A Lesson On What Some Stuff Is

That is a deer.

This is a pillow.

This here is a book I like.

Those are some people I said 'hi' to earlier.

AND THIS IS A FORK OK?

She's like Bart Simpson in that episode where he is not smarter than a hamster.

Disclaimer: photos presented in the exact order they were taken.


Hey look, a lime.

OH THAT IS TERRIBLE.

Why would you be like that, lime?

Oh hey look, a lime.

Limes are good, right?

THIS IS A SADNESS FRUIT.

Oh hey look...

FOOL ME THRICE, LIME.

This butterfly is SOCIAL.

Eleanor has never really made strange, which is nice for me, especially three hours into a four-and-a-half hour flight when I am sick of her face and she is sick of BOTH OUR FACES and the couple behind us asks to hold her.

When we got her back half an hour later she looked at us like, Ugh, you guys again.

And Eleanor really loves to have people looking at her. It makes her grin, and then people grin back, and then she grins at them grinning and it's a downward spiral of grin and it makes taking the bus a lot of fun. So we'd be in the dining hall and she'd be flashing her teethies at people and they'd be like, Awww, and she'd be like SQUAWK and it was this torturous process to try to feed her because SHE WAS BUSY LOVING PEOPLE.

By, like, the third day she had amassed this fan club and everywhere we went we'd run into people who knew her name and wanted to hold her and exclaim over her in Spanish and kiss her fat cheeks.

And we'd go to the pool and the Mexican kids would gather around and chatter at Joel and I while they stroked Eleanor's arms and face and she was like, Yessssss, the adulation!

One day I was setting her down at the beach and she was like, Hi! Hi! Hi! over my shoulder because she'd spotted these two dumplings

whom she loved beyond all reason and who loved her and were always fighting over who got to let her hold their toy.

Now it's just the two of us, booting around Calgary in the snow, but she doesn't seem to mind.

Mexico in a nut shell. A taco shell? A sea shell.

So usually my vacation recaps go like 'And then we and then we and then we ATE and the next day we and then we ATE and then we' but this time around, every day looked pretty gloriously the same.

Eleanor would wake up around 8:30 because Puerto Vallarta is actually east of us and therefore earlier time-zone-wise, who knew, and we'd get dressed and go take forever to eat breakfast and then it would be time for her nap, and then I would read on the patio while Joel went boogie boarding or Joel would read on the patio while I did yoga on the beach or we would BOTH read on the patio while keeping a simultaneous eye out for the muchas iguanas who lived in our foliage.

And then Eleanor would wake up and we'd go to the pool or the beach and if it was the pool, she'd entertain the troops

and if it was the beach, she'd eat the sand. That child, you guys. No thanks on the watermelon, but sand is a salty treat.

And then we'd go have lunch and linger over our coffee until it was time for Eleanor's nap again and see, like, three paragraphs up. And then she'd wake up and if we'd already been to the beach, we'd go to the pool or vice versa, and then we'd go take forever over our dinner and then she'd go to bed and Joel and I would have drinks on the patio.

And there was no internet except in the lobby, so once a day we'd spin down there and let Eleanor free-range while we posted to our instagrams.

And our resort had a ZOO so on the way to and from meals we'd stop to say hi to the ostrich and the monkeys. And the palm trees. And the large boulder. Eleanor hasn't quite refined her 'hi' to things with faces. She scatters them wide and then, like, half the time they are socially appropriate.

Hi, sand!

It has long been a dream of Joel's to go Somewhere Hot In The Month Of November, Which Is The Month That Sucks For Many Reasons, Not The Least Of Which Is The Cold. Mexico was mad hot and tropical, and my poor skin, which has fared horribly in Calgary's dry outdoors and overheated indoors, felt plump and soft and not unlike the baby's. I am warm and flush and I cannot find my doldrums anywhere.

It was good, as vacations go.

A hodge-podge for you.

HAHAHA remember when I was going to post every day in November? THAT didn't happen. We went to Mexico, it turns out, and I was going to schedule a post every day we were gone but packing makes me weep so THEN I was just going to schedule this picture to post every day

because HAHA THAT FACE. It is a face she makes all the time now, for no reason, and we are like, what is up, face?

I will post more about Mexico later, prepare yourself for a lot of this

and an in-depth discussion of all the flan I ate (so much flan). For those of you who have been wondering how the Eleanor-Octopus relationship is playing out (Alice), I am both the worst mother and the most brilliant. We have that plastic stuff on our patio windows that you stick on and then hair-dry and it shrinks and insulates your house and Eleanor loves nothing, NOTHING more than to try to peel off the edges, and the more I'm like, Don't do that, the more she's like HAHA I'M DOING IT so I set a guard

and now she doesn't dare.

Exposure therapy.

Some of you may remember Eleanor's octopus from these, also known as My Favorite Ever, pictures:

Ugh, it's like she WANTS me to put captions under her and then post them to the internet.

ANYway, the octopus' legs hoot when you squeeze them and I think at one point I hooted them when she wasn't expecting it and now she has this crazy love/fierce distrust relationship with the octopus. He lives on the bottom shelf with a blanket over him, because for a while there she couldn't stand to be left in the same room as him if she could see him, and the other day she was exploring the room and pulled the blanket off and it was every bit as hilarious as I expected it to be.

So now he lives on the bottom shelf with NO blanket, and she won't go near him without me right there so she can climb me when she is overcome with fright, but she also won't leave him alone. She's always crawling over to where she can stare at him.

Today I was like, JUST KISS ALREADY and picked her up and plunked her down in front of him

and she was immediately like, Oh crap

Is he coming?

Oh crap

and she's grinning in that last one because, while she both fears and hates him, she also loves him. She is having a great and terrible time. It's complex. Anyway, we got to about here

and the stove buzzer went off, which is something else she doesn't trust, and the combination of the two was too much for her and now she's gone off the octopus again.

Next up: opposable thumbs.

Eleanor has found her third hand.

This frees her other two hands up to play with things, or transport her places.

She will show you how it's done.

Her feet have a secret life.

Remember when she used to fall asleep in my lap all the time?

I'm not really going anywhere with this, I was just having a bit of a reminisce.

Hahhaha, what a ridiculous face, that face.

Anyway. When I put socks and/or boots on Eleanor, she waves her feet around for the next half hour like, LOOK AT THESE HILARIOUS THINGS ON MY FEET. And then when I take the boots off when we get home, she gets all intense about her feet because where have you guys been.

She spends a lot of her life excited about SOMEthing.

She does this thing with her feet when she gets excited, where her toes all curl in together, and I didn't have any pictures of it because usually I am doing the thing she's excited about, or I am also excited and therefore distracted. But mom was feeding her and she was doing her curly toes and I whipped out my camera and she stopped and started doing her flaily legs instead, which is cute in motion but hard to get a feel for on camera.

But then my dad came in the room and started TALKING! TO! HER! and she was like,

It's like her feet are going EEEEEEEEEEE!

And then she does this thing with her hands when she gets excited where it's like she's telling you a story and you're laughing and she's like, Just wait, just wait,

only usually SHE'S the one laughing, and these hands happen a lot in the bath because the bath gets her JAZZED.

And then there are, of course, her Excited Legs.

They are like eager drumsticks.

Pretend that I blogged yesterday, too.

We're teaching Eleanor baby-sign-language because she's started to Hnnnnnn! at us when she wants something, and it's not cute. I've never met a baby that's actually able to manage the sign for 'more' right off the bat, but it's usually some sort of index-finger tapping or hand-flailing. Eleanor's looks like this:

It's so precious I could PUNCH something. She does it when she wants more food, or to be picked up, or whatever you have in your hand. And when it's something she's really into, like beets, she just clasps and clasps and clasps her hands in this adorably frantic hand-wringing.

Pretend I posted yesterday, ok?

Oh. Hullo, November. Isn't this the month where I post every day? Good start, me.

I'm in Vancouver visiting the fam, only we've all been down with the flu, and it's not the achy, grouching around in your sweatpants type of flu, it's the weeping, full-body vomiting, Lavinia-Swire-dying-of-Spanish-flu, several days of recovery before you can walk down the hall without fainting type of flu. We've had to cancel so many fun things, including lunch with my ladies, and dinner with my grandpa, whose 92nd birthday it is, and trick-or-treating with Felix, and eating anything delicious.

The only bright spot in all of this is that, though all three of us have been rolling on the floor, begging for death, we've mostly been doing it one at a time, so there have always been two of us conscious to keep an eye on a very healthy, very happy dragon.

Lookit her go.