Comma Dot Comma

I discovered Abigail’s instinctive love for chocolate a couple months ago when I gave her a chocolate bar to carry in while we were toting groceries from the car to the house. By the time I dropped off my double-armful of bags and met up with her on the doorstep, she had somehow peeled the wrapper back and taken a huge bite. Her little chipmunk cheeks were a-working as she tried to gulp it before I could get it out of her mouth. I just let her swallow. She cried for awhile after I wrested the rest of the bar from her grasp. Of course, she cannot have chocolate because it contains milk. This is sad.

There is one brand of chocolate chips, Enjoy Life, that are soy- and dairy-free and delicious, though too expensive to buy regularly. We opened a bag today to make some dairy-free chocolate chip cookies and Dr. G. offered the Wee Girlie a few chips. She solemnly chewed them one by one, then came and asked for the bag. Dr. G. held the open bag for her, thinking our timid little eater would take just one or two. But, of course, she went for the biggest possible handful. They were pitter-pattering on the tile as she rushed away with her booty. I offered my empty cupped hand for her to put them in. She dutifully deposited her chocolate, then leaned over and hoovered up the whole pile like a bottom-feeding carp. I could feel her little lips maneuvering around on my palm to make sure she didn’t miss any. Chocolatey saliva leaked out the corners of her mouth as she sucked and chewed the giant mouthful. Then she started dancing around and climbed up her toy shelf to crow from the top. Happy girl.

“This feels somehow very wrong,” I said to Dr. G. “It’s fine! It’s just your strict childhood talking! We’ll feed her a diet of chocolate chips and Craisins from now on,” he replied. Abi heard him mention Craisins and headed for the pantry to point them out on a high shelf. We didn’t even know she knew what they were called, having only been introduced to them this week. She got peas and spaghetti and yes, Craisins.

Lately what has made me laugh the most are Abigail’s frequent attempts to pick me up. She wraps one arm around each of my legs, braces her head by squeezing it between my knees, and goes into a deep knee-bend/lunge. Then she strains and grunts with all her might, trying to lift me off the floor. Her face turns red and she runs out of breath trying. I go up on my tiptoes so she feels she is making progress, and once in awhile I’ll let her carry a foot over to a chair and rest it there, but for the most part her efforts are fruitless. But she just keeps at it! I guess she figures that since I just pick HER up willy-nilly and deposit her wherever I wish, she should be able to do the same thing with me. Oh, Abigail, maybe you should get a big lever. In the meantime, though, why not try taking my hand and leading me somewhere instead?

We just got back from a short trip to San Francisco and Santa Rosa, where Abigail proved herself NOT a fan of hotel rooms but a HUGE fan of the busy city streets. She would point and exclaim at everything we passed when we were out: dogs, buses, cars, bikes, children, various interesting people, bright lights. Then she would cry piteously whenever we returned to the room. The hotel had no crib, so we set her up on her own queen size bed, barricaded in with pillows. The pillows were more of a symbolic barrier than anything, so one of us had to stay near her all the time she was sleeping, or trying to sleep. It took her hours to fall asleep each night, poor thing. And poor us, singing and rocking and back rubbing until 10:30 pm! She was much happier in the usually-despised pack n play at my parent’s house in Santa Rosa. She spent a lot of her time with the family following around and mimicking her four-year-old cousin, Judah. By the next time they see each other, she will be a confirmed Judah groupie, I’m sure. He was the recipient of the first hug she has ever given another child. He called her his “little helper” and tried to teach her new words. She was resentful of his baby brother Micah, who apparently horned too much in on her territory, and in awe of his older brother, Noah, who is of course in a class by himself, able to run so fast and throw so far and build such cool things with legos.

Lesson of the day: Abigail is no longer afraid to wander far afield. Up until todayish, she’s always imposed about a 10-foot limit on her independent travels. Today at the end of baby story time at the library, I was chatting with another mom and keeping an eye on Abigail, who was busily roaming the toddler room examining toys and babies. Suddenly she took off around the corner and out of sight. I scrambled after her but didn’t immediately lay eyes on her. Where did my little pixie get to?

I found her in an adjacent room, standing in the middle of a tight circle of developmentally disabled adults in wheelchairs, who were getting ready for their own story time. She slowly rotated to look at everyone with a perplexed expression, like “Who are all these big people in strollers?” The group members were similarly silent and confused by Abigail’s arrival. One man was totally offended by my tiny invader, scowling and grunting at her until I threaded my way into the center of the circle and gathered her up with my most sincere apologies.

Afterward, on a mission to exchange some pants for Dr. G, I set Abigail down at Old Navy to better peer at the sizes on a shelf of men’s khakis. She was off like a shot. I was in hot pursuit, but she managed to squeeze inside a tent-like double-mirror across the aisle, from which it was pretty difficult to extricate her. Apparently she had spotted it the day before, when she was shopping with her dad, and seized the opportunity. Now that we’ve got so much carpe diem in the family, those baby leash things are sounding kind of reasonable.

“Hey, beautiful,” said Abigail’s doctor, to Abigail. The flattery worked well on Abigail’s mommy, who was immediately predisposed to think kindly of anything he said. Those studies that say flattery works to persuade even when the target realizes exactly what is happening are SO TRUE. That was shortly after my being quite impressed by the assistant’s ability to decipher baby talk. She understood Abi about as well as I did, immediately, picking up on the obvious words like “up” and “no,” but also the more blurry ones like “don’t,” and “out.” (Abi was not pleased about being intruded upon and manhandled, however gently, in our little exam room). Her stats: 21 lbs, 1 oz (after a week of weight loss from diarrhea); 33 inches tall; and I forget the rest. She’s almost off the charts for height and around the 25th percentile for weight, which means in baby terms she is supermodel skinny, cute little thigh chub or no.

Flattery doc says to keep promoting high calorie foods and otherwise not to be concerned, somewhat in opposition to the G.I. specialist we saw last week, who suspects that I am not concerned enough. But I’m gonna go with flattery doc’s opinion on this one. The G.I. is trained specifically to see eating problems. He only sees kids with eating problems. Abigail doesn’t have any eating problems, as far as I know, unless she is exposed to milk or soy. Perhaps there is a hidden link that the G.I. suspects and I don’t know about, though he hasn’t mentioned it. In his mind, milk protein intolerance + slowing weight gain = we might be missing something here, something potentially requiring Abi to get The Scope if she doesn’t shape up in another 3-6 months. And I’m glad he’s keeping an eye on her with that in mind; I’m glad there’s a specialist looking for ways to connect the pieces of the puzzle if need be, which is why I keep taking her to him. The pediatrician, though, sees a zillion kids a year and has a wider basis for comparison. He sizes Abigail up and sees that she is growing and developing rapidly; is energetic, healthy (only feverish-sick two or three times in her life) and cheerful; and has nice rosy skin, which apparently means something nutritionally. “It’s not pathological,” he said, applying a term I’d never heard used in conjunction with slow weight gain before. In the end, he, like the G.I., simply wants to wait and see in 3-6 months. Okay then, I won’t worry. I will keep plying the girl with french fries and spaghetti with meat sauce and let Abigail do the rest. Time to hold the poor child down while she gets her shots. Yowch!

Abigail is so stinkin sweet. Sweetness is probably her dominant personal quality. It is hard to think of examples of it since it permeates everything she does. It is there as she beams at her father, who has just given her a whole cucumber all to herself. She beams and hugs the cucumber and gnaws away at it, telling her dad, “Mmmm!” with each bite. It is there in her panicked shriek when she hears the front door open and thinks I might be leaving without her, and it is there when she clings to my knees in relief and wipes her nose on my pant legs when it turns out I’m just throwing away some trash. It is there in her earnest attempts to entertain whichever far-off relative is on the other end of the web-cam; she dances, she holds up picture books, she brings one toy after another to the computer for her relative to see. It is there at bed time when she puts my hand on her hair so I will stroke it, and then pats my hand with her tiny one. It is there in her proud expression when she gets a family cheer for trying a new food (falafel, pb&j, and cucumber, all in one day!). If Abigail thinks about her day as she falls asleep, she’s probably thinking about the times she made a real connection with someone she loves: a shared giggle, a cuddle, a game, a “conversation.” Above everything, she loves to connect. She is so stinkin sweet.

Dr. G’s work hosted an event out at a ranch on the edge of town: hayride, fire pit, the works. Abigail was in heaven. There were dirt and rocks and sticks in every direction, plus an admiring audience. She is part of a departmental baby-boom (one of five born within a month or two of each other) and a few other toddlers were at the barbecue. Some of the other parents were sort of enviously admiring how tall and interactive she was and how well she raced around the site. I, on the other hand, was envious about how well all their children ate. Everywhere I looked there were toddlers munching away on snacks and hot dogs. Meanwhile, I followed Abi around with tidbits of food and back-up food and back-up back-up food and tried to get her to eat a few bites. She weighs as much as a typical 12 month old though she is taller than a typical 18-month old. (she’s 15 months). Now that we are in pants-wearing weather I’m having a hard time finding pairs that will cover her shins but not droop off her little bottom. I’ve moved up to the next size diapers in part to aid in holding her pants up. I don’t know if food is uninteresting to her, or if her stomach kind of hurts after eating, or what. But she’s not a big eater and I spend lots of time each day trying to plan, prepare, and get her to consume 5 high-calorie meals and a sufficient amount of supplemental formula. On the plus side, mealtimes have become one of Abi’s biggest sources of inspiration for verbal development. She’s trying out stringing together words.

Me: Here, have a bite of peas.
Abi: No don’t no bite peas!
Me: I’ll take that as a no.
Abi: NO!

On the other hand, she’s become a little obsessed with the bottle of caramel syrup in the refrigerator door. The other day she put both hands on it and said, in a wistful little voice, “Bite? Bbiiiiiitttttte. Bbiiiiiiiittttte.”

I enjoy Dr. G’s sense of toddler fashion. When he dresses Abigail (which is rare since I’m the one who normally gets up with her in the morning), he picks a theme and amps it as much as he can. Today’s theme was purple. Purple shirt, different shade of purple shorts, neon tie-dyed tights in purple, pink, and black, and jelly sandals, in yet another shade of purple. Somehow it all worked. She looked like she should be in a music video. The camera is temporarily misplaced so I didn’t get a pic; the outfit gets a blog paragraph instead. We gotta rememberize these things somehow!

Abigail’s memory has suddenly gotten much better. Her Auntie Marie came to visit for the weekend, and though she hadn’t seen her in person for three months, Abi hugged and hugged and hugged Auntie Marie after we picked her up at the airport. That was her first definitive yes-I-remember-you moment with a relative.

This morning, I asked Abigail if she wanted to help me brush my hair. Abigail promptly turned around and wandered off– not in the mood, I thought. But then she returned with her favorite striped headband of mine. It had gone missing a week ago after she spent a morning wearing it as a necklace, but obviously she knew and remembered where it was. She brought it over and helpfully laid it on my head. It was as if she’d been waiting for the opportunity to get me to discard the usual ponytail for something a little more cheerful.

Later this morning, Abi also abandoned putting crayons away (gasp! her favorite thing to do with crayons is put them in the box, so she would never quit without good reason) and beckoned Dr. G over to the desk, where she pointed out a missing purple crayon hidden between the desk and file cabinet. I have no idea how long it was there, but several days at least. Then she did her second-favorite crayon activity, and took a big bite off the point. Coloring with crayons comes in a distant third. Oh well. At least her teeth matched her outfit.