Cat Toys

Everyone knows that laser pointers work as excellent cat toys. I brought it out for the first time in a while this past week, and I think Sara Beth enjoyed chasing it more than the cats. The cats would perk up their ears and make a few moves towards the laser dot, and then Sara Beth bolted after it, scattering the cats. It was hard not to give Sara Beth a hard time, placing the dot right above her reach, but I managed to restrain myself, mostly.

The other day, while eating dinner, Sara Beth took too large of a bite. She then took too large a swig of juice, and started to cough. I asked her "Are you ok? Do you need some help?" Her response: "Some ice cream would help!"

Sara Beth loves to play pretend. She will announce "I'm a baby baby" and then crawl onto her baby bed, but by the time she gets up there, she will likely have switched and will now be "Catta" and begin to meow, or she will be baby Jesus, or Mary or Joseph. Her identity shifts rather quickly and it is hard to keep up.

By this point, Sara Beth probably knows her way around Heather's iPhone better than I do. I am impressed with her ability to correctly identify all the letters and shapes in the various educational games on the phone.

Snow

An actual snow fall happened in Texas again. It rarely gets cold enough for gloves, and so when Sara Beth and I went for a walk out in the snow, I just changed out of my shorts into blue jeans, and put on tennis shoes and a jacket. We walked around the block, and then, when we got back to the house, Sara Beth asked to build a snowman. Since I didn't know where my gloves were, I didn't want to spend an extraordinary amount of time with by bare hands rolling snow balls around. We did get a fairly decent snow man built, and Sara Beth was a good helper, adding little handfuls of snow here and there as touch-up work.

She definitely had a great time helping, but I was ready to go in before she did. As soon as we stepped inside, she asked to get a carrot and buttons to make the nose and eyes on the snowman. I had to wait for the feeling to return to my hands before I was ready do retrieve those items and venture back outside to install them.

Sara Beth loves to sing. She will go around the house singing her own variation on familiar songs. She got this cat piano as a present a while ago, but she has really started to use it a lot recently. It will automatically play familiar songs, and she loves that when you push a button, those songs are then preformed by cats meowing. It is truly as obnoxious as it sounds, though Heather doesn't mind it, and Sara Beth absolutely loves it.

So this past week, I decided to bring out the guitar so we could try singing together. Sara Beth had a wonderful time singing and clapping in time with the guitar. But since no cats were singing along, she got bored with it by the second night and went back to her singing cat piano. I think that is a subtle hint that I need to brush up on my guitar playing skills.

A little earlier in the week, Sara Beth asked to help clean up the driveway after I had messed it all up with a heavy duty tree pruning job. She then proceeded to push her doll around the yard with the broom.

Spring Time

Well the new year has arrived, and the cold winter weather is already leaving, or at least, it is on hiatus. It was back to shorts and t-shirt weather. It was so warm that Heather let Sara Beth play with some of the neighborhood girls splashing in the puddles.

The other girls are 6 and 7 years old, but Sara Beth tries her hardest to keep up with them, and actually does a pretty good job of it. The other girls will slow down so that Sara Beth can catch up as well. If the kids are playing in the middle of the road and a car turns onto the street, Sara Beth will call out to them from the sidewalk, "Watch Out! Car!"

After Christmas, it can be a chore to make sure all the sweets get eaten before they go bad. Fortunately, we have Sara Beth to help. I gave her a cherry cordial as desert one night. She picked it up and popped the whole thing into her mouth, and then she tried to figure out a good way to bite down on it without having to take it back out of her mouth. I had enough time to grab the camera to take a picture before she figured out her plan of attack.

Sara Beth got all sorts of sticker packs for Christmas. On Sunday, she decided she wanted to put all the snowman stickers onto her cloths. They actually stuck on pretty well didn't come off until I ripped them off at bed time.