Riley’s First Blog

Riley has friend. Her first real friend. His name is Taylor and he’s almost 4 years old and Riley says he’s funny. She talks about him all the time. There’s been other kids she kind of hung around with or talked about, but never like this. They play together in the daycare everyday, and from what we hear from his parents, he talks about her at home all the time too. I took some cute pictures of them going nuts with the marble tower at daycare one day, but I’m not sure it’s a good idea to post pictures of other people’s kids on the web…

At night before Riley goes to sleep I ask her what she wants to dream about and we think about some fun, happy things (part of my plan to prevent nightmares that seem to sometimes plague her). One night I was giving her option after option… swimming in the pool, the animals in the zoo, Ronin, rainbows, the tomatoes and carrots growing on our roof… but she kept saying no no no. So I asked her what she wanted to dream about, and she replied, “I want to dream about Taylor…”

Another time I asked her who loves her and she said “Mommy and Daddy and Taylor love me, and I love Mommy and Daddy and Taylor.”

He’s a very sweet boy so I’m happy they are friends.

In case you haven’t heard, Riley has a cousin, and her name is Ronin. If you ask her she’ll tell you allll about her. It’s one of her favorite things to talk about. Sometimes at night when it’s time to turn out the light and go to sleep Riley will say, “Can we talk about Ronin?” So I’ll tell her everything I know about her and Cheyenne and Joshua. Most often when I finish she’ll ask, “Can we talk about Ronin again?” If you too want to know everything there is to know about Ronin, you can check out her blog (well it’s not HER blog, but she’s pretty prominently featured on Cheyenne and Joshua’s blog these days)

I have to give Riley a little credit, some of her animals do have names. She has a bunny she calls bim-bim (i think this is actually a bizarre permutation of bun-bun though, from when she couldn’t speak very well, and the name just stuck), and a bear name Witson (no idea where this name came from) and a pink doll she named Becky. The rest all follow the pattern from the previous post…

Riley still loves her stuffed animals. She hasn’t gotten real creative with the names (her tiger is called Tiger-Tiger, the lion is Lion-Lion, dog is Doggy-dog, lamb is Lamby-lamb… you can probably figure out the rest) but she loves them all the same. At night she carts them all up to her room and arranges them on the bed, only to tote them all back to the “downstairs room” to play the next day. Sometimes she throws the all over the banister for a short cut down the stairs. I’m just happy she prefers animals to princesses… and it hoping it stays that way.

Eagle trying to get some work done, Riley trying her best to get him to play with her instead. She’s a big fan of Eagle, and very demanding of his time. “Eagle look at this! Eeeaaagggllleee, look at me look at me!” is a common refrain in our house these days.

Riley buried in animals. The amazing thing is the only ones we actually bought for her are the tigers (it’s a long and uninteresting story why she has 2), the rest were all presents… quite a nice selection I think. We’ve skyped with my parents a few times and she always wants to show them all her animals, she’s very proud.

Sage and I both had birthdays in the last few weeks…

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For both birthdays the cake was a “surprise,” except that Riley’s not so good at keeping secrets yet. For Sage’s birthday, we lit the candles and they blew them out together at least 3 times. On my birthday, we ended up bringing the cake out in the middle of dinner because she just couldn’t wait anymore. Good fun…

In April we went on a whirlwind trip to Puerto Rico for Jason and Amada’s wedding. We flew overnight Thursday arriving early morning on Friday, then flew back on Sunday. It was worth it though. We did some site seeing, some lounging poolside and at the beach, and had a great time at the wedding itself. Because of the time change Riley was able to stay up late for the whole party, and we could all thankfully sleep in the next morning.

Riley’s tiger got to come to the wedding too, and Riley spent much of the night wrapping him up in my shawl and carrying him around.

She also danced up a storm and kept everyone at our table entertained by running around and just being generally nutty.

Rain is kinds a rare thing around here… one night as I was putting Riley to bed it started raining pretty hard outside. She really wanted to go out and see, so we put on her raincoat and rain boots (from Chloe! She gave them to us before Riley was born and she’s finally big enough to wear them) over her pajamas and ventured out into the wetnesss…

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Riley had her first birthday party recently… she was very excited. The party was just around the corner so we walked over to the house. When we arrived the party was in full swing with tons of people and a giant bouncy house and toys EVERYWHERE. Riley was a bit overwhelmed, but we had fun playing in the corner.

There were more presents then you could ever imagine a child needing, so Riley helped Ashley open some of them…

We took about a million pictures on our trip of course, but we managed to trim it down to some highlights. Here they are.

(the ones at the end are videos)

Some last thoughts on the trip…

Unexpected things that Riley learned to do while travelling:
- Cut with scissors (she became quite the scrapper)
- Ride escalators by herself (up and down and up and down and up again)
- Play make believe/pretend

Things we heard her say a lot:
“Can we ask the lady for pretzels” (this after she learned the flight attendants were the keepers of the pretzels… it’s pretty much her first question when getting on a plane now)
“Khap kun kah” (Thank you in Thai. People loved it whenever she said it)
“Good job!” and “You did it all by yourself!” (we must have been saying this to Riley a lot… because she started saying it back to us whenever we did anything complicated like opening a water bottle or putting on our shoes)
“No thank you” (whenever we asked her to do something she didn’t want to do… this was a very frequent one)
“I want to do it MYSELF!” (also very frequent. sometimes coupled with a foot stomp)
“Can I touch it?” (In the temples she wanted to touch every shiny thing…)
“I want to remember again” (To make her stop crying or keep her occupied we would play “Remember when…” and tell her a story. At the end she would often ask to remember the story again)
“I’ll be right back” (again, something we said to her a lot, and she started using too)

She’s so funny to listen to. It’s not so much that she says funny things, but more that it’s funny to hear her just talking and saying things word for word that we say. And it’s funny to hear her interpretations of things. I wish I had more examples…