Comma Dot Comma

Today was actually Abi’s least muddy day of the four we have spent planting. Her legs and arms are a mess but her face and shirt are not too bad.

Before:

After:

Abi has been helping me plant flowers. By helping, I mean that she dunks her teddy bear in the watering can, tries to stick her hands in the (organic) fertilizer bag, puts dirt and rocks in her dump truck and pushes it around, puts rocks and dirt up to her mouth, shakes her head “no,” and puts them back down, dumps water down her shirt, and otherwise has a wonderful time. She sings “doo, doo, doo” as she toodles around the flowerbed in her tennies and a mud-covered onesie. She has surprisingly little interest in the flowers themselves. She will pick rocks over flowers any day of the week.

The other thing she does is point out every single bird. Our backyard is generally full of birds; we mostly have grackles, doves, finches, and hummingbirds, but every once in awhile a cardinal or an oriole will pass through. She has fine-tuned her bird-spotting skills to the point that she is much better at it than I am. When we were at Home Depot buying mums she gasped with delight at the nondescript bags of mulch piled on a high shelf. “Buurrrrr!!!” she said, pointing. Sure enough, there was a little brown bird resting between stacks away up there near the ceiling.

Today during the morning planting session she got so filthy she had dirt in her eyelashes. “Burr! Burr!” she said, blinking furiously and pointing to the powerlines where some of our usual bird neighbors were perched. She looked like some nature sprite just sprung from the earth to rejoice in it.

Abi is wild about, and with, her daddy. When he is on the scene, there is way more shouting, laughing, careening around (both with and without things on her head) and throwing herself wildly backwards without considering what might be behind. With just me, there is way more kissing and chatting and feeding of stuffed animals. One of her favorite activities to do with me is to read a book together with a doll or stuffed animal, while I make the doll interact with both the images on the page and Abi; once I got her to pantomime most of a book by following the example of her baby doll. Some of her favorite things to do with her dad are dance while he plays guitar, bounce on the bed, and play I’m Gonna Get You. As she does crazy things with her daddy, she constantly watches me to see how I’m taking it. I’m sure I could put the kibosh on the iffier activities with just a worried look if I wanted to. This evening, a gleeful Abi performed the amazing feat of maintaining eye contact with me and a firm grip on her baby doll while being tossed repeatedly into the air by her dad, laughing maniacally all the while. It amuses me that our parenting styles, and her responses to them, are so straight-up gender-stereotypical. Whodathunk? Of course, Abi and I have our loud, zany moments and Dr. G and she have their quiet, cuddly ones. Fun times are had by all.

Dr. G, Abi and I were all in the car. There were happy little sounds coming from Abi’s car seat as Dr. G told me some amusing story that I have since forgotten, except that it ended with a loud, sarcastic, “Daaaannnng!” which I found funny enough to repeat: “Daaaannng!” We didn’t notice that it had grown silent in the back seat until we heard the shout of a sweet little voice, adding her contribution: “Daaaannne!”

“We have to stop saying words like that,” said Dr. G, once we had quit laughing. We never can tell what she is listening to (the other day the mention of broccoli in a context unrelated to Abi still produced a loud “mmmmmm!” and enthusiastic nodding) or what she will try to repeat. She’s become quite the little playback machine.

After sprinting out of the gate as an early talker with a fairly large vocabulary set, Abigail sort of meandered off the side of the spoken words track and went looking for flowers. She says almost none of her early words anymore: hi, baby, bubbles, and dada have all disappeared, though daddy and bye-bye have just made a recent comeback. Though they’ve been replaced with a few other words (no, blech, tickle-tickle, mmmmm, and “nan” which is her pronunciation of fan), for the most part she prefers to rely on body language and single syllables. I can’t tell you how tired I am of the multipurpose “na!” which has been going on for about two weeks, after she got tired of “ma” and “dee”).

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Since I started this post on Saturday, Abigail has decided to try talking some more. I hear “up” and “bye-bye” all day long, and she also enjoys whispering “hat.” She has special relish for words with the long o sound. She looks into the toilet and says “Poooooop! Poooooop! Blech!” She says “djoooooo” for both juice and shoes. She suddenly has started on the animals sounds as well. I guess she knew I was going to write about her vocab slowdown so she decided to re-up.

I own exactly one pair of sexy shoes. They are sleek, shiny, strappy, open-toed heels in a subdued tangerine color with cream details. This being Arizona, and me not being on the Scottsdale clubbing circuit, I’ve had only one or two occasions to wear them in the last four years. Until recently. Perhaps not coincidentally, my one sexy pair of shoes is also Abigail’s absolute favorite pair. Several times a week she rummages in my closet and hauls them out to play with. Even if they are on opposite sides of the closet from each other, she perseveres until she finds both. Often, just playing with them is not enough; she wants to see how they look on mommy’s feet. I’ve found that they class up everything from saggy gym shorts to blueberry-stained tank tops. There’s nothing like sashaying around in a pair of nice shoes to make one realize the depths of fashion faux pas to which one has fallen.

So I have a few bad habits. One of these is occasionally letting Abigail play in the open refrigerator or freezer while I am prepping her meal. She only has access to frozen bags of veggies and plastic bottles, so the damage potential is limited and I get five minutes without whining and leg-clinging. She likes to rummage around for awhile and then put her dolls on the shelf and shut the door on them. This morning I forgot about an open box of chocolate-covered ice cream bars that was on a low shelf. By the time I registered what Abi was doing, she had bitten through the wrappers of at least five of them, and her face was totally smeared with chocolate and ice cream. Only two bars escaped unscathed. Whoops! I guess we are doing an unofficial re-test of her milk protein intolerance. She seemed okay today.

One of the more impressive sights I remember from Benin is the women balancing huge baskets or jugs of water on their heads, even when walking long distances over rough terrain. They looked so strong and graceful that I would wish for a moment that I, too, could be one of them. One of the sweetest sights in Benin was seeing these same women introduce the skill to their toddler girls. Once in awhile I would spot a tiny girl, her hair a mass of fuzzy ponytails, walking ramrod straight next to her mother with an empty cup or cereal bowl nestled in a ring of cloth on her head. She would let her hands stray up to her head and then stop, remembering she was supposed to do it without hands. She wore an expression of complete concentration and pride, carefully placing each bare foot on the dusty road to keep from jostling the cup.

Today Abigail had that same expression, that same careful walk, though she wasn’t balancing anything on her head. She was helping me bring in the groceries. Well, a grocery. Abi successfully carried an avocado from the back of the car all the way into the house to the kitchen table. She held the avocado out in front of her, gripped in two hands, and whenever she felt a little wobbly, she’d clutch it protectively to her chest until she stabilized. Then it would go back out to arm’s length. Our driveway and sidewalk are uneven so she had to navigate a few bumps, and get help to get over the door lintel, but she made it. She accepted the avocado as her solemn duty and she fulfilled her responsibility without even trying to bite it until she made it to the kitchen. She was A Big Girl.

Abigail is interested in letters. On her bedroom door, her name is spelled out in colorful paper letters that came home with her from the NICU at the hospital, and whenever she points to it, I take her over there and let her touch them. I say “That’s your name– Abigail!” Then I carefully spell it out, pointing to each letter. We’ve been doing this several times a week for at least couple months. A few days ago as we were lounging companionably together on the floor of her room, she pointed at the door and said, “A-B-eh-G-eh-eh-eh.” In response to my astonishment and delight, she did it again. Then she did it the next day for her dad. At first I thought she had simply memorized the sounds I say when I spell her name, but she has definitely made the connection to letters. Karen gave her some blocks with letters on them for her birthday, and yesterday Abi started pulling them out of the bin, saying, “B! G!” She didn’t actually find the B and the G, but she had clearly associated those shapes and the shapes on her door. The past several times I’ve read her books, she’s pointed, instead of at pictures she really likes, at the words on the pages and the numbers on the barcodes on the back. That’s one of the things I didn’t anticipate about being a mother– reading aloud strings of numbers off the backs of books. If Abi turns out to be a major geek (in the good, smart, experty sense of the term) I will someday tell her this story of How She Got Her Start. “You were definitely a fan of a good serial number as a baby!”