Enjoying London

Last two weeks our Gymboree class was extremely crowded; today I didn’t feel up-to spending my morning in the small room packed full with loud, energetic kids and since we’ve been listening to the first 5-10 minutes of the Paddington Bear narrated by Stephen Fry I took Cat to the Paddington station instead to look at the stature of Paddington Bear, .

Cat loves trains at the moment and was highly impressed with the big loudly humming ones there. Afterwards we walked to the Kensington Gardens to look at the birds and the fountains, chase the squirrels and observe the slow fall of leaves. And we got to see few tractors pulling the wagons with collected leaves. Cat loves them almost as much as trains and even started saying tractor/трактор few days ago.

I’m reading John Holt’s How Children Learn and am surprised by how much I’m learning from this book as a parent. For example instead of seeing dangers everywhere, I am able to relax more and trust Catherine to know her own limits. Today instead of grabbing her to prevent the potential fall into the fountain, I peacefully watched as she first sat on the edge and later leaned in to take a closer look at the water. Free from worrying thoughts I was able to see perfectly well that she wasn’t in any danger. Being a relaxed parent is more fun than constantly worrying one - I'm glad we stopped watching news in the morning as they constantly have conflicting segments on dangers surrounding kids, negative effects of overprotection and various debates on parents failing to do the right thing, whatever it deemed to be on that day.

Counting

Despite me counting the stairs in Russian every time we walk down from the third floor and back up, Cat recently started saying “one, two, three” while climbing onto her highchair and before running down a hill. She actually “counts” in Russian as well, but totally out of order with most numbers being три (three) or шесть (six).

And at the moment she is in her bed doing her own rendition of “Row, row, row your boat” instead of sleeping despite looking exhausted for hours.

More words

This week Cat started pointing at me and saying “Mama” throughout the day. About time! I was getting slightly grumpy at being called generic “Eee!” or hearing whiny “Ma-ma-ma-ma-ma!” when she was super hungry or in desperate need of comfort.

I also realised that she says few Russian words, like:
где (where), usually it’s где bum (where is ball?) or где ты (where are you?);
туда (there), as in “let’s go there” when I’m going in one direction and she is insisting we go in the opposite one;
один (one), два (two), три (three), we usually walk downstairs counting the stairs instead of catching the lift and since we are on the third floor there are a lot of stairs to count. Though when she counts on her one she usually says один, один (one, one) or один, три (one, three), but asked how many legs she has she replies две (two).
And she also says up in English. There are few other words, which I can’t think of at the moment.

Fun playmate

Two mornings in a row we spent playing with my friend’s much younger brother, who was visiting for a short time with their parents. The Little Girl was totally mesmerized by him and wanted to follow him everywhere, specially because he had a range of play balls. If we got too distracted chatting to throw the ball back to her, we would instantly hear “Bum! Bum!”, which is her attempt at saying “Boom! Boom!” and the word she uses to mean ball. Sadly he went back to Australia and we can only dream about finding another such patient and fun playmate.

Three favourite rhymes

Incy Wincy spider climbed up the water spout.
Down came the rain and washed poor Incy out.
Out came the sunshine and dried up all the rain.
And Incy Wincy spider climbed up the spout again.
English nursery rhyme
--

We have a CD of nursery rhymes and Incy Wincy spider is Cat’s favourite song. She keeps on asking for it, by trying to do the action of Incy Wincy spider climbing up the spout with her little fingers. I heard this song so many times in the last few days, that whenever I have a quite moment to myself to relax or think I end up singing it instead. This little rhyme is also preventing me from thinking of any other quote for today’s post.

The other favourites are “Five little ducks went swimming one day” with the loud quacks and attempts to imitate the hand actions from the Little Girl; and “Old MacDonald” – Cat does a very good “Ee-I-ee-I-oh” sound now.

(I don't have a picture of ducks, so a swan will have to do instead)

Out of the 26 songs on the CD Cat only wants to listen to these three, I hope, for my own sanity, that she’ll progress to a wider range of favourites or will get tired of this CD altogether.

Quotes, talking and our trip

I showed my masterpiece to the grown-ups, and asked them whether the drawing frightened them.
But they answered: "Frighten? Why should any one be frightened by a hat?"
My drawing was not a picture of a hat. It was a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery "The Little Prince"
--
Polina, Driftwood and Katy, thank you for providing other suggestions for what this drawing could be. I'm looking forward to the day when The Little Girl will be able to tell me herself what she is drawing, feeling and thinking. Though she may choose to keep the explanations to herself believing that:

Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery "The Little Prince"

There isn't very much progress with talking, though recently The Little Girl started answering my questions with very loud and clear Да (Yes) and on Friday she said Baby in very happy sing-song voice, so throughout our car trip to Stratford-upon-Avon she and I would burst into chanting Baby-Baby to the amusement of everyone else. We also enjoyed eating delicious food at the King's Arms in Mickleton; looking at (and smelling) the myriad beautiful flowers; and exploring Warwick castle, cute Cotswolds villages and old houses.

Photo of Anne Hathaway's Cottage

However the biggest highlight of our trip for me was the visit to the Mary Arden's Farm (childhood home of Shakespeare's mother ). The guides there are dressed in the replica Tudor clothing and are happy to chat about the daily farm activities they perform in the same way as was done in the 16th Century. I found them very knowledgeable, friendly, enthusiastic and interesting. And there were various farm animals to keep The Little Girl entertained - she loved patting and feeding the sheep and chasing after the chickens.
Few more photos are on Flickr

Talking progress

Naree, who is between jobs at the moment and therefore spends a lot of time with us, came to visit yesterday and Cat tried to say her name. We both thought it was super cute. Cat also says tickler for tickle-tickle while tickling mostly herself and occasionally others, iggl (or something similar) for Igglepiggle (yep, we are horrible In the Night Garden addicts. I very rarely watch TV myself and don’t feel comfortable with letting her watch it, but she loves this show and it gives me 30 incredibly wonderful minutes to make dinner or tidy up or do some work or just rest), мяу-мяу for cats and гав-гав for dogs. But Bah is still her word for everything, though she pronounces it differently depending on what she is trying to indicate.