Robot Maintenance

Alice at Papa and Gamy's house for T-Day+1.

We got a new Roomba robot recently and Alice really likes it.  She loves pushing the buttons and running away as its starts cleaning.  The last few days she has started helping me clean the robot.  She brings her step stool into the kitchen and helps wipe down the Roomba after a cleaning.  She is very interested in robot maintenance and asks me what parts are called (listening closely to answers) and wants to help clean each piece.  Its fun and its generally awesome that Alice will grow up with robots. :-)

Alice understands it to be asleep when it is recharging on its base (a.k.a. its bed).  Also, the robot is often silly.

Alice learns to pedal

It took Alice a while to understand the concept of pedeling,
but she finally got it last Friday.

She has taken a few spills on the trike,
but she always gets back up and tries again.

Thats my Girl!

Room 10 Montage

Dora, Dora, Dora the Explorer

We avoided Dora as long as possible.  We knew an end to the no-Dora era was coming to a close when she came home from a visit to Grandma Didi's house with Dora Pj's, which became her favorite.  Then, she started Spanish classes at school  and they use Dora to teach the kids spanish.  So when we asked Alice one day what she wanted to watch and she enthusiatically yelled "DORI" we knew it was over.

 

Every since she has started watching Dora, she has not wanted to watch a single movie...no Totoro, no Iron Giant, no Anastasia.  Although we dreaded Alice succumbing to the Dora bandwagon, we have noticed some benefits to her watching the show.  She is getting better at counting, following directions and answering questions.  She has also started to create her own Dora pretend games.  We take turns playing "Swiper de Box" (she has a hard time saying Fox) and Alice and Daddy create maps to follow to find the items Swiper takes.

Maybe I'm just trying to rationalize how something we dreaded but could not avoid, could actually turn out to be something beneficial and educational for Alice...and therefore was not as loathsome as we feared ;-)