New Stuff, New Skills

Clio is a little obsessed with citrus fruits, and lately the special focus is on grapefruits, primarily because of the very cool thing that happens when you squeeze them: you get juice. She likes to do this herself, although frankly, she's not quite strong enough to get much of a result, so she ends up asking me to "help oo" (the catch all for "help me" which obviously comes from my overbearing penchant to ask "should I help you?") Luckily for me, she has not yet asked to drink the juice itself. She has, however, discovered that if you squeeze other fruits, like blueberries, they do not produce juice in such a nice, streamlined way.

Other favorites around the house these days include "colors" aka drawing, and "ABCs" aka playing with the magnetic alphabet on the fridge. My favorite local toy store, Romp, is consolidating to just a website, and at the resultant sale in the brick-and-mortar store I scored a beautiful easel and lovely painted wooden magnets, both at a discount. The easel was still really a splurge, but it's worth it every time she uses it- which is often. (It's a total bonus that we don't have to set her up in her high chair at the table every time she wants "colors.") We don't actually have the right size pad of paper yet, but both her white board and these giant flip-pads (left over from Dave's old job) do the trick for now.

One funny thing about the easel is our relationship to its height. Because it's made for people Clio's size, I often end up sitting on the ground when she asks me to draw with her. then, being a toddler and therefore a mimic, Clio will sit down with me, so she can no longer reach the paper. With the oversized Staples pad, she can't reach the top; being obsessed with this stool (see A Chair of One's Own, TV Monster, and various other posts), she has ingeniously incorporated it into her artistic practice. Now when she tells me to draw a diamond "up there." she can climb up and color it in (by which I mean scribble all over the shape and the surrounding several inches).


When it comes to the magnets, Clio has a thing for the As, Bs, Os, and Ws. She'll pick out a W and say. "Hi, W!" She'll pair all the Os together and count them. And earlier today, when we were leaving a playdate at Statia and Zoe's house, where the front door is populated by a magnetic alphabet, Clio waved to it, saying "bye bye ABCs."