Lost Tooth!

DaVinci lost her first baby tooth tonight at dinner!
We had a very mellow day at home today and decided to finally leave the house and hit Hopworks for dinner. When I saw DaVinci biting the pretzel from the side to avoid her loose tooth, I told her she should bite on the pretzel and let it do the work of removing the tooth. She tried to no avail and then little D pipes up - "She should bite on something harder like celery. That will probably work." You know, because he has so much experience with loose teeth at 3.5 years old. Our entrees come, we tell DaVinci to bite into the celery and sure enough, POP! the tooth comes out! She was startled and excited all at the same time. Too cute. I don't think she is ever going to fall asleep tonight because she is waiting for the tooth fairy. In the photo above, you can see the little "Tooth Fairy Pillow" I made for her awhile back. Her tooth is now safely nestled in its pocket.

I cannot believe how small the tooth she lost is... it is tiny, fragile, and nothing at all like the tooth it will be replaced by. I can't help feeling that the same transition is happening to DaVinci all over... I am excited to see how much she is growing and changing, getting stronger, smarter, funnier, more patient, kinder, but at the same time I mourn for the things we are losing, never to get back again - the lisping high voice, the chubby cheeks, pudgy legs, laughing while nursing, baby with a million sign language signs for the world around her, excited to talk about every little thing. What a constant heartache children can be, even when everything is going (mostly) beautifully...

DaVinci as a 6 year-old

One of my close friends Sarah started a daily blog 6 months ago where she posts one photo, every day, and with it a little something about the day. This means that on Christmas, she had to pick one picture to describe a whirlwind of activity which is quite a feat. But more meaningful to me are the days in which they live their regular lives and nothing out of the ordinary happens. Then we get to see the stuff that makes up their lives, the minutiae that makes up a family of four. I love her blog, and the complete picture she is able to capture by posting every day.

This is what I am attempting to create for myself: a memory bank of small moments. The lives that we live as a family right now with a 3 year old, a 6 year old, a pup, 2 cats and 2 chickens in an AMAZING city with wonderful family and friends close at hand is not the life we will live forever. Time with kids passes so quickly, and they are changing every day. I want to remember the funny things they say, the things they do that drive me crazy, the library trips, the awesome evenings that are a family bike trip to Hopworks (which we call HUB-O for a complicated set of reasons).

So let us begin with the moment captured above: my darling daughter. We gave her the middle name DaVinci so she would be inspired by a man who was both an artist and an inventor, and she has grown into this role already. She is constantly possessed by the need to create, to the point where she is incapable of doing anything else before her ideas are on paper.

This morning we are preparing for tonight's New Year's Eve party at our place, to be attended by three other families we have had the honor of being friends with for the last six years. I told DaVinci that perhaps we should have some sort of craft for the kids to do when they got here. We decided on paper lanterns, and DaVinci immediately got to work on a "sample." This was after creating an illustrated shopping list for Z to get groceries with and making a wooden person with a craft kit her Aunt got her for Christmas, all before 10AM.

There are two main downsides of all the creativity. 1) We do not have near enough space to store all the items she creates. 2) Chapped Lips. Like me, her ability to think is directly related to the distance her tongue sticks out of her mouth. No amount of chap stick seems to solve the problem.