Comma Dot Comma

I’ve been collecting little ideas for posts over the past few days but haven’t got around to posting any of them. So let’s do a mini-round-up.

The Scream.
Abigail has been relishing the sound of her scream lately. She thinks it’s just right for when she is happy, excited, frustrated, or upset, which means pretty much all the time. It is not so enjoyable for the rest of us, since the pitch of her scream is somewhere between a tea kettle and a dog whistle.

Baby Cannot Live on Bluberries Alone.
Though Abigail would certainly be willing to give it a shot. They have been her favorite food since they day she first tasted them. I give her thawed wild Maine blueberries for breakfast because they are smaller and sweeter than fresh ones and I don’t have to cut them in half. They also stain everything. I take her out in public with a blotchy purple face and hands so blue that she looks oxygen-deprived. Bib or no bib, her clothes always get covered in blueberry juice, more so now that she has learned to shovel berries into her mouth by the fistful, letting the strays rain down upon her lap. Today I let her eat in just her diaper, and now whenever I change her, I gasp at what look like giant bruises on her torso and thighs. Then I remember– it’s just the blueberries.

Baby Steps.
Is it walking or not? That’s the question. As with every push forward in Abigail’s development, these things are not either/or. Abi has been practicing standing and tipping over for a few weeks, trying to get her feet under her as she does, and sometimes succeeding. Today and yesterday she’s become more interested in walking to her goal than crawling to it. As I was holding her hands this morning while she teetered and swayed toward the recycle bin, I thought, “She is nowhere near walking.” Then, a few hours later, she stood up near me and took two steps without tipping over at all. She just matter-of-factly clutched my neck and gave me a nice zerbert. She was emboldened enough from that experience to try walking to a ball just lying on the open floor a few feet away. Immediate face plant, of course, but now she thinks that maybe she can do it. Once the “maybe” is lodged in her little brain, how far can the reality be?

Over the past few days Abigail has become fanatic in her passion for books. She must have some big cognitive or verbal developmental leap in the works. If she is playing on her own, she tries to read them by herself until she gets frustrated. Then she calls me over and we read books together, one after the other, over and over. She cries each time a book is finished and hands it to me to be read again. She even wants to read the books she normally doesn’t like, such as The Giant Jam Sandwich, which is more of a big kid book and doesn’t have much to attract her yet.

This morning I decided to do an experiment. I went through the entire house and gathered up all her books. I lined them up on a low bookshelf and let Abi choose which books to read and how many times to read each one. I wasn’t going to stop reading until she stopped asking. The results:

42 consecutive minutes of reading time
13 books read cover to cover
1 of those read 2 times in a row
2 of those read 3 times in a row
1 of those read 6 times in a row
2 books partially read and discarded
prefers books with photos
prefers books with repetition or rhyme
prefers elaborate pictures to simple ones

We were both feeling antsy and drained by the time she finally cried uncle and went to knock over block towers and practice her standing and walking. I bet she takes a long nap.

Caring for Abigail has made me notice how impressive human beings really are. As I watch her learn how to be human, I often find myself thinking, “Wow, that is really complicated. How cool that we can just do it without thinking!” Today she gave herself a lesson in physics by alternately sticking a magnet to the fridge and then trying to get it to stick to her dad’s face. It’s a perfectly reasonable assumption that something sticky would stick to both a face and fridge, and yet there was some rule at work that she could not identify, no matter how many times she tried it out. The knowledge we take for granted! But soon enough even Abi will have her own rudimentary rules about magnets figured out.

I’m particularly fascinated by her growing social sophistication. Okay, maybe “sophistication” is too strong a word– she attempted to play with another baby yesterday by scooting up to her and sticking her pointer finger into her head. She ran out of ideas for what to do after that. But at home, she has learned to use different voices for different situations. I’ve written in the past about her well-developed whining techniques. But she also has her whispery, high-pitched baby-talk for use with her dolls and stuffed animals; her loud screeches for wrestling and chasing games; her ordinary conversational voice, with both questions and statements; and just this week she has developed a silly voice for when she is trying to be funny. It’s sort of a baby’s version of a gravelly grandpa voice. She pulls her cheeks back into a wide smile/grimace and lets loose with this deep-throated, scratchy set of syllables: “Guy guy guy guy chai chai zzzzzzzztttthhhpppppttt”! She adds a fake laugh or a fake cough for good measure. The more flying spit is involved, the funnier she thinks it is.

She was pulling out all the stops today at lunch. She has this game where she dunks her hands into any pureed food and then claps them so the food splatters everywhere. The first few times she did it, I laughed quite a bit. Then I decided that the clean-up for this particular funny game was a little much. No more laughing. So Abi does the hand-dunk into some oatmeal peach puree and sends it flying everywhere. She laughs. I don’t laugh. She fake laughs and ppppttttthhhhs her tongue. I still don’t laugh. So she adds the grandpa voice and goes in for another hand-dunk. The grandpa voice tips me over the edge and I laugh after all. Oh well. It wouldn’t be an Abi day if I didn’t have to clean up some kind of slime.

This was one of those days where I just appreciated Abigail’s little ways. Lately if she finds some tiny item on the ground that she is not sure about, she offers it to me instead of putting it straight into her mouth. Today I got offered a piece of wet paper, part of an oleander leaf, and some gummed up graham cracker. She holds each item up above her head, pinched between her thumb and forefinger, blinking at me until I either take it or declare it ok. I LOVE that. It saves me so many fishing trips in Abi’s mouth. I unfortunately did not get offered a handful of hard, sharp, broken rice noodles that had fallen out of an instant soup pack. She could tell they were food of some kind and thought they were fair game, and was therefore offended that I would try to take them from her mouth. We had a bit of a tussle over it, in fact. I won because I’m the mom.

She has also recently decided that I am much better at playing with her toys than she is. She will pick up a favorite toy, hold it out to me, and wait to see what I do with it. Her favorite entertainment is when I stage little puppet shows with her stuffed animals. Sometimes after I play with a toy with her, she will try to imitate it a bit later. I saw her load up a dump truck with old pacifiers today and push it around experimentally. She seemed disappointed. It’s that age-old problem of toys always seeming way cooler when the big kids are using them.

There are a few things I do that will cause Abi to stop whatever she is doing, race over to me, and cling on for dear life. The first is my using any form of the word “go,” as in, “I’m going to the bathroom, I’ll be right back.” The second is if I cough or sneeze. When she was littler, coughs and sneezes made her cry; now they seem to fill her with concern for my well being. Or maybe she is scared out of her mind and coming over for a little reassurance; it’s hard to tell what that passionate hug and searching gaze mean, exactly. It always feels nice to have someone drop everything and rush to be with me, though I do miss going to the bathroom by myself.

Ouch. Tooth number four is turning out to be a doozy. Abigail got her two bottom teeth without much trouble during the same week when she was seven months old, and this week, at ten and a half months, her top two finally started coming in. The left tooth made her fussy for a few days while it broke through those last bits of swollen gum tissue, but the right one is YYOWWWCH. The only way Abi is able to suck her bottle is if we give her a bowl of ice chips first to numb her mouth. We have hours of night waking that are only solved by tylenol. We have blood and tears from even minor face bumps. She won’t let us look at it or touch it. The best way to get a view is for her dad to turn her upside down against his shoulder. The gleeful upside-down smile reveals all– a raggedy red gum with a few sharp edges poking through. Maybe the dread tooth will finish the worst part of its journey tonight. Here’s hoping.

The painful mouth hasn’t stopped her from adventures in ambulation. The grandparents got to witness her taking a few steps on the webcam yesterday– she was dying to pry the keys off the laptop and lunged toward it from the piece of furniture she was holding on to. It doesn’t really count as walking since she just managed to keep her feet under her for a moment as she toppled over, but she’s definitely got the idea into her head now. This afternoon I watched her take a step that ended with a splashdown in the baby pool. To me it seems like her balance and coordination are still pretty far from actual walking, but we all know Abi– she knows how to persevere! Every time her feet touch the floor she takes advantage of the opportunity for another practice session. Squats, leans, bends, sidesteps, lifts… I should be making an exercise video of the baby calisthenics going on in this house. Maybe we could get Abi some extra dough for her college fund.

Motherhood has forced me to face the fact that I am still a space cadet. As much of a space cadet as I was in kindergarten, when I would show up to class 30 minutes late because it took me that long to walk the half a block to school. In my personal and professional life I’ve developed enough workarounds that I sometimes forget how easily I drift into la la land. I take notes and doodle during meetings, I ask questions at regular intervals in personal conversations, I make it a point not to spend more than 30 minutes driving if I can help it, and so on. But having an active, curious baby that is always on the verge of getting into some kind of scrape really highlights one’s shortcomings. There are times when I have been completely sure that I am keeping a close eye on her and then something will happen– Dr. G will come in and say, “Do you realize that Abi has eaten a third of that cardboard tube you gave her to play with?” and I will suddenly jolt into full awareness. Whoops. The fear that something terrible will happen on my watch is feeding vivid Abi-in-peril anxiety dreams. Last night there were two. In the first, she had smashed her arm through a plate glass window and was resting it on the jagged edge. It hadn’t cut her yet, but I knew there was no way I could reach her before it did. In the next, I had barricaded her away from a flooded room to protect her from drowning, only to watch her choke on something she had picked up from the ground. Abi didn’t turn blue– instead she got thinner and thinner and developed two black eyes as I tried to navigate all those barriers in time to help her. As usual, I woke before the horrible consequence occurred. Is there a way to stop being a daydreamer? I think I’m probably incorrigible, but I sure would like to sleep better.

It looks like wheat is ok! All her stool tests came back negative for any blood. She did have an eczema outbreak this last week, but I suspect that it is from daily exposure to chlorinated water rather than any food. On to the oat test…

Abigail has been focusing intently on her large motor skills, practicing standing without assistance (her record is 10 seconds), picking up large objects while freestanding (a size 5 soccer ball, her baby piano), squatting down to get things and standing back up, and pushing objects of furniture around while walking. She especially enjoys pushing her empty carseat box and the half-full laundry bin. She also is working on increasing her distance while walking and holding mama’s or dada’s hands, though her technique is a good candidate for the Ministry of Silly Walks. She often can’t get her toes pointed quite in the right direction and takes giant lunges or swings her legs out in arcs.

Two new teeth on top, finally. Well, at least one– the other is still trying to break through.

She is so tall we had to get her a new carseat– she couldn’t make it to the one-year mark in her infant carrier. She still has to be rear-facing but now she has more room to scrunch her feet up.

Here is a photo of the creek near the house in Oregon, as described in the post The Sponge:

And a link to a video of her swimming technique, as described in the post Tadpole:

Abigail Swims

How did Abigail know? After church on Sunday, I was holding her and standing in a small group of women, chatting. One of them was going through an especially hard time– a loss in her family– and was feeling quite sad. Abigail suddenly reached out to this friend, wanting to be held. My friend took her and Abi snuggled up against her chest for awhile. My friend got to experience the satisfaction of a heartfelt Abi cuddle, an occasion not to be missed if you can get it. I was really surprised that stranger-averse Abi, who has only met the woman briefly on a few occasions, wanted to hug her. Yet she blessed her with real comfort in a difficult time. To me, it felt like a confirmation of something I have suspected for awhile: that it is part of Abi’s destiny to be a profound blessing to others, just by being herself. I remember the utter joy of spotting a glittering quarter on the sidewalk as a child– the world of possibilities and special favor such a find can open up!– and I see a similar hopeful delight bloom on the faces of those who win a smile or a hug or a baby-babble conversation from Abigail. At her best, Abigail can clear the air, brighten the room, dissolve the loneliness and anxiety that seem so present wherever our fellow humans are gathered. And I am no less hopeful, no less delighted, though I receive her smiles and hugs every day. To be honest, I can’t believe my luck. Not that I really think it is luck at all. Praise God from whom all blessings flow.

“Hush, little baby, don’t say a word,” I sang to Abigail tonight. She had finally settled in my arms and her eyes had been closed about 30 seconds, long enough for me to hope we were done with the nightly struggle to fall asleep. Then she opened her mouth and began to sing, eyes still closed. For Abigail, singing is just like babbling except that she draws out the syllables and moves between high and low registers as she does so, like a scat singer. Her closed-eye singing was especially inspired. After a few bars she sleepily cracked an eye open for a moment, took a deep breath, and hit her money note: BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA BAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! Then she snuggled back down in my arms, quiet and still; sweet slumber had arrived.

I feel Abigail’s toddlerdom looming. There are portents everywhere, from her decision the other day to mash my face with both hands when she was upset about taking a nap, to her growing willingness to crawl off and explore parts of the house where I am not. One especially interesting way that I see her personality and independence growing is in her reactions when she is disappointed– either not allowed to do something she wants, or forced to do something she doesn’t. For most of her life, if we just took her out of the way of temptation (into another room, distract her with a more appropriate object), she has calmly acquiesced without protest. Confiscate the newspaper? Give her a board book instead? Okay, sure, this is nice too. Now she is not so easily fooled. Last night it took her two pages of a book to realize that her Dada had left the room, and she smacked the book away and started crying. She has a very effective smacking-things-away maneuver when she suspects she is being redirected. She uses a vigorous, horizontal windshield-wiper motion to disdainfully sweep clear anything within the radius of her arms.

She also complains verbally. I find it so cute that it is hard to show her I am taking her concerns seriously. I don’t know where she learned the exact right tone for whining (is that innate?) but she trots it out whenever she is crying about something inessential, such as having to take a shower after swim lessons or waiting five minutes for me to get her out of her crib or being unable to open the pantry door because her mama has finally gotten disciplined about making sure that it is latched shut. She goes on and on in her baby babble, between sobs, utterly aggrieved: (sob, sob) Da dee DIE djay djee! (sob sob) Ny ny no babababBABABA ny nee no! (sob, sob!)

Usually what I do is murmur sympathetically, and try to give her the words she needs for her feelings: Yes, I know exactly what you mean, Abi. You feel frustrated when you can’t open the door, don’t you? Yes, Abi, sweetie, I feel sad too when Daddy leaves. It is sad! But that’s okay, we will have fun chasing each other around the ottoman! Doesn’t that sound fun? I hand her a stuffed animal, which she hugs to her chest and envelops with her whole body, curling around it in a fetal position, and then she feels better and starts using her usual sweet voice. Mama! Mamamamama! Ba bee bo bo boo? Ba da DO da da! That’s more like it, my dear.