Eleanorisms

We went camping this weekend and it was SPLENDID but I don't have the energy to get into it now so here are some things Eleanor is up to these days.

When she's running away from you (because she doesn't want to go to bed, because she's naked and it's hilarious, etc), she hollers, 'HEY YOU,' like she's the one chasing you.

She refers to tree-lined streets (of which there are many in our neighborhood) as 'tree-tunnels.'

She has started calling them 'bananas' instead of just 'nanas,' but she has also switched to calling pandas 'panandas.' I'm not going to correct her.

There are lots of things I don't correct her on. I always believed in encouraging proper pronunciation in your children, but then I HAD one, and her diction is so good in most things that I think it's MARVELOUS that she calls a dinosaur a 'why-saur' or a butterfly a 'futterly,' and when Joel taught her that it was 'bathtub' and not 'tathbub,' I corrected her back later.

Anything more than three is a lot ('LOT puppies! Looooooot trucks') because three is as high as she can count.

When she's telling you something that she's serious or excited about, she leans in and nods and makes this face:

She makes this face a lot.

What do you guys want to talk about?

OOOH, let's talk about my garden. This is my little baby orphan tomato plant. I rescued him from the discount bin for a dollar.

He's tiny, and his leaves look terrible because the potato bugs love HIM AND ONLY HIM. Here is one of my other tomato plants for comparison.

Both my other tomato plants looked like the orphan one at first, but they are getting out of hand. I also have two cherry tomato plants, and any time we even WALK THROUGH the backyard, Eleanor wants to 'pick matoes.'

I have a weird number of hot pepper plants, which I mostly don't use, and which I only bought because I was planting late in the season and didn't have a lot of options. Maybe I'll pickle them, and put them on pizzas later. We grab some kale probably every other day, making it the second-most used and easily the MOST BEAUTIFUL of my plants.

I bought a snail to put in the garden because obviously, and I just sort of plopped him in the squash plant thinking I might move him later. But now I can't.

Maybe it's because I'm from the city, but it still boggles my mind that you put dead, dry things in the ground and then food comes out of it.

Her day was goat-centric.

What's fun about when your kids start talking is that you get to see inside their heads and find out what parts of the day stick in there.

I brought up the fair today, and about how Eleanor rode a pony and ate a donut, and she thought for a minute and said, GOAT! And I was like, Yes, you patted a goat. And she was like, 'hniff, 'hniff, 'hniff, and sort of waved her hand at her neck, and I was like, Yes, he sniffed you in the neck.

And then she looked at me all appalled and was like, Skirt. And I was like, YES, he DID try to eat my skirt.

And then she shuddered and sort of patted me on the thigh, like, There there.

It's the only way she gets fed around here.

I always said that Joel was the best person to cook for because he's not picky and will eat whatever, even if it goes awry or is just pasta and sauce (or is pasta and sauce and goes awry), but he's also INTERESTED in food and has OPINIONS and likes trying new and wacky things..

Eleanor is turning out to be sort of like this also. She's one and a half, so obviously she gets stubborn and capricious around food sometimes, but OTHER times, she tips back her head and goes Ahhhmm nm nnnnm.

Mmmmmnummumm.

Yahhhmy.

It makes me want to cook for her always.

Eleanor Goes To The Fair (or, This Is Why I Had a Child)

Eleanor rides a pony.

Eleanor pats a goat.

Eleanor flees a large, belligerent sheep.

Eleanor pats a smaller, more phlegmatic sheep.

Eleanor watches the superdogs jump fences.

Eleanor pats a superdog.

Eleanor shares a bucket of fries with her daddy.

Eleanor rides a cow and makes motorcycle sounds.

Eleanor has her first mini donut, and immediately plots how she can get more.

Eleanor drives a fire truck.

Eleanor gets a paramedics tattoo from the paramedics.

Eleanor gets a slew of mardi gras beads from a couple of ten-year-old boys.

Eleanorus Rex falls asleep on the way home.

Non-stop fests.

This is exactly what we're loving about Saskatoon. We hopped on our bikes today after dinner to check out this place called Calories, which apparently has great desserts.

On the advice of a friend, I got the shmoo tart, which I would NOT have gotten otherwise, but which was so far up my alley it has real estate there. 

It was a light, fluffy cake with whipped cream and caramelized pecans. Eleanor was also a fan.

We noticed, when we pulled up, that there was a FRINGE FESTIVAL going on outside, so after our desserts we walked the streets a bit to check out the aura readers and bratwurst sellers and puppies

and dancers. This one troupe was just these three girls and their teacher twirling, twirling, twirling on a rug for a whole song.

Like, they didn't even change direction. Eleanor is an easy critic, however.

We like it here.

Errrebody ALL WET.

After a certain number of hours you're supposed to bring your bike back in to have things tightened up, so we biked down to the Bike Doctor this morning in suspicious weather. We went for chili fries while we waited, and by the time we got back to pick my bike up, it was pouring.

Pictures of chili fries still on phone. Accept instead this picture of Eleanor solemnly eating deli soup.

It poured on us while I hooked the trailer back up, it poured on us while I got Eleanor in her helmet and got her belts done up, it poured on us all the way home. I could hear Eleanor back there the entire ride talking about all the things that had gotten all wet. 'Mama all wet. Mama bike all wet. Eleanor all wet. Eleanor pants all wet. Eleanor grey shoes all wet. Eleanor helmet all wet. Mama helmet all wet.'

What she's saying is, everything got all wet.

Like this, but not on purpose.

The guy at the bike shop had been like, I wonder how long it will last! Probably the fifteen minutes it takes us to bike home, I said. We pulled up to our garage mid-monsoon, but by the time I'd gotten Eleanor out of the trailer and spread everything out to dry, the rain had stopped completely.

We should have dawdled over our chili fries.

These are going to be useless when we return to BC: Land of a Thousand Hills

Chicklets! Hello. We have been OUTRAGEOUSLY busy. Did I mention that we got bikes? WE GOT BIKES. Saskatoon is, after all, so flat.

Eleanor doesn't look like she's enjoying herself here, but she's mostly just miffed that we stopped.

See? She loves it. I don't take her out on the handlebar chair because I am not a confident cyclist (this is an extreme understatement) so we got a chariot (not, like, a Chariot chariot, because those are a thousand dollars, but an off-brand chariot. The costco chariot) and I haul her around town in that.

Having bikes has opened up our evening activities. Sometimes we hop on after dinner and scoot down to the double-decker bus for ice cream.

We also happen to live nearish a great gelato place.

Don't let the appearance fool you, although we first went there because it looked like a total dive, and that's the sort of thing I dig. Their noodles are also great, but their gelato was featured on CBC.

Eleanor concurs.

Last night we biked down to River Landing, which is a longish walk (you have to be walking it for the exercise, which Josie and I do [we also walk it for the chats]) and there's no good parking. It's a quick bike ride along the water, though, and they leave the splash park on late.

Today we were on our way back to that same splash park when we saw balloons and be-festooned trucks and a giant tomato with legs, so obviously we changed our plans and found the beginning of the parade. We got there just in time to settle down and pet some Eleanor-sized puppies

before we were beset by marching bands and fire trucks and horses.

But Eleanor's favorite was easily this troupe of dancing girls.

Hi, dancing girls!

The parade was only half an hour long, so we hopped back on our bike and made it to the park after all.

Splash splash.