wellington the credit for Noni's newfound interest. Wellington is the author of a series of books about young entrepreneurs and many of them are in the business of making and selling food. Whether we're reading about Suzette selling crepes or Annie selling apples or Sally selling pizzas, Noni loves her stories.

You can check out the recipes from her books on her website (click here). Noni's favorite is the pizza recipe, which we altered only slightly by using 1/2 whole wheat flour and adding olive oil.

If you have a little chef in your own kitchen, I suggest you check out Wellington's books.

Chef Noni in her apron

Discovering the Already Discovered

One of Evie and Lucy's favorite games is a game we call guess-that-animal. One of us thinks of an animal and then can only answer yes or no to questions about the animal. The girls have gotten fairly efficient at guessing--Is it bigger than a cat? Does it live in the ocean? Does it have fur?--and better at thinking of more exotic animals, although Evie, who carries around her Guide to Colorado Birds on every camping trip, is banned from thinking of any birds after stumping us with a double-crested cormorant and marbled godwit.

Noni usually sits and listens to us as we play, but today at lunch she asked me if I wanted to play guess-that-animal with her. Only she had a slightly different take on the game.

Noni: Okay, I'm going to pick an elephant and you guess what animal it is.

Me: ....

Noni: So guess!

Me: An elephant?

Noni: No! You can't guess for it like that!

Me: Okay, a monkey?

Noni (smiling): No

Me: A llama?

Noni: No

Me: An elephant!
Noni: That's right! You got it!

We then took turns "guessing" each other's animal, but always had to let the other person know up front which animal we were thinking about.

As we played, I had to resist the urge to tell Noni that her version didn't make sense. I realized that really it just didn't make sense to me. I thought back to a day at the reservoir a couple of weeks ago. Noni and her friend Ami decided to play hide-and-seek. Ami counted first and I helped Noni to hide under the towel. To her delight, Ami immediately found her. Then it was Noni's turn to count and Ami, of course, hid under the towel again. This went on for several turns until I asked the girls if they wouldn't like to mix it up a bit and hide somewhere different. Noni looked at me like I was crazy and probably would have rolled her eyes if she knew how. Then she and Ami looked at each other and both yelled "No!" at the same time. They were perfectly happy with their own version of the game.

At three, Noni is in discovery mode all day long. Just today, she has asked me why apples have skin, how to get up a really tall mountain, and why she has to wash her hands before lunch. The games she's playing, whether hide-and-seek or guess-that-animal, are new enough to her as it is without needing to add the element of surprise that older children enjoy. And so, without judgement, I'm off to play another game of guess-that-animal with Noni. By the way, I'm thinking of a bear.

Rookie Parenting Move

I've learned a few things in my eight and a half years of parenting. For example...

- Don't leave permanent markers anywhere within reach. (And by "within reach" I mean able to be reached with a chair, a pile of blocks and tip-toes.)

- Don't let juice boxes, and especially kids with juice boxes, anywhere near your computer.

- Don't think that giving your kid a big pile of stickers to make a car ride easier is actually going to make your life easier. You definitely won't think so when you're still scraping stickers off the mini-van windows years later.

- And then, of course, there's the totally obvious parenting rule: Never, ever buy character Band-Aids. Because you know what? If your kid is hurt, a flesh colored Band-Aid and a kiss will do just fine. And the character ones? Will be gone.

Look at me Mom!

What? Oh, yeah, of course it's the whole box.

Toby's tagline for this photo: Busted but totally unrepentant

You know you're child is two when...

...you think it might be a good idea to take a break from cooking and cleaning and eat out. Instead, you leave the restaurant exhausted, covered in food, and wondering if you'll ever be allowed to eat there again. And to top it off, you didn't even taste the food because you ate it like you were a contestant in Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest.

...you decide to buy a new t-shirt because all the other t-shirts have stains on them from attempts at eating out. As you stand in your bra in the Target changing room, she slips under the door and takes off running. You grab for anything to cover you up so you can catch her because you're sure that today's the day all the kidnappers have come out to check out sales at Target. You follow her giggles and finally catch her, all the way across the store.

... she enjoys turning the LeapPad on over and over again just so that she can keep saying to it, "No, I won't press the green Go button!"

... her favorite show is Sponge Bob. (Oh, wait, that probably doesn't belong on this list. But hey, this two-year-old we're talking about is the third child and she basically doesn't pull much weight when it comes to TV remote control decisions. At first I was worried that it wasn't an educational show, but now I just figure she's learning to have a wicked sense of humor.)

... you ask her sisters, "Where's Noni?" and you hear a devilish giggle from the other room. You find her in the bathroom with all of the dental floss wrapped around her already marker-covered body. (Perhaps the wicked sense of humor isn't such a good idea.)

... you snuggle up in bed with her every night to read her stories and then she asks you to stay until she is "warm and cozy". Your heart breaks because three is next and, really, two is such a wonderful age.

For the girl on the go....

Last week, Noni potty trained herself. Just like that. I had put a potty in her room, next to her crib, a couple of weeks before, thinking that maybe at some point she'd take an interest in sitting on it and then we could go from there. I wasn't going to push it anytime soon. The memories of potty training with her sisters were still too fresh - we covered the entire bathroom wall with sticker charts for Evie and spent over a year offering pretty much any kind of bribe you can think of to Lucy. I won't even go into all of the cleaning and detergents we went through during that time, but you can understand if I wasn't enthused at the idea of jumping into it again. But in the typical Noni fashion, she just walked over to the potty one day and went. This resulted in Evie and Lucy covering her in hugs and high-fives while I walked around in shock for the day thinking, did that just happen? Just like that? Noni seemed confused as to why we were all making such a fuss. To her, going on the potty was like jumping in the pool and trying to swim "no help! no help!" or walking up onto the stage at Evie's drama camp and giving a heartfelt rendition of Annie's "Tomorrow". She just assumes that if her sisters can do it, she should be able to as well. It's more surprising to her if she can't.

We've had a couple of accidents, but only a few days into it and she's already about 90% of the way there. After breathing a huge sigh of relief, it suddenly occurred to me that this wasn't perhaps the best timing. We're going back east for two weeks in August and attempting public restrooms in the airport or trying to teach her to balance on a real toilet just isn't happening.

What to do? Introducing Fisher Price's "Potty-on-the-Go", which arrived in the mail today from amazon.com. On our trip, Noni will have her very own little tote bag, complete with a potty and wipes. To the mom out there who invented this: Thank you! Now if you could only invent a soundproof cage to put around our airplane seats, we'd be good to go.

One Liners

It occurred to me recently that if I should save some of my Facebook status updates in order to remember some of the cute things the girls do that I write about only there. This will be boring for 99% of you since you've read it already in your Newsfeeds, but since the idea of a physical memory book just makes me laugh at this point, these entries are for the girls to read in about 10 years or so. I wish that Facebook would make that a feature on their site. It'd be cool to have a running one-liner diary/blog where you just keep all of your status updates. Instead Facebook decided to update themselves in a way that does absolutely nothing for the user, but that's probably another entry in itself. At any rate, I thought this was pretty cute last night:

Kita Murdock is listening to Noni "read" her Babar book to herself. "Elephants. More elephants. More elephants. More elephants..."

Remembering

"The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones..."
- Billy Collins

When Lucy was three, Evie was learning about silent vowels in school. She had overheard us talking about them and one day she lay down on the floor and twisted around in a way that looked nothing like an "E" and announced to me, "Look, I'm an E!" I looked skeptical and told her I didn't quite see it. "Well mommy," she said patiently, "That's because I'm a silent E."

I love that story because it is quintessential Lucy, but the only reason I remember it is that today I looked through my old Yahoo blog, a blog where I occasionally jotted down a story or two about the girls just for the purpose of remembering them. It's funny how many stories we have like that about our kids - stories that we can't imagine forgetting, but that are soon replaced in our brains by something entirely mundane like a grocery list. There are so many things I swear I'll remember even as time goes by - the way they say certain words, the expressions that they make - but often they blend together with other memories so that can't remember which girl did what. My friend Natasha sent me the Billy Collins poem I quoted above today and it inspired me to write down a couple things that the girls have done recently that I want to remember before they head off to that fishing village in my brain.

I want to remember how Noni says "no" for yes. I'm wondering if this will ever change, since it completely works for her. Toby, Lucy, Evie and I all know that if she responds to "Do you want a banana?" with a "no" in a slightly Canadian accent, she means yes. If she shakes her head or yells, "NO!", she actually means it.

At 17 months, she's also at that stage where she can say a lot of words, but most of them are indecipherable to people outside her family. "S" is generally pronounced as a "D" such as "dower" and "doap". Her favorite song is "happy birthday" (Yes, now I can actually say I know her favorite song! See October's blog entry: "Noni, part time model") and she regularly sings it to anyone. She doesn't quite have the words down, it's more about the tune. It's also nothing a million babies haven't done before - Mozart was probably playing "happy birthday" on the piano by the time he was her age - but we still find it so brilliant and cute that we make her sing it over and over again.

Another thing we make her repeat over and over again is her animal noises. The girls love going through the list with her and get frustrated when Noni tires of it before they do. They'll sit next to her in the back of the car asking over and over, "C'mon Noni, what's an owl say? An owl? I know you know it. An owl?" Speaking of animal noises, the other day I found her sitting on top of our poor tortured cat yelling, "Neigh, cat, neigh!"

Probably what Noni says most of all though is, "Wa Dada?" ("Where's dada?"). She started this one night at dinner when Toby wasn't home yet.
Noni: "Wa Dada?"
Evie, Lucy or I: "At work."
Noni: "Oooooh."
She did this so many times that it started to be funny. Eventually we just laughed when she asked. Now she will ask it again and again just to get a laugh.

With Lucy, I want to remember her skipping down the road when we went camping in Malibu the other weekend. She skipped and ran on ahead of us until she came to a fork in the road. At that point, she turned around and yelled back to us, "Which way do I go?!"
"Right!" Toby yelled back.
She paused a minute. And then, "Which way is right?!"

I also want to remember the way Lucy can be overly candid without even realizing it. The other day, I convinced her to talk to her grandmother on the phone for her birthday. Usually she is reluctant to get on the phone, but once she started talking, she chatted on and on for about half an hour. Then suddenly, in the middle of the conversation, she asked, "Gram, how much longer do I have to keep talking?" Fortunately her grandmother found this hilarious. Again, I just love how it was so typically Lucy.

As for Evie, she's entered a new stage where she's not as likely to say something that is funny because it is such a different, purely child-like interpretation of the world, but she is young enough (and hopefully always will be) to have kept that same level of enthusiasm for life. When I think of her at this age, I'll remember her dancing the pata-pata for Nid and Tiggy at Tiggy's house, spending hours creating something (anything - a cardboard house for a Littlest Petshop, thank you letters for the Troll at Peek's house, or, as I write this, a complicated snack made from graham crackers, peanut butter, raisins, Cheerios, sugar and cinnamon), playing an imaginary game with friends in the tree house or pulling up her knee socks as high as they can go and urging me to hurry up because we might be late for school.

There are a few things that I will gladly release to that fishing village part of my brain - the hours of constant cleaning (see snack mentioned above), the nights of not sleeping, the frustration that comes with tantrums and talking back. But for all the good stuff, I'm glad that I have this blog to help me remember the things that are too important to forget.

Number 3

“Three, it’s a magic number.“ - Jack Johnson

My friend Joanna is the youngest of three girls. She once told me that she found three scrapbooks at her mom’s house, each with a name of one of the girls on the front. She opened her oldest sister’s album. It was full of pictures and notes about first words and first steps. Her middle sister’s album wasn’t quite as complete, but there were still a good amount of pictures in it. She came to her album and it opened with a resounding crack. It was the first time that it had ever been opened. She was horrified that her mom could forget her, though she said that once she had children of her own this horror turned into understanding. I listened to her and put my hand protectively on my pregnant belly and vowed that our third daughter would have a scrapbook of her own.

On June 22, 2007, Noelle Bethea came into the world. After three years of waiting, I couldn’t believe she had finally arrived. Two miscarriages had lead me to believe we would never have another healthy baby, but “Noni” was the picture of health - she skipped the scrawny newborn stage altogether and came into the world with chubby cheeks and a perfectly round belly. I spent the first two days of her life in the hospital with her, talking to her, nursing her and trying to soak her all in.

On the third day of her life, the hurricane of her two sisters arrived. Chatting a mile a minute, they burst into the room and announced they were there to take us home. Toby picked up Noni in his arms and I thought, “Goodbye little baby, it was nice to know you!”
That’s a little dramatic of course. She basically didn’t leave my sight or my arms for months, but I really felt her more than I saw her. She was the pleasant warm weight that I carried around as I rushed to soccer, school, brownies, gymnastics and ballet. She fell asleep in the car, in the stroller, in my arms, but was often awakened to be dragged elsewhere and rarely saw the inside of her crib. She listened to me help her sister with homework or read to her older sisters, but rarely did I talk directly to her. Her first year went by in a blur that, frankly, I barely remember.

This year, for the first time since that hospital room, she and I have some time alone together. For four hours a day, five days a week, her sisters head off to school and it’s just the two of us. Granted, most of that time is spent at the grocery store or Target or vacuuming the house. But, without being interrupted, I am able to teach her new words by pointing out the different fruits and vegetables to her and she has her own little vacuum that goes alongside mine.

Being a third child has definitely affected her personality. At least once an hour, during our mornings together, she rushes to the door saying “Yoosh, Yoosh”, imploring me to get Lucy from school. When she falls, she’s just as likely to ask for “Edie, Edie” as for “Mama”. Her sisters are influencing her life at least as much as Toby and I are. While her life is often chaotic, this is the benefit of being the third child - she has a lot of people to learn from and to love.

Fifteen months later, I still don’t have that scrapbook. But, times have changed a little. I do have hundreds of photos of her on Flickr and a blog to help record her childhood. So Noni, if you are reading this thirty years from now, I’m sorry I never made you an album. And, yes, you did get lost in the fray from time to time. But never doubt that we have always loved you very, very much.