Vac-isol-ation

As everyone is aware, the last few months have been pretty much shut down the entire world. Of course we have also had issues like everyone. We have cancelled two vacations, worked from home and are still confused at the need to hoard toilet paper. Well folks, while the world may have stopped, Half Calf sure the heck has not. So since our real vacations were cancelled, we decided to treat quarantine as a “vacation” for blogging purposes since let’s be honest, the point of a vacation is to get a break from your regular routine and activities so if this does not qualify as a break in the normal, we don’t know what does.

We are not sure how it is everywhere else but in Anchorage in spite of all the closures and social distancing, we are actually encouraged to still go outside and use the trails and parks. Even though the parks are open, all the playgrounds were closed for quite a while so we can’t play on the slides (a Half Calf highlight). We take the baby for quite literally 3-4 walks a day on weekends; it is like having a puppy!!! We try to have carry out food once or so a week from local restaurants to help out our neighbors. Many businesses are closed but both Momma and Daddy work for essential companies so have continued working, though from home for most of the time. Thankfully Half Calf is still able to go to daycare part time for a while (only part time due to the ‘gathering size’ limits in place) because on the days he is home, we both struggle to get any work done. Luckily as things have opened back up he has returned to full time daycare. And as things are starting to lift a bit here we are starting to interact more with our friends and even have had a few backyard get togethers.

As for the star of the show, Half Calf is definitely changing. He can’t get enough of going outside. He has vastly expanded his vocabulary and even started two or three word phrases. He has new toys and we even gave him a playroom. Due to working from home, Momma and Daddy both work in the kitchen during the day so we dismantled the bedroom near the kitchen for him by taking apart the bed and shoving all the other furniture against the walls or into the closet. We essentially needed a place close to us for him to play to allow us a fighting chance to get some work tasks completed.

When we are playing outside, most of the time we just walk around the neighborhood. He has a couple of cars he can ride in and he will switch up riding and pushing depending on his mood. Since it starting to warm up we also are starting to get out and do some hiking with him. That is about the only way Momma and Daddy are getting social interaction since we usually go hiking with other folks to have someone different with whom to talk. We have even worked in a couple overnight camping trips. We still are not doing enough of it though because Half Calf doesn’t like riding in his backpack for more than an hour or two before he wants to get down. And once he gets down, the pace slows to a crawl, or worse. Some places we are walking it isn’t possible for him to do it himself since he isn’t strong enough to climb up actual rocky and/or snowy inclines yet. Another big problem with this time of year and a toddler is the daylight. For those who live somewhere other than Alaska, on the shortest day of the year, the Winter Solstice, we have less than 5:30 hours of sunlight. But a month later we are gaining over 5 minutes of light every single day and as the angle of the sun changes, we get more and more twilight too. What that means is that in January we add over 2 hours of actual sunlight; February adds 2.5 hours; March and April add just under 3:00 then it starts to slow back to 2.5 hours again in May but by then sunset is after 11:00pm and it is twilight until 12:30 or more. From June 6th through July 2nd we have twilight for 24 hours a day meaning it is never dark. Anyway the point of that tangent was to say that it is really hard to get the baby to go to bed since it is light long beyond what should be bedtime.

When it comes to vocabulary and recognition of things here are a few of the highlights. Half Calf loves ‘Choo Choos’. We are not even sure where that came from, probably watching television at daycare, but in any case he seems to have quite an affinity for trains of all types. We even got him a train play table for his newly created toy room. He also love ‘Ps’ aka planes. When outside, every time he hears one he is looking to the sky trying to find it. And there are a lot of propeller as well as jet planes around Anchorage so he has a lot to look at for sure. And then one day it suddenly became ‘airplane’ instead of ‘P’ which was quite a shock. One that confuses us a bit is that he really likes ‘Ani’, which is elephant. As long as he has been using that word, it has always been to identify an elephant and honestly we have zero clue how that even came to be. Blue has always been the color he knows and it seemed for the longest time he only knew two words for colors, blue and “not blue”. The “not blue” changed a few times from red to green to yellow but after a few months he can actually pick them all three of them as well as purple and ‘p-p-p’. That is pink by the way. Early on when trying to teach him, we over pronounced the P sound by saying “p-p-p-pink”. Well now he knows that color as only the first part. He has also picked up a couple Spanish words; agua and beso. His daycare is run by a bilingual lady and her Spanish only mother in law so it wasn’t very long before ‘wa-wa’ was replaced with ‘agua’. And there is always kisses happening a dropoff and pickup from daycare so beso has become all of our go to word now when leaving. With all these words, the most exciting step is that in the last couple weeks he has started using them in phrases by saying “yellow car” or “blue plane” or similar. You can almost see his brain getting bigger.

All in all, there is a silver lining even in a pandemic. It has actually been nice having the opportunity to spend time with Half Calf and focus on “him” rather than doing other things. Now on to what you care about since there really isn’t a lot to say when you have not DONE much recently.