My Favourite Things

Lana is at an age now where she has a lot of likes and dislikes. She has many favourite things - favourite songs to sing, favourite things to do, favourite toys to play with.

Among her favourite things to play with is Lego - the "Duplo" kind that is more suitable for two year olds than the itty bitty kind. She has a couple of sets of lego, including a "Bob the Builder" (formerly known as Bobby DooDah), a zoo set including a crocodile, a couple of lions, an elephant and a giraffe, and a farm set with a few farm animals. She can play lego for hours!

Lana also loves to play with play dough - although we insist on her sitting in her chair to play with it (I don't want it caked into every corner of the house!). For some reason, she always wants to play with the green colour and then she will tell me what she wants me to make. Sometimes it's a crocodile, or Mickey Mouse, or a ball. Lana mostly will squish it, or roll it, or poke it with her fingers - but her creative formation skills are not yet on the "Sculptor" level yet. It's quite therapeutic though just to mush it. No wonder Lana likes it! 

Lana's always been a big fan of playing with balls and she has a bunch of different types of balls. She has a couple of bouncy balls, an inflatable beach ball, soft balls that rattle, the list goes on and on. She loves to throw and "catch" (although her "catching" at the moment is just holding her arms out and hoping that Mummy can manage to make the ball land in her arms - but hey, that's a start!!)

One thing that Lana loves to do is to go out to the park. Nearly every afternoon when I'm at the hospital, our helper will take Lana downstairs to the park at our complex. Lana's met so many little friends there - and since I'm not going with her, I don't even know them all. But over the past couple of months, I've had many people - both adults and children - say to me in passing "Hi Lana's mummy!". I never have a clue who they are, but they all know Lana from the park. On the weekends, Bernard and I will often take Lana to one of the larger parks around our area. It's a bit more of a walk away, but there's a lot more to do there. Lana's a bit of a daredevil - she will attempt to climb things which are obviously too large for a two year old, giving Bernard and I a mini-heart attack! She is highly independent as well and often doesn't want any help with these climbs - but we always stand behind her (or under her) just in case. 

Lana has a favourite story - it's "The Gruffalo". It's a very fun book, it rhymes so it's a great read for kids this age. The story is about a mouse who takes a walk in the woods and these predators want to eat him - but he makes up a creature, the Gruffalo, to scare them away. After a while, he actually comes face to face with a REAL Gruffalo who wants to eat him! Lana can actually recite nearly the entire book - it's so cute. Sometimes I'll just hear her mumbling to herself, "A mouse took a stroll through the deep dark wood. A fox saw the mouse and the mouse looked good!"

When Lana is going to sleep, she often will ask for Bernard or I to sing to her. She has a few favourite songs that she always asks for. First of all is "Little Peter Rabbit had a fly upon his nose" (which also turns into Little Gruffalo had a fly upon his nose, or Little Elmo, or Little Tigger, or whoever else happened to have a fly upon their nose). Then she will ask for "Jesus Loves Me" too. Sometimes she will sing along, but often she just listens as she falls asleep.

One of Lana's latest little "quirks" is that she insists on picking which shoes Mummy will wear - and she has a favourite pair of Mummy's shoes too obviously, since every single day for the past month, she's insisted on me wearing my black Mary Jane crocs. I don't really mind - I don't care that much which shoes I have on anyway. But one day, I happened to put on a different pair of shoes and Lana didn't notice until we were already out of the house. When she DID notice, she had a mini-melt down. "Black croc shoes, Mummy!!" 

I'm sure that if I thought about it, I could name another hundred or so of Lana's favourite things - she is that opinionated!! But these are some of the main things that come to mind :) 

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens

Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens

Brown paper packages tied up with strings

These are a few of my favorite things

- My Favourite Things, from Sound of Music