She Sings

The baby.  Whenever she hears music, she "sings" along.  And Av taught her to clap her hands, so now she does that, too.  She sits up and holds one hand out and slaps it with the other. 

"The Land of Rainbows"

in watercolor, by Av, this morning:

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes...

Last night I dreamed I looked at my younger daughter and noticed her hair had grown long, her eyes were an emerald green instead of cobalt blue like they are now, and she was running and talking.  My dream self panicked - omg, when did this happen?  I missed so much all of a sudden she looks like Av and I can't tell them apart except one's a little shorter than the other!

It's not hard to guess the psychological origin of this dream.  It captures how I feel on a daily basis.  Yesterday I was noticing El's hair starting to thicken a little and lengthen into tiny curls in the back.  Someone had commented on her blue eyes and I tried to remember when Av's eyes had started to slowly change.  I've been noticing how much more complex El's "language" is getting, how good she's getting at pulling herself up to standing, even taking a step or two now and then, holding onto the couch or table.  Every day she changes.  I wish I had time to write every day, but it's hard, as everyone knows.  Taking care of kids is time-consuming.  Sometimes something will happen in the middle of the day and I'll try to imprint it on my brain, try to start right away forming the sentences I will use to describe it, in an attempt to hold it in my memory.  That's what this blog is really for, anyway - so that I won't forget.  Because you do forget.  And I'm not sure why it seems important to remember the details, but it does.  Maybe because everybody loves to hear stories about themselves when they were kids.  I mean, as long as those stories are mostly positive and not, "Remember when you were six and you wouldn't eat anything but boogers and cat food?"  That might not be so nice to be reminded of.  But just in case my memory is not the steel trap I wish it was, or God forbid I'm drooling in a wheelchair by the time my kids start wanting to hear this stuff, I'm putting down as much as I can.  On the other hand, I guess you could argue that you can go overboard taking pictures and video and writing about the stuff you do - I mean when do you fit actual living into your schedule, right?  And then later when you're looking at pictures and watching video and reading journal entries, you're sacrificing your valuable time remembering the past instead of doing stuff in the present.

I might be over-thinking this a tad.

After all, it's not every day your crawling baby says her first inappropriate word.  Surely that ought to be recorded for all time in some public forum.  Okay, sure, I'll tell the story, you don't have to beg.  It was this past Saturday, and we were all bumbling around the house getting ready to go somewhere.  I happened to be standing at the bottom of the staircase when El climbed up one step.  This was the first time she had done this.  GW was standing at the top and we caught each other's eye, both of our expressions saying "Oh, boy, here we go!"  I said it out loud: "Oh, man, we've gotta go out and buy a gate today!"  We had already talked about doing it soon, but we'd thought we had more time.  "Crap!" I muttered absent-mindedly.  "Wap!" yelled the baby in exactly the same tone.  We burst out laughing, of course, and El beamed, quite proud of herself.

Her babbles over the past week have been more multisyllabic, and are starting to sound like real words and phrases.  Her favorites now are "Ooo-at!"  which of course sounds like "Who dat?" and "Uh-dat!" and "Ooooooh, yuh!"  Sometimes she belts them all out together in a long string.  She does say "Uh, oh" although she doesn't necessarily associate it with something dropping or some other calamity, she just likes to say it.  She does have "Bye-bye" down pat, though, and always accompanies it with her twisty wristy wave.  Bye-bye is probably her official first word.  She's growing up, already.

Even with Av, it can be hard to keep up with the changes.  Once they go to school or somewhere and they're gone from you for a period of time during the day, being influenced by other people, things move impossibly fast.  Av is a super senior at pre-school now, and it's like her second home.  One of their teachers from last year showed up the other day to say hello, and she was mobbed by the kids like she was Madonna in 1988.  I hadn't really thought about how attached they had become to her after just one school year - you forget what teachers meant to you when you were young.  They're like aunts and uncles, really.  Anyway on the way home from school that day, Teacher M was al Av talked about.  So sweet, how big her heart is.  I'm impressed by it almost on a daily basis, watching her with her little sis.  Although  it's obvious that in some ways it's been hard on Av, the baby coming, she always treats El so kindly.  Sometimes Av is lonely and I feel terrible about that.  Not guilty, exactly, but it's painful to see and I want to be able to do something about it.  I'm never sure if there isn't something I can do, some way I could be a better parent.  There probably is.  I know that someday I'll be apologizing to her for this year, the year Mom was so exhausted from taking care of our little baby that I missed out on a lot of play time and other stuff with my first baby.  But that's the way it goes, and I know that every parent in this position feels exactly the same way, at least sometimes, and I know that most of the time everything turns out alright.  Not to go all Hallmark, but the trick, I think, is gratitude.  And boy, oh boy, am I grateful for these two girls.

Some Highlights of El's Personality, 8 months

*Wrists and ankle roll.  Two wrists going means "Pick me up!"  One wrist going is a friendly wave, usually accompanied by "Dah dah!" which is her way of saying bye-bye.
*Bite-a-kiss.  This is when she dives at your face with mouth wide open, usually hell-bent for your nose.  If she gets it she bites it (gently, gotta give her some credit) and slobbers on it.  If you manage to turn your head away in time, she giggles and tries again.  Repeat. Sometimes she'll finally settle for your cheek, if you're persistent enough about keeping your nose out of reach, but in that case she'll bite you harder.  Punishment, I guess. 
*Loves an echo.  She yells in stairwells, vocalizes into plastic cups, etc. 
*Tongue sticks out between lips when concentrating.
*Favorite toy: sunglasses, especially when they can be pulled from someone's face.
*Fascinated by people's hair, since birth.
*Favorite thing to do outdoors:  rake up handfuls of grass and quickly stuff them in her mouth.
*Points and yells "That!"
*Big open-mouth smile.  Heart-melting when it's directed at you, but somehow even cuter in profile.
*Current raison d'etre: standing up.

Yeah, You're Gonna See These on Your Christmas Card This Year.

What a Weird Day

Weird good...mostly.  The bad part is we had flooding rains - a really unusual trailing line-up of storms that dumped almost 2 feet of rain on us over the past couple days.  That's a third of the amount of rain we usually get in a year.  And none of the storms were hurricanes or even tropical storm-grade.  The last time we had this much rain was during the one-two punch of Dennis and Floyd back in 1999.  Before that, the last rain this big was in 1871.  Our town has been all over the weather channel today.  Fortunately we have not been personally affected other than GW not being able to go to work and Av being home from school.  In fact we got to have a fun romp in the "rivers" on the sides of our street, and later we saw a huge double rainbow.  I tried to get a picture of it but my camera couldn't capture the colors.

Today was me & GW's 10th wedding anniversary.  The whole family is getting over a stomach virus, in addition to being trapped in the house because of the rain, so we didn't go out.  We broke out our wedding and honeymoon pictures and paraphrenalia and looked through it all with Av.  She thought that was pretty cool.  She's trying to understand what a wedding is, what it means to get married.  Later we made cupcakes.

After we put the kids to bed I came back downstairs to check my email.  Being one of the presidents of the board at Av's school this year means that I have to help decide whether the kids will have school tomorrow, and I knew people would be emailing to ask what the deal is.  Anyway I was greeted in the family room by three tiny baby tree frogs, perched in various places near the back door.  One of them was no bigger than my pinky finger nail. They must have snuck in while we were outside playing in the lake where our back yard used to be.  I thought about finding something to keep them in so Av could see them tomorrow, but I don't really have anything that would serve that purpose and I was afraid I'd end up hurting them.  So I got them to jump into a water cup one by one and set them outside on the patio.  I think it's good luck when frogs get in your house.  Right?  Or is it just that they lower your bug population?  Gee, a rainbow, tree frogs, big anniversary, weird storms....weird day.  Oh, and a poltergeist stole our Bumbo seat.

A Great Big Red Mad Mad Baby Head

I wrote this somewhere around September 10th.  Not sure why I didn't put it up, but here it is now.  Jeez - out of order posts.  How sloppy of me.


Having one's tonsils out comes with many privileges: eating lots of popsicles and ice cream, watching lots of movies, getting dibs on the computer to play games, having your grandmother travel 500 miles to help serve your every need, to name a few.  Playing on your parents' sympathies in the week following surgery is bound to work, so you might eek out many other little bonuses along the way.  Tonight Av cashed in a bunch of her bargaining chips and offered to forego bedtime stories in exchange for being allowed to stay up an extra half hour to watch Diego.  She knew I would cave, seeing as how Daddy was working late and I was on my own with her and a tired 7-month-old with pooping problems.  All she had to do was crank her voice up an octave and let it waver a bit.  She was fully prepared to squeeze out a couple of tears, if necessary, but since I immediately rolled over like a hound dog with heat stroke, she didn't have to go that far.  But something on Diego didn't sit right with her.  I don't know what it was, but she complained that it didn't make any sense and started making up alternate endings for this apparently inadequate episode, which she turned off about 15 minutes in.  I wish I'd done a better job of recording the things she said.  I was dealing with El and not paying close enough attention, but all of a sudden I realized that Av was rolling out all this wildly creative stuff.  She has a way of talking off the top of her head like a rapper on open mic night.  She looks around the room while she's doing it, taking whatever she sees and riffing on it - hence the great big red mad mad baby head that ended up in her story as a bizarre creature that Diego had to rescue from a pit of hot lava.  I think she gets this ability from GW - he's creative off the top of his head like that.  Pulls stuff from God-knows-where and works it into something hilarious.

Well, El sure is a great big red mad mad baby head today.  Poor little girl.  As much as she wants to eat solid food, it seems her digestive system isn't ready yet.  It makes weaning her off the nursing-five-times-a-night thing a hard sell.  Good thing she's so damn cute and cuddly.