Careful? What's that?

I don't know if she will ever understand the word, quite frankly.

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And yes, she's fine, she got up giggling.

Ah, the joy of being 2

This is my sweet, caring, silly child:

For some reason, she has decided that I am the best thing in the world and much of the time insists that I be the one to take care of her.  This isn't always possible and Jenni usually gets the brunt of it.  Posting by request, this is said child angry because I went to pick up pizza without her:

Perhaps a mistake on my part

Took the child to Michael's for some black Friday shopping.  (Note to self: don't do this in the future.  People be crazy.)  Gwen and I have been there once before and we determined that it is the "stuff store".  She asks me "what's that?" and the only thing I can respond with is "stuff" since I have absolutely no idea what anything is. 

Jenni went off to do her shopping so Gwen and I wandered around the store.  We ended up in the "foamies" isle.  This is random stuff made out of foam; don't ask me who comes up with these names.  In any case, she grabbed one of these so of course I had to grab one too.

I felt morally obliged to teach her how to use it (start self defense training young!), and she ended up doing this:

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At this point a family squeezed through the isle and the pre-teen girl mentioned "violence sure starts early".  My only response was "Yes.  Yes it does", before describing my own sword collection to her.  She did not appear to be impressed.  Kids these days, I swear.

Jenni seemed annoyed at me once she saw the pictures for some reason.  I really don't understand that woman sometimes...

A few more pics:

The child had a hard weekend.  We were heading home from daycare to go to dinner with some coworkers when she decided that it was a GREAT time to be sick.  No change of clothes (I didn't have the full diaper bag with me) and we're still 20+ minutes from home, so it was not a happy ride for her.  All the rest of Friday night was spent repeating the performance every 30 minutes or so.

Saturday was much better, but dear LORD she was cranky.  Understandably so, of course.  Took an extra nap and ate almost nothing.

Sunday was nearly an entire day of sleep.  We did make it out to the park, but she mostly wanted me to carry her around.  Managed to eat a little bit more at least.  Poor child.

Neither of us appear to have gotten the stomach bug.  Yet.

Throwing gang signs at dinner

In response to "Smile!"

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Crazy thing at daycare today:

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Bedtime!

Gwen's on-demand "happy face", after having her hair tied up all day

The on-demand "angry face"

She wanted to read her bedtime book in the box today.

Pics at daycare

Just some random stuff.

Sandbox and obstacle course

WORM!

Is it edible?

One of the sensory tables.  This one is filled with corn, but their contents get swapped out.  The one behind this one is filled with millet at the moment.

I don't understand what it is these kits get out of filling containers with millet, but they certainly do enjoy it.

One short artist.

Gwen and Lucy painting

Maybe we can get her into algebra by kindergarten...

The look of absolute concentration.  Or extreme sleepiness.  Not sure which.

Halloween

Some oft-requested Halloween pics.

The night of

Getting ready to head out

Still waiting on Dad

This is by far my favorite holiday

I SEE CANDY!

Those owl feet were a nightmare.  She refused to wear socks or shoes under them, so they came off constantly.  This was quite distressing to her and dropped our pace to a crawl.  Not literally crawling, that might have been faster.

And as for the trick-or-treating itself, it could have gone better.  At the very first house we made it to, a boy wearing a zombie mask answered the door.  Oh, the times you wish you had a camera trained on your child.  We got her calmed down before the next house, but the boy seemed to feel bad for making her cry.

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Trick-or-treating at the Department of Education while at daycare

Notice she's not wearing the owl feet.  The daycare providers are smarter than we are.

Ready for bed in skeleton pajamas from Grandma

Quack!

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Random tech

Just two pictures of stuff I'm playing with right now:

Frankenputer!

For this one, my desk is on the right.  Joseph (mostly pictured) was too lazy to move the oscilloscope over to his desk, so he just puts the unit on the floor and stretches cables across the office instead.

On the bright side, I'm now officially a project engineer!  Granted, the project is just that little silver box on the floor, but it's still something. 

That box of diet pepsi under my desk really needs to go, it expired over a year ago and they just taste nasty...

Just having some silly, excited fun.

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Climbin'

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Silliness

Just being silly.  The child has decided that pretending to go to sleep on the kitchen mat is entertaining.

I'm going to start tagging [video] when I post one since at least one RSS reader doesn't give any indication that there's something interesting to see.

Bedtime

Gwen's first experience with a toddler bed.  She did really well, managing not to kill herself on anything overnight.

A will of her own

Note from daycare"  "Gwen is becoming more assertive and will not cower down to the [bigger] boys..."

Yesterday, I was playing on my tablet while she was running around.  She comes up to me, shouts "NO!", smacks the tablet out of my hands, and climbs up to the couch with a toy she wanted me to play with her.

Today, she wants to be with me, but it's Jenni's turn to take care of her.  Jenni gets pushed away and I swear I heard "go away!"

This is going to be an interesting experience, this whole parenthood thing.  Already afraid of what puberty is going to be like...

Let there be tea!

Aunt Susi got Gwen a tea set for her birthday.  She really enjoys forcing us to have tea parties.  Gwen, not Susi.

Ketchup

Or is it cat soup?  I can never remember...

McDonald's on our way up to Nebraska.  Burger and fries on her plate, and guess what she eats?

Notice the shape of the little cup at this point.  It's about as empty as a 2 year old can make it.  Daddy's girl indeed.

Playing in the house

Just some slow-moving play.  Nothing exciting to see here.

More with the glasses theme...

This is Gwen's costume for Halloween (on the right). 

This is Gwen trying on the feet (backwards) and hood, with her sunglasses on.

And just for good measure, at grammer's:

Still rockin' with the glasses, indoor, outdoor, doesn't matter.

Just along for the ride

This video gives a better view of her new daycare's play area, i.e. the entire back and side yard.

Rhino is pulling the wagon.  Gwen has quite a crush on him.

I insisted the child have fire at her second birthday party.

I may have created a monster.

Just walkin'

My child is short.  Walking is sometimes a trial.

But she did have a good time pushing this thing around, nonetheless.

Posting

Yes, a serious lack of posts recently.  The major problems have been twofold. 

The first relates to time.  In particular, one of my normal posts takes about 2 hours to do.  I have to comb through the pics, find the best ones, resize them, do the same for movies (which is much worse - they have to go through several programs to make them usable), then come up with witty dialog.  It gets very intimidating when I haven't done it for awhile, since there is so much source material to go through.

The second is also about time.  Blame Skyrim.  It has swallowed my soul.

So I'm on to an experiment.  I'm going to post random pics and not worry overly much about it.  Today's topic:  Buckethead.

These are quite old.  Apparently at her last daycare she'd just walk around with this bucket on her head.  I have an odd child.

The poor balloon...

This is a balloon:

Note how it is happily floating along without a care in the world.


This is also a balloon:

Note that after a hard night of partying, the balloon is a bit...  tired.

The hard part: after watching your child poke at it and regale it to "wake up!" repeatedly, having to try to explain that no, it won't wake up and no, daddy can't fix it.

Probably made me more sad than it did her...

Ingenious!

See my latest creation!

(It's ingenious because Jenni says so, btw).

For those of you not capable of grasping the consequences immediately, let me clear it up for you:

It's like making the sausage into a supplementary condiment-delivery device. It nearly DOUBLES the amount of stuff you can fit in a Chicago dog!  C'mon, people!

For those of you still not capable of seeing the awesomeness, I have no use for you.  Move along.  Or look at a few pictures of Gwen, if you must:

Gwen's first professional haircut.  Don't blame me for the shaky camera, I wasn't there. 

Very shy at the new daycare

Starting to get the feel for it

SWING!

She didn't want to come home with me this day...

Ice cream at grammer's

Eating a cupcake from Amie

CUPCAKE!