Tag: Heather

Heather’s Last Day of Preschool

June 9, 2016 9:05 pm

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Today was Heather’s last day of preschool.  They had a potluck lunch and little certificates.  The teachers wrote down one memorable thing about each kid as part of their certificates.

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If you can’t quite read it, Heather’s says: “Classroom Encyclopedia, Google = Heather.”  She’s a learner.  She loves learning about everything she can.  Her favorite shows are still The Magic School Bus, Wild Kratts, Octonauts, Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, Sesame Street, and others.  She watched Planet Earth with us and was super excited about the animals she recognized from the other shows (e.g., whale shark and vampire squid).  She can pick up and read pretty much any children’s book these days.  It’s still hard work for her, but she can do it.  She’s constantly asking questions about things and asking for explanations.  Her standard procedure is to ask Jess, if Jess doesn’t know, she’ll ask me, and if I don’t know, she’ll say, “Just ask Google.”

She’s developing a concerningly comfortable relationship with Google as a fount of all knowledge.  By which I mean, she’ll ask questions like, “What did I eat for breakfast last week?”  And when we say we don’t know she’ll tell us, “Just ask Google; it will know.”  We’ve tried to explain that Google doesn’t work that way, but she doesn’t seem to believe it.  Google knows everything.

Anyway, she had a great year.  She loved preschool.  She was sad anytime she had to miss a day because she wouldn’t be learning the things everyone else was that day.  This fall she’ll start TK (Transitional Kindergarten) for which she is excited.  At least one of the kids from preschool will be in her TK  class next year, so it won’t be all strangers.

June 2016 Camping

June 4, 2016 3:33 pm

Heather and I were supposed to go camping a couple of weeks ago.  I had made a campsite reservation back in May.  The weekend of our trip had cool and comfortable weather–and we were all sick with hand-foot-and-mouth disease.  So we had to reschedule.

I booked the same site for this weekend (June 3-4) and we had roasting 99F weather all week leading in to our trip.  We camped at Joseph Grant County Park in Santa Clara County at the base of Mount Hamilton.  Luckily, after we climbed up into the hills where the campground is, the temperature was at least 10 degrees cooler and there was good shade (I scouted out likely shady sites using Google Maps beforehand, shade is key).

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We got to the site around 6:30 and got the tent all set up.  Not wanting to need to get a fire going to cook or eat something hot, I opted for Subway sandwiches for dinner.  We ate those and took a little walk up to an observation hill as the sun set.

After the sun set and things cooled down a bit we got the fire going to prepare for s’mores.  Heather was pretty fascinated by the concept of arranging the wood to allow oxygen flow to help the fire.  After a few false starts she was able to muster up the courage to add a couple of sticks after the fire was going.  She also tried roasting her own marshmallow; it caught on fire in about 5 seconds.

Heather particularly liked the way the fire made everything “look all glowy.”  Like this:

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Heather fell asleep around 10:15 (usual bedtime ~7:30) and I stayed up a bit longer to enjoy the quiet and let the fire die out.  Then she was up with the sun around 5:45am, declaring it “not night time anymore.”  So….we’re both a bit sleep-deprived today.

Breakfast was Fruity Dyno Bites (Heather requested a cereal breakfast and it’s hard to argue with simplicity).  This brought us to about 6:30am so I figured I would break camp while it was still cool and overcast as the forecast was for another hot day.

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Due to really annoying flies, Heather asked if she could just sit in the car, so she did (somewhat surprisingly, I guess she was kind of tired).  I was taking the tent down and noticed a oddly worn-out spot on the floor underneath one of our sleeping pads (this tent floor is the same nylon material as the sides, not a tarp bottom).  I figured there must have been a pointy rock under the spot, but it actually felt like a little hollow space.  I thought it odd that a hollow spot would cause that much wear on the material.  Then I folded up the tent and saw the tent footprint underneath.  It had a hole clean through it (picture taken after getting home).

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When I folded back the footprint there was a nasty looking creature lurking in a thumb-size hole under the spot!  A creature that apparently ate or tore a hole through the footprint and tried to get in the tent!  I didn’t get a good look at it though and, after moving the tent and footprint elsewhere, it was gone when I got back.  I think it may have been a wolf spider though:

DSC_0017bbGah!  I have no idea what we would have done if that thing had cut into our tent floor and started climbing around inside.  Might have had to just burn it all down and go home.

So, now I have to repair the tent and footprint.

Anyway, we got packed up and home around 9:00am.  Which was fine with me since it was only going to get hot and unpleasant out.  Our next camping adventure is scheduled in July.  We’re going to try Heather’s first multi-night camping trip.

Heather’s Dance Costume

May 25, 2016 2:54 pm

Heather missed picture day for her dance class due to our family’s bout with hand-foot-and-mouth disease.

Today was a dress rehearsal, so she got all dolled up again.  So I set up my equipment to try and get at least one or two decent pictures of her in her costume.  Our kitchen, unfortunately, is just not quite large enough for me to use my 50mm lens effectively, but I got some okay pictures:

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Corinne wanted to be part of the excitement as well.  She looks like an anime character.

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Life with Heather

February 12, 2016 7:44 pm

I have a habit of making up little songs that I sing to Heather.  They’re not impressive in any way, but she likes them (usually).  The most often criticism I get from her is to “make them more rock-starry.”  I don’t really know where she got the concept, but she then is happy if I give the song a more rock-and-roll style.

Because of her regular insistence on my songs being more “rock-starry,” on Saturday I told her I was going to put on a song for her that I thought she’d like.  I told her it was a song I associate with Grandpa (her Grandpa, my Dad) playing on Saturday mornings for some reason.

Dickerson kids should now make a guess about the song, we’ll see if we developed a similar association.

I played “I’m gonna be (500 miles)” by The Proclaimers and she thinks it’s awesome.  We listened to it a few times and she can sing along with some parts.  During the chorus she got her stroller and would strut around in circles pushing it along.

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Now for something completely different.

One of the kids from Heather’s preschool class had a birthday party this week.  It was Monday evening and Corinne was going to need to be going to sleep, so I took Heather to the party.  It was at a party place in town that has a room with big inflatable play structures and a rock-climbing wall and some other rooms for eating and such.  We arrived and I told Heather she should find the birthday girl and say, “Hello” and wish her happy birthday.  But Heather didn’t want to leave my side.

She was a little overwhelmed by the noise of the fans on the inflatable things and by the number of adults milling about.  So we walked around the room getting a feel for the place and she started to relax.  I asked her if she recognized the kids.  She said they were the kids from preschool (with that tone of voice that says, “obviously”).  I asked her if she could tell me their names.  So she started rattling off the names of the kids in her class.  I interrupted her and asked if she could tell me who particular kids were, “Who’s this girl who came over and said ‘hi’?”  But she didn’t know.  We did this a few more times and she didn’t seem to know the names of any of the girls.  Then a couple of boys ran by and she did know their names.

At school they do a game where they say a kid’s name and toss them a ball.  When they do this they’re all wearing name tags.  Heather has no problem with names during this game.

We think she’s reading the name tags (probably not completely, but recognizing enough letters to then pick the right name from her memorized list) during the game.

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I think she must have the same issue that I have with recognizing faces.  I can learn to recognize a face, but it seems to be harder for me than it is for other people.  Especially if I run across someone outside of the usual context–it can be incredibly hard.  Often times I will be able to recognize that I know the person, but have no idea how or why or who they are.  Heather seems to be the same way.  At the party she definitely recognized the kids, but couldn’t connect them with their name, but she knew all their names.

I find it really interesting.  It took a long time for me to realize that I took a lot longer to learn names and faces of people.  I don’t think it was until I was in college that I really figured it out.  Which probably has something to do with growing up in a town where the entire grade was the same ~100 kids from kindergarten through graduation.  I would have learned all the kids eventually and then they didn’t change much.  Whereas in college there was little consistency.

Taking her to that party and watching her in a full-blown social situation where I don’t know anybody and can’t really help things along made me realize how much of my personality she has.  Jess says she sees a lot of her own (Jess’) personality in Heather as well.

We know she does play with other kids in a very normal way, but we also, at times, see her play less with the other kids and more in-the-vicinity-of the other kids a lot too.  And she will, not-uncommonly, just go off by herself to play.

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At the party, when it was time to sit down and eat, she went in and carefully sat at the corner seat furthest from where the other kids were already sitting.  The table then filled in around her.  During the time they were all sitting at the table she only lightly interacted with any of the kids.  I recognized that I was displaying the exact same behavior.  I didn’t really interact with any of the other parents.  I tried to stay to the outside of the room so that Heather would be more likely to interact with the other kids and less likely to just interact with me, but I suppose I wasn’t being a good example of pro-social behavior.  At one point she wanted to tell me knock-knock jokes. I redirected her to tell them to the other kids at the table which she did just fine.  She wasn’t unhappy at all–just not really interested in the other kids.

This makes me feel a little torn.  I fully recognize the benefit of developing the ability to have smooth social interactions, but I also recognize that it probably doesn’t bother her (in the same way that it didn’t bother me at all that I wasn’t interacting with the other parents at the party).

In some ways its feeling like I’ve acquired all this understanding about the world and now have to decide would I have done anything different in my own life growing up that I should now encourage Heather to do.