I'm sorry I haven't been putting anything on this blog. I've been saying everything on Facebook these days. If you want to keep up with me, that is the best place to do it. Just ask Mommy or Daddy and they can send you an invitation to be my 'friend' on Facebook.
Here are some photos of our trip to America in May. Click HERE to see them. That was a long time ago! I am even bigger now! I'll be four next month!
Anyway, get in touch with Mommy or Daddy and then you can hear what I'm thinking and doing on a more regular basis. I'm having trouble blogging and Facebooking at the same time!
Tonight at dinner I was finishing off some cinnamon raisin toast. I said to Mommy, 'I'm eating a lot. I'm fat.' I patted my tummy. She said, 'You're not fat, JoMo. You're just right.' She tried to explain how three year olds don't have very strong tummy muscles to hold the tummy in, so they look a bit round. 'But you'll grow bigger and older and your tummy muscles will get stronger to hold the tummy in.' 'I look like I have a baby. I have plenty of room for a baby so that it can be comfortable!'
Mommy couldn't stop laughing. She went and found Daddy and told him what I said. She came back to the kitchen still laughing!
When I came home from preschool yesterday, Mommy asked me, 'How was your day?' I told her, 'I was frustrated, because there was too much people playing in the garden and there wasn't enough room for me to do what I wanted to do.'
'You were frustrated?'
'Yeah.'
'What did you want to do?'
'I wanted to play catch the ball. Amanda and Cassandra were playing, but if I played with them, then there wasn't room, or I would have gotten in the way in between them.'
'Oh.'
'I was really frustrated.'
For some reason, Mommy thought I was really clever to use the word 'frustrated', even though she knew that the garden [outside play area] we have to play in is really pretty big.
Daddy's reaction: 'Well, at least he can express what he's feeling and won't be emotionally constipated!'
Today I saw a picture of a pirate on Daddy's computer. It didn't look like the pirates I've seen before. Here I am, getting my MegaBloks pirate ship for my second birthday, which was over a year ago. You can click on the picture to see the pirates a bit better. I think these pirates on my boat are not so bad.
The pirate in the news picture didn't look anything like these. Daddy said it was a Somali pirate, and that they captured someone, but the Navy Seals fought the pirates and rescued him. They were not nice pirates at all. I asked Daddy if the Navy Seals were good men. And he said that they were; in fact, they were great men, he told me.
Tonight as I sat on the potty, I was talking with Daddy about pirates and how they fight. 'When pirates fight with swords,' I said, 'it's called swordfighting. When they fight with guns, it's called gunfighting. And when they fight with guns and swords, it's called mixed pirate fighting!'
[Or as Mommy would put it: Don't bring a lifeboat to a seabattle with the US Navy.....]
-Said while watching the bathwater drain out of the tub: 'You know, there are bits of dirt and bits of skin there. But it's okay: the skin are really little bits, otherwise you would have a hole and that wouldn't be good.'
-Said after a friend told him 'You're not my friend' one day and a few days later said 'You're my best friend': 'What she said the other day means I can't hear what she is saying today very well.'
[From Mommy: No one has informed me if they were able to see the photos I linked to in the previous post ('Facebook'). Let me know if you had any troubles. It is just much easier and faster to upload photos to the Facebook website and comment on them than it is on Blogger website. Not sure why. Let me know if you can see them! Thanks!]
Mommy put up some photos of my trainset on her Facebook page. I hope you enjoy seeing how I fill up the living room!
Mommy and Daddy are on something called Facebook. It's on the internet. They can see pictures of people they know and say hello to them by sending them a message or flinging food at them. It's not real food--just pictures of food. Don't worry if you're confused by that!
Mommy posted some photos and videos of me recently on Facebook. No one but her friends can see them. She is going to try to put a link here so that you can see the photos, too! You don't have to join Facebook to see the photos. It's faster to put the photos on Facebook than my blog, she says. We'll see if it works.
Here are some photos from half a year ago! September 2008. We went to Italy and I discovered something really yummy! Can you guess what it is?? Click here. There is a description of the photo album on the main page (toward the bottom). You can click on photos you want to see bigger, or you can click on one and then keep clicking 'Next' in the upper right hand corner (or actually, just click anywhere on the photo!) to see the next one. When you make the photos bigger, you can see the captions for each one, too.
Let Mommy know if it worked and you can see the photos. Leave her a comment here. Thanks!
On Thursday and Friday, I rode my bike home from school! (Mom came along with me--I'm not quite ready to go solo she says!) Today I rode it to school, too!
On Saturday I had my very first sleepover! I went to my friend David's house in the late afternoon, played, had dinner, laughed a lot, had a bath, laughed some more, had story time, laughed some more, and got to sleep on my Thomas Ready Bed [inflatable toddler bed with Thomas the Tank Engine on it]! I was so excited! David is five and is really great. I told my mom yesterday that we should move next door to David and his parents. David's mum told my mom that I didn't mention my mommy or daddy once while I was at their house. Well, I probably mentioned them, but I never whined or complained or cried or anything. I had a blast!
Meanwhile, Mommy and Daddy went to a big event for Daddy's work, at a hotel out in the countryside not too far from Oxford. They picked me up from church at the end of Sunday school. And then, after lunch in McDonald's, we met a friend of mine from nursery at the Natural History Museum (the one with the dinosaurs) for their children's activity afternoon, and then went to the University Parks to run around. What a great weekend!!
This dinosaur has a red nose for 'Red Nose Day'--a charity event that actually lasts a couple of weeks.
Here I am with my friend Thomas. We're wearing our explorer hats. The museum lends them out along with a backpack full of activities to do while you are there.
Here is a view of side aisle in the Museum, from the second level.
And here is the Dodo from the museum--skeleton on the
left and a stuffed one on the right (or maybe a re-creation of one?). [The Dodo is now extinct, but has a lasting place in literature in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, written by a math teacher here and with a lot of Oxford references.]
And here we are, climbing a lacrosse goal in the Parks, like good Marines!
And here I am, playing one of the rhythm instruments in our museum explorer backpacks! (Press the little triangle to play the videoclip.)
Clifford is a big red dog. I hear that he sometimes appears on TV, but I've only seen him in a set of books that my Grandma Shirley sent me a while ago. Mom and Dad read some of them to me some months ago, but we recently got them back out and Dad discovered that I could read some of the first few stories to him! I was able to 'sound out' words like 'is' and 'am' and worked out more complicated things like 'Happy Birthday, Clifford!' (I saw the words 'Happy Birthday' a lot a few months ago when I turned three!) Mom didn't believe Dad when he told her, so she sat with me, and I worked my way through it word by word. I sometimes got stuck, but then I would go through letter by letter to try to work it out.
You know what? It's FUN to read to Mommy and Daddy! After all, I like to copy all the things they do, and they read to me a lot! Mom said I've been 'pre-reading' for a while, in that I can recognize and 'read' signs and words I see a lot, and so on. But now I'm getting that words are made up of letters that have sounds. Mom and Dad have big smiles on their faces.
That's what we usually say before our meals. Well, at least before our dinner. We hold hands and I lead the family in saying Thank You. I add in, 'And thank you for Daddy, and Mommy and JoMo and all the other things! Amen!' If we have a guest, we thank God for them first. I used to say thank you for lots of other people and things, but I got a bit worn out and now just decided to say 'And all the other things'--that about covers it!
In my class, called Tumblers, at church the other Sunday, we talked about how God provides our food and we got to make our own placemats! The teacher had brought lots of pictures of food and we chose what we liked to eat and glued it to the placemat. Then they put a prayer in the middle that the teacher had typed up, and we decorated the mat. Then the teacher laminated it! I use it for every meal now!
Here is the mat:
And here I am singing the grace (to the tune of 'One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Once I caught a fish alive!'):
On Valentine's Day, Mommy's college organized a trip to the local ice rink. I got to try ice skating for the first time!
Here's what I told Mommy to tell you about it:
'It was good. I ice skated really well! And there was music! I had fun on the ice. It was REALLY fun! The ice was cold. I fell over. The ice was slippery! I had hot chocolate. I saw some more people. I saw some ice and I saw some lines. I holded Mommy and Daddy's hands. It was really, really good.'
Here are some pictures.
Mommy took video on her digital camera, but forgot that she can't rotate the camera when doing that! oops!
Yesterday after swimming, Mommy and I went to the library. I love going to the library! This time they had some books they were selling off for just 10p [about 15 cents] each, so we chose 11! Then we borrowed some other books. Good thing Mom brought the stroller with the big basket!One of the books we borrowed is called 'My holiday in the USA.' 'Holiday' means trip/vacation here. Mom thought it might be good for me to learn something about America. So I guess you could say I was having a social studies lesson.
The first picture in the book is of a man with a helmet catching a ball. Mommy said he was playing American football. I said, 'No, he's not playing football. He's not kicking the ball!'
Then there were lots of interesting pictures of different parts of America. One picture had the Eiffel Tower in it, and I said, 'Look! It's France!' Mom said, 'No, actually it's America. It's in Las Vegas at a hotel that looks like Paris, France.' Clearly, I have a lot to learn about America! It's so confusing!
One picture I really like in it is the Statue of Liberty! I asked Mommy to help me find pictures on the internet of it, too. We found some videos even on YouTube. Some are funny--they make the statue sing and dance around! Mommy said that the Statue doesn't really move.
I asked if we could make a copy of the Statue of Liberty ourselves. Mommy thought about it and suggested Play-Do. Today we worked on it together. Mommy did most of the main sculpting, and I added some of the decorations. I am so happy with it!
Then after a ride on my bike and some time feeding old bread to the ducks on the local canal, I worked on another project with my PlayMais. (PlayMais is a present from my Auntie Jacqui that she brought back from Germany for my birthday. It's really cool. It's little bits of stuff made out of corn somehow that stick together when you get it a little bit wet with a sponge.) I showed it to Mommy and told her it was a piston and connecting rod for a steam engine. So I guess you could say this was the physics/engineering lesson for the day, only I was the one teaching it!
After dinner tonight, Daddy was making some coffee for Mommy and himself in his Mokki. ['Mokki' is what JoMo calls the stovetop espresso maker that we got in Italy--they call it a Moka there. See the story from October 3rd, 'Barista and Bearista' --found here.] I said that I wanted some. So, he made me a mini-cappuccino, too! Well, since it was almost all milk with only a spot of coffee, I guess it was a mini-latte, actually. And don't worry: it was decaf!
They got some cantuccini/biscotti to dip in their coffee. But I didn't want those! I wanted some of those nice cookies Mrs. Hanes makes. They are also known as Moravian cookies or ginger crisps. GaGa Donna sent them to us and I love them. I am always trying to get some of those: I'll finish my meal, be extra good, make my eyes really big and hold out my hands and say 'Please....?'
Enjoy the video clips. And remember: it IS decaf! [And it was almost all foamed milk!]
I like crackers. Not just the party kind of crackers that people here have at Christmas dinner, with the paper hat and joke and little toy or other surprise inside. Those are fun. But right now I'm talking about crackers that you eat. Savoury biscuits, some people call them.
Today I was having a couple of crackers at lunch time with my hummous and veggies and other stuff. One I had was a Hovis cracker, that says "Hovis" right on it. I don't think I had ever seen this kind of cracker before. Hovis is famous as a brand of bread here, mostly wholewheat. But there is also, as I found out, the Hovis cracker, or 'biscuit' as the locals call it, that looks like a loaf of bread. Cute, huh?
I ate half of the Hovis biscuit and held up what was left to Daddy and said, "Look! It says 'Ho'!" He was surprised. These parents are always surprised when I read things. He asked me, "What would THREE of those say? Something like Santa might say?" "Ho! Ho! Ho!" I said with a laugh.
But I said to the parents this week that I thought that maybe Santa was actually Mommy. "Cynical at age three!" said Dad.
In any event, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all!
Addendum, Friday, 2 January:
Today at lunch I said to Mom, "I want a cracker that says H-O-V-I-S--that spells 'Hovis'!" Now it was Mommy's turn to be surprised!
This dinosaur has a red nose for '
On Valentine's Day, Mommy's college organized a trip to the local ice rink. I got to try ice skating for the first time! 
