Daphne's Page

As of 10:04 a.m. April 13th 2003 our little Daphne came into the world. She has blessed us in so many ways. Jack and I are better people because of her. Attending to this child has made us more patient, loving, and compassionate people. There is nothing in the world that has happened to us that is as great as this. Really!

In an effort to be sentimental; here is a photo of Daphne only a few moments old:

I thought I should post to Daphne's page since I already posted on my blog earlier.

We had Daphne's well check visit today. She basically cried the whole time. I don't think she was very popular with the nurses. She doesn't like getting naked and put on a scale and then held down to be measured. She also doesn't like being poked and prodded by the doctor. And she really doesn't like getting her MMR shot or having the lab take blood. Sheesh.

The weird news is that we have to go back in six weeks because she doesn't weigh enough. Yes, you heard me correctly. She doesn't weigh enough. It seems that she has dropped a pound and her weight is now in the 50th percentile and her height is in the 97th percentile. So, we have to go back and have her weighed again to be sure that this isn't a trend.

Otherwise, she is a very healthy girl who is right on track developmentally. She impressed the doctor by walking around and by exhibiting her language skills. But, we weren't able to get her to say, "Hi!" Just more reminder that she isn't a trained seal.

Ok, so I (Holly) am going to post the Utah pictures. I know that I am not as witty and as clever as Jack, but this gives me an opportunity to practice my posting pictures skills.

Here is Daphne at the Hogle Zoo stalking a peacock. This is my favorite picture of the whole trip.

Here Daphne hangs out at the zoo with her Grandma and Grandpa Pinette. Don't be fooled into thinking that she likes being in the bjorn. This was a momentary pause in her being Miss Fussy-pants.

Daphne walking at the zoo.

Daphne stopping to look at animals.

Here I am holding Daphne's hand. The one and only time she has let me do this.

Daphne trying to escape into the tropical rainforest.

Daphne showing a little belly. Also a rare moment of hand holding.

Daphne being fed to the lion.

Here is a nice photo of the Utah mountains that we miss so much.

Later that evening Daphne and her Grandma had a great time playing dress-up.

Jack wanted to point out that Utah has six lane highways. Why? I am not sure.

Here we are at Beus Pond in Ogden. We went there so Daphne could feed the ducks and geese. She had a really good time.

Here she is with her Grandma at the duck pond.

This is a photo I took at my Grandma Winn's home a few days before she died. Sadly we did not get any photos of my Grandma on the trip, but at least we got to see her one last time.

Here is Daphne with my Step-Sister's daughter. Hi Kendall!

Here is a picture of Daphne with my friend Jenny's daughter Josephine.

Here is a kinder gentler version of their playtime together.

Here are some pictures taken by my brother Greg's friend. These are candid shots at Greg's 30th birthday party. Doesn't she look beautiful?

Looking angelic.

Being the center of attention.

Trying to figure out how to turn on some music.

Daphne dancing!

Here are a bunch of pictures we took on the Fourth of July at Bryon and Mauria's new house. Enjoy!

Here are some pictures of Daphne with her two favorite doggies. Enjoy!

Here are some pictures of Daphne in Bryon and Mauria's backyard. Please note Jack's new haircut and the beautful view of the pond. I am going to miss looking out at that pond. It is so pretty.

Here is Daphne collecting rocks, her favorite hobby.

Daphne's bestest new song - how quickly can you decode it?

row-SEE!
pocka poe-SEE!
ass-a!
ass-a!
fa down!

Daphne loves to dance!

She has entertained me with music on her Leap Frog Table, to which she dances madly around the room until the song ends, and then plays another. She can do this for hours without tiring.

She also points out every animal she knows and what they say, and she never makes a mistake.

She knows her colors, and says them often as she sees them in the book she is looking at.
She 'reads' books on her own, and has them read to her as often as anyone will. (I will!) She can count, and says some letters and she still loves trees. She has been quite happy with the putting up of the Christmas tree. So far she scarcely notices the presents.

She entertains herself very well. She is happy, happy happy!

Unfortunately, she truly does not eat. If you offer her food she says "No!" If you put food on a plate in front of her she ignores it. If she points out food on your plate, and you give her some, thinking that she might want it as she noticed it, she will turn her head away and cry. She almost acts as if she is afraid of food. I know it is a phase that she will get over, but I don't remember my kids wanting no food for so long at a time. Even when she is hungry and recognizes it herself enough to climb up in her chair and be ready to be fed, she then will not eat. A cup of milk is about it.

We walked in the mall and she was wearing a pink coat and hat, and she was so cute everyone pointed and whispered about how sweet she looked. On a walk outdoors wearing the same coat and hat people driving by in cars honked and waved at her.

Her mommy tells her secrets. I don't know what the secrets are, but they make her laugh.

When you ask "What does the Daddy say?', (as in 'what does the kitty say?', 'what does the doggy say?') she answers, "Stop it!" and when you ask, "What does the Mommy say?" her answer is " Yove you." And that sums up Daphne. Everybody loves her and she loves. . . .well, everybody she knows.

posted by Daphne's Grandma Darcia

As mentioned here, Daphne flew into dress-up mode yesterday... she wore her doggy outfit all morning, then in the afternoon she wore her great-grandmother's bracelets, necklaces, and clip-on earrings. Sorry, I would have taken a picture, but the camera battery was dead.

I did manage to get a picture of her little menagerie, though -- she made her mommy help her put shoes and bibs on all of her stuffed animals.

Here are more pictures from our day of sledding. I love our sledding hill! Daphne also made a snowman, we used red candies for the eyes. It was very cool when the red dye from the candy started bleeding so it looked like someone had removed the snowmans eyes. I decided to name the snowman King Lear.

Here are the pics:

On Easter morning we went for a walk around Lake McBride. Daphne saw a nice goose and gander and even looked down and saw their poop.

We also went to her Aunt Mauria's (Bryon was working in Maine) for dinner. Here she is playing the piano and one or two of her eating cornbread.

"Two years old," I say, holding up two fingers.

"Two years old!" replies Daphne, flashing a peace sign right back. Unable to help herself, she continues, popping up one finger at a time: "three years old, four years old, five years old!"

Not quite yet, kiddo.

So Daphne is two. Hard to believe (he says, knowing practically every parent in history says the same thing anytime one of their children has a birthday).

We're having a mini-soiree this evening to celebrate. I say "mini" because it's just going to be the three of us, plus Uncle Bryon and Aunt Mauria. I'm all for birthday parties, but anything more would overwhelm Daphne at this age.

I'm actually concerned about how Daphne will deal with the party overall; for some reason, every time we've said "birthday" over the last two weeks, it's made her really nervous ("No! No!", shaking her head violently back and forth).

But I have faith that she'll come around once she sees the cake (Pooh Bear themed, natch) and balloons (ditto) and the groovy presents to open. Hopefully the weather will hold up enough that she'll be able to pedal her present from us around the driveway after she eats some cake.

See how I cleverly held back from giving away what Holly and I got for Daphne? Boy, am I mysterious!

Happy Birthday Daphne!

You can't see them, but there are a million balloons with Winnie the Pooh on them.

We thought Daphne deserved a non-ugly cake this year.

Birthday Presents!

Why did they just light my birthday cake on fire?

Mmmmmmm! Birthday cake is good! Yummy!

Mmmmm! Birthday Medicine is good! Yummy!

Birthday Books from Grandpa!

Nemo! A life-jacket for wearing on Bryon and Mauria's boat!

What is this?

Oh My Goodness! What is it? A TRIKE!!!

Grandma Winn sent a book about fairies!

Grandma and Grandpa Pinette sent fairy dress up.

Now I can read about a fairy and then dress up like a fairy!! Wow!

She had a great birthday. Wish you all could have been there!

Here are a few pictures (from many) of our trip to St. Louis:

I don't know if she's trying to channel a communiqué to the aliens soon to colonize our planet, or what, but Daphne occasionally offers up these precise little sculptures that leave us scratching our heads.

This is mostly what she does when we're not paying direct attention to her, which is almost never, because she REALLY wants us to pay attention to her. Attention must be paid! She cannot stand to have us do something that does not involve her. Personal grooming is becoming a problem, so if you see me shambling by with dishevelled hair and smelling like I've been a week without a bath, please understand it's because I can no longer close the bathroom door without triggering the apocalypse.

All of which is ameliorated handily by her being such a friggin' cutie.

She's doing lots of girlie stuff recently, like demanding to wear dresses (preferably with princesses on) and getting practically incandescent with excitement over the prospect of toddling around in her Mommy's boots. She is playing it cool in these pics, but I am here to tell you that it rocked her world.

One more for the road: she has started to tell a lot of jokes. Here was her joke today:

MOMMY: (pointing to an item in a catalogue) Daphne, isn't this cute?

DAPHNE: It's not cute, mommy. It's gyute.

MOMMY: It's what?

DAPHNE: Yah, it's gyut.

MOMMY: What are you doing?

DAPHNE: (beginning to snicker) Gooing.

...later:

DADDY: Daphne, is this a bee?

DAPHNE: No, it's a ghee! (collapses in hysterics)

DADDY: ... huh?

She went on like that half the night.

For those who haven't seen it already, here's a (smallish) version of the St. Louis vacation video Holly put together.

For those who have seen it already: you've seen it already. In fact, you may even have a DVD with it on.

A couple of things about this online version:

• I am not very good at the whole video encoding thing; in order to make this both small and of reasonable quality, I had to use the newest video encoder I could find. Translation: you'd better have a very recent version of Quicktime (or whatever your preference is for H.264/AAC playback).

• It is still not all that small (26MB), and is best suited for broadband connections rather than dial up.

Thanks for playing.

Today, in the car:

DAPHNE: Oh -- I see a awful tower!

DADDY: Tower?

DAPHNE: It's a awful tower.

DADDY: I don't see a tower. Why's it awful?

DAPHNE: It's ok, it's like a triangle. It's got four red lights, one two three four.

DADDY: (spotting a radio transmission tower with four red signal lights) You mean Eiffel tower?

DAPHNE: Yeah! Awful tower.

Yesterday, in the car:

DAPHNE: (pointing out a decorated house) That's my Christmas house!

DADDY: Your house?

DAPHNE: Yeah. And that's Daddy's Christmas house, and Aunt Mauria's.

DADDY: Who else gets a Christmas house?

DAPHNE: Mommy!

DADDY: Where's Mommy's Christmas house?

DAPHNE: (looking around, in a bewildered tone) I don't know. I can't find it. Where'd it go?

(a few minutes pass. Daphne spots a decorated house down a side street, which we are passing by)

DAPHNE: Daddy, I want to go that way and see the Christmas house.

DADDY: Honey, we're going this way. We're going home.

DAPHNE: No! I'm too scared, it's too scary!

DADDY: Honey, there's nothing scary at all. Our house is just around the corner, see?

(momentary silence)

DAPHNE: (quiet but emphatic; she means business) No. Don't touch the Christmas.

DADDY: What?

DAPHNE: Don't. Touch. The. Christmas.

Today Daphne and I watched The Little Mermaid. At the end she decided that she was going to get married just like Ariel. I asked her who she was going to marry and she said, "A BEE!" She then let me know that I was was going to marry a butterfly and that Daddy was going to marry a duck.

Ha!

Here's another in Daphne's sculpture series, "Landing Strips for Aliens".

This was the firstest bestest day for Daphne to go to the park, since it actually got up above 50 and was not raining. We followed our usual regimen of ball-chasing and rock-throwing and swinging and such.

Later, after Daphne decided to follow the walking path that rings the park, she located a large cache of dry leaves that had been caught in the vee formed by a chain link fence and a gate that had been left open at the same angle all winter. The day had turned blustery by this time, so that when Daphne grabbed an armload of leaves and flung them to the sky, they were snatched by the wind and plastered up against the chain link like wallpaper.

Soon we were both tossing every leaf we could lay hands on, watching them dash up against their comrades on the fence, which began to resemble the kind of sculptured shrub that faces the sidewalk in old neighborhoods.

We didn't stop there, though; we slathered the fence with a layer of leaves inches thick, up to the capacity of the wind to hold them in place, pausing only to draw the occasional swirl or curlicue with a finger. The surface of our unlikely canvas was alive with shifting, crackling leaf sculptures, pyramids and crescents and ziggurats forming and dissolving like a vertical field of sand dunes.

Daphne took breaks from construction to burrow peep-holes, which were duly enlarged to windows and a door. We played house for some time (or, more accurately, we played "going trick-or-treating at Daphne's house"), until the wind finally changed direction and turned our wall into a fence again.

Then we came home and played dance marathon.

(hint: click the image)

Here are some pictures of her summer so far:

She started the summer visiting her Grandparents and Uncle Kip in Reno!

Here she is in her little kiddie pool.

We took Daphne and her Grandma to the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha.

Here she is with Bryon and Mauria at the North Liberty Fun Days Parade.