Q: Why is Halloween unnecessary for toddlers?

A: Because every day is dress up day!

Pumpkins!

Or, "punks" as Carter likes to call them.
(Mandi - I always miss you when we carve pumpkins!)

New School

Carter starts his new school the first week of November. We went twice this week for about an hour to get him acclimated, and we'll do the same twice next week. The first day he was very clingy, but the second day was much better. On the first day, we took a bunch of photos, and we looked at them and talked about them before the second day, so I think that helped some.

The school is less than a mile from our house and they serve children 6-weeks through pre-K (state-funded pre-K, I might add). There are three classrooms of Carter's age group, the "older toddlers". He is in the "Rainforest" room with 12 other kids that are anywhere from two months older to six months younger than him. All three of his teachers seem very nice, as do the administrators we have met.

In the reception area, they have a fish tank and a bird, which families can sign up to take home for the weekend. When we got there yesterday, someone had apparently already picked up the bird for the weekend. Carter immediately ran to the empty table where the bird cage usually sits, pointed and started yelling, "Oh no! Oh no!" I expect we'll be taking the bird home for a weekend soon.

The sand table in the classroom

Trying out the pint-sized potty

He loved the rocking horses

And, of course, the playground

Speech

Those of you who have kids, or know kids, or read blogs about people who have kids may have noticed the lack of pithy blog entries about the funny things that Carter says. This isn't because Carter isn't funny. We think he's very funny. It's just that he doesn't say much.

Ever since his 15-month check up, Carter has been toward the low end of the verbal spectrum, and we've been waiting for the burst of verbal activity that every doctor since then has told us was just around the corner. Shortly after his 2-year checkup, we decided to get him evaluated. While he isn't that far off of where he should be--and we do think that he just has more interest in gross motor development (the kid can climb a rock wall)--he has recently started to become frustrated (and we have, too) by his inability to express himself in a way that we understand. So, we've found him a speech therapist, and he started with her this week.

His speech therapist, who he calls La-La (perhaps you graduate from speech therapy when you can pronounce your therapist's name properly?), seems terrific. She takes a very holistic approach, so in addition to vocal and mouth exercises, Carter is now getting a nightly full body massage with organic coconut oil (wish I could get someone to prescribe that for me) and we'll likely be starting him on fish oil supplements soon. So far (they've had two sessions), Carter LOVES her, loves the 'games' that they play and is amazingly on-task during their work. Unfortunately, he's less inclined to do his homework with us, but that's to be expected. One of the techniques La-La is using with him is sign language. Now that we know Carter is better at expressing himself physically than verbally, we are really wishing that we'd given baby sign language more of chance (I'm pretty sure we gave up on it after about 2 weeks when he was 8 months old), but, cest la vie...

Carter will be meeting with La-La weekly for the foreseeable future. One thing that is helping make that possible is that we are moving Carter into a daycare center in November. We are very sad to be leaving our terrific nanny, but there are lots of benefits of the new school, most of which I won't go into now, but the relevant one is that La-La already works with some other kids in the school. She will pull him out of class to do his therapy on-site, which means that we don't have to take off work every week for it, which is very helpful! It also means that she'll be able to talk directly with his teachers about how they can help him, and she said she'd probably do a session or two in his class to both model for his teachers the things that they can do to help him, and also to allow Carter to show off what he's learning.

I'll do another post in a day or two with more details about the new school and some pictures!

Chilly Weather

It has started to cool off here in Atlanta, and here are some pics to prove it.

Carter, sporting a stripey sweater and a scarf that he picked out to go with it (it is by no means actually scarf weather)

Morning blanket snuggles

Blue Food

I have been known to go a little crazy with food coloring in my quest for more blue/purple/etc foods. I like a good green milk or a teal yogurt. But when Thomas and I make shepherd's pie this weekend, we didn't even have to get out the artificial color. We used a mixed bag of fingerling potatoes that we had in the pantry that included blue/purple potatoes.
Eating weird color foods is just more fun! Someday, I am going to make Carter some rainbow pasta with my pasta maker...

Baby

Ever since Anna came along, Carter has been crazy for babies. Sometimes he wants to be treated like one, but mostly, he likes to play with them--both the human and doll varieties. His favorite baby doll is Eli Daniel, my brother's old Cabbage Patch Preemie. For a while, the only way we could convince Carter to get dressed was if we would dress Eli Daniel too. Finding that Carter's clothes were much too big (and that it is very annoying to have to dress a baby doll 100+ times a day) we got a few newborn things out of the basement, so that Eli Daniel has his own wardrobe.

Here is a picture of Carter giving Eli Daniel a very sweet kiss (we wish he were always so gentle with babies of the human variety).

Bounty

We recently finished up our first CSA contract, and we convinced Park and Ashley (okay, mostly Ashley) to go in on a full share with us this time around. Now we get twice the goodness! Sure, we only keep half of it, but it's still exciting to pick up this much loot every week.

Santa Scramble

I stayed up until midnight last night in order to make Carter an appointment to see Santa at Phipps Mall - supposedly the best place to see Santa in Atlanta. Now, I'm not overly concerned about going to the best place, but I was highly excited by the prospect of making an appointment and thus avoiding the torturous wait in line. Carter has never actually been to see Santa because we felt that if he wasn't old enough to understand it, we weren't waiting in line, at a mall, in December. This year, we figure he's old enough, plus, we heard about these appointments.

I was skeptical that staying up and waiting until the online appointment system opened at 12:01am was really necessary. Come on, I could probably do it this morning and be fine. But I really wanted the first appointment on a Saturday, and I was mildly interested in all the fuss (chalk it up to another social experiment in being a mom), so I stuck it out until midnight. I had no trouble getting an appointment, and the system even let me on a few minutes early. So... was staying up necessary?

My late night is justified. I checked first thing this morning and almost every single weekend appointment is already booked - even the ones in early November! The email confirmation for our appointment included this note: "Any appointments found to be sold or placed on ebay will be cancelled immediately."

We'll be reporting back in 2 months to let you know if its worth all the fuss!

Update: An article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution on Thursday said that 1,400 appointments were made in the first 45 minutes.

Recent pictures

Here are a few recent pictures that I am not even going to try to explain...