Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Daddy, what does x mean?

In the limited time it takes to drive from daycare to the house, yesterday The Grape asked for the meaning of the words:

soil
infected
sensitive

She's getting really active/curious about the vocabulary.

Friday, January 30, 2009

BOLO

My wife and I often refer to our children as the Big One and the Little One.

The Big One was born on July 24, 2004. She is also known as The Grape. Why? Well, during the pregnancy, we were getting weekly emails from some parenting/baby site that told you what was going on "in there." It told you when different organs were developing, what was going on with the brain and stuff like that. One week it said that the baby was about the size of a Grape. So we started referring to the baby as "the Grape."

It was a few weeks before there was another size comparison and neither that next one nor any of the others that came after made as good a reference as "the Grape." We liked calling the baby "the Grape," so we kept it.

We've since explained to the Big One why we sometimes call her the Grape and she can recite the story in full detail. But she's not that fond of the nickname, so we use it very sparingly. I don't want her to hate it forever, but I want her to hear it once in a while in the hopes that it will grow on her.

When the second pregnancy came along we wanted another nickname. In both cases, we had names picked for the kids,whether they came out boys or girls. But we didn't want to find out the sex of the baby and we sure as hell didn't want to start using the names before the babies were born.

Since we had sort of scrolled through the list of size comparison nicknames during pregnancy number one, we knew there wasn't anything of interest there. So we went another way. The baby that is now known as "the Little One" was dubbed "the Duece." We weren't as in love with the name "the Duece" as we were "the Grape" but it worked well enough.

On July 4, 2006, "the Duece" came into the world. Sometime in her second year, she oddly became a big, big, big fan of hippos. It had something to do with her seeing the ballerina hippos in Fantasia and another event I can't recall. She was a ballerina hippo for Halloween. We got a full body costume (with head) like you'd see on a mascot and put a tutu on her.

She was slated to get a whole bunch of hippo stuff for Christmas when I began to worry she might lose interest in hippos by the time we turned to December 25 on the calendar. I needn't have worried.

Anyway, this blog is about them and eventually, for them. I wanted to put down some of the experience we have with them in greater detail than I'd be able to recall a month or two down the line.

I wanted to name the blog BOLO (BigOneLittleOne) but the name was taken. So instead, we're going with GrapeHippo. Hope you enjoy it.