Comma Dot Comma

Getting Dressed:
Many days, Abigail wears pants inside out and backwards, hanging off her backside a la L’il Wayne, sometimes over another pair of pants. She is intent on learning to dress herself and will put her legs through anything with holes in it. She will pull the neck of a shirt up to her waist and wear it like a skirt, announcing that the sleeves are pockets. She will wear her headbands like belts. She is fond of donning my two-piece swimming suit and her dad’s shoes, tromping around until she falls over. All of it is challenging, but she is especially perplexed about how to pull up pants over her little bottom. It’s impossible! Try, try again.

Making Friends:
Abigail now attempts to make friends with other kids. She always zeroes in on the ones who are six months to a year older than her. “Hi, Somebody,” she said to a boy at the park. “I’m climbing too!” He totally ignored her and zoomed up a ladder that she had to carefully navigate. Same results with a boy pushing a truck. Sometimes she says, “Hey, little girl!” or “Hey, little boy!” instead. It actually worked at a restaurant play area– she and the older girl dragged high chairs around together and ran back and forth until Abigail cried because the girl was climbing on a step that she wanted to climb by herself. The main problem is that the older kids are so much faster and stronger and there is no way she can keep up. She shrugs it off. Rejection has no sting for her yet.

For a month, Abigail has been asking almost daily if it is Easter. It’s all Grammy’s fault. She sent a wonderful Easter care package at the end of March. In it, among other things, were three books about Easter. One of them was about Jesus but the other two were all about painting eggs and hiding eggs and looking for eggs. Abigail thought that was a wonderful idea. She found a pen on the ground and ran to the refrigerator. “Color eggs!” she said. I gave her one of her plastic eggs so she could pretend to color it. “No! Brown eggs! Fridgerator!” I told her she couldn’t color any eggs until Easter. Hence the constant month-long refrain: “Easter, mommy? Paint eggs?”

Finally, I told her on Friday that Easter would start very soon. She spent quite awhile dancing around singing, “Easter soon. Easter here soon.” We decided to to all our secular Easter activities on Saturday since volunteer obligations at church would keep us busy for a good chunk of Sunday. After Abi went to bed on Friday night, I put together an Easter basket for her with some jelly beans, a chocolate bunny (we’re testing milk right now), a handmade card, and some plastic eggs and flowers. The eggs each had three jelly beans in them. I let her discover it in her play area upon awaking. “It’s Easter! Happy Easter!” I said.

“HAPPYEASTERHAPPYEASTERHAPPYEASTERHAPPYEASTER” said Abi, digging through the basket. She pried open both plastic eggs and scarfed down the jellybeans while I got breakfast started. Then she raced across the kitchen, arms wide, declaring her love for me. It was pretty satisfying, if I say so myself. After breakfast we did the eggs. We let Abi color on the eggs with crayons but did not actually let her near the dye, to her disappointment. She simply cannot go near a little cup of liquid without drinking it, dipping her hands in it, and pouring it everywhere. Then we hid them and she kind of liked finding them. The first three she found, she cracked open immediately, tasted, and discarded. “Where’s the candy?” she said. Apparently she thought that painted eggs were like plastic eggs-full of candy. We let her have some more jelly beans. On Sunday we all dressed up and she went around in her blue flowered dress and hat Happy Eastering everybody and melting their hearts. Overall, our first Easter with a kid who kind of knows what is going on was a win.

Is it possible to over-praise a small child? Lately I’ve been wondering if I shower Abigail with too many compliments. This caution comes in part because of the view many people have of the generation currently entering adulthood (one that is ungenerous but not without a tiny grain of truth): that its members have a sense of worth that far exceeds their efforts to do and be in the world. I myself caught a bit of that zeitgeist; it wasn’t until after college that I realized that I could not get everything I wanted with, metaphorically speaking, a half-raised hand when the sign-up sheet came around.

One of the reasons I praise Abigail so copiously is that it works so well to motivate her to want what I want for her– i.e., to don clean clothes. She is saddened but unpersuaded by disapproval; but bring a well-timed (sincere) compliment into a conflict, and she will docilely put her arms through the sleeves of a sweater that moments ago was her sworn enemy.

But the real reasons I speak well of her are 1)I think so well of her and 2) I want her to value and cultivate certain characteristics in herself: courage, kindness, intelligence, perseverance, strength, friendliness, humor, curiosity, caution. Anytime I praise her for going down a slide that made her nervous, I hope that it will be a signal to her that oh, this bravery stuff is worth practicing.

However. I’m not so sure about how often I praise her appearance. I don’t want her to grow up feeling like gorgeousness is her due, or even something to be pursued with the same fervor she pursues all those other things. Chances are that she won’t be gorgeous, or that she will only be gorgeous for a little while; God forbid that she should feel cheated or overly self-conscious or obsessed with clothing and hair and other trappings of appearance. Looks do matter, but not that much.

Yet it is hard to restrain myself because she is so lovely to me. Sure, there are those technicolor blue eyes and that precious smile. But there’s something about this age that is especially lovely to me. Before I had a child of my own, I thought babies were the be-all and end all of cuteness. By the time they hit toddlerhood, they were scrawnier with bigger teeth and scraggly hair and perpetually dirty shirts (the children of present company excepted, of course). Now, though, when I put Abigail into a brightly colored t-shirt and wipe off her face and smooth down her hair, and let her escape my embrace to prance around the room, she takes my breath away. That little body, that little self, is finally coming into its own. At last she’s got enough muscle and skill and experience that she feels like she belongs here: in this body, in this room, on this little patch of earth we call home. And I have to tell her how beautiful she is. But maybe sometimes I shouldn’t.

One of the most delightful parts of mothering 20-month-old Abigail is the increasing number of glimpses into the way her mind works. Her personality is sort of… studious. When she wants to learn something, she looks for it everywhere and practices it. She likes to test herself, too. For example, she will sometimes pull random books off the shelf, even those she doesn’t read often, and try to remember the titles. It’s a pretty impressive display when you consider that she has dozens of books (her own and the library’s). “How to Get to Sesame Street” is “Street;” her nursery rhyme book is “Hunty Dunty;” “No David” is “No David;” and so on.

One thing I’ve especially noticed is her ability to take information from one context and apply it to another. Her outdoor parties now must always include tea cups because of something she watched or read in which they had a tea party. And cake and presents, too, from another book. She asked me what the small creature drawn on the corner of a page of her bedtime book was tonight, and I told her it was a lizard. “Catch it. Hard,” she said. She was remembering a month ago when she and her daddy found a lizard on the fence and tried and failed to catch it. Recently I taught her how to twist off and on a lid. “You have to turn it around, like this,” I demonstrated. “Round and around! Go around again!” said Abigail, quoting her “Go Dog Go” book, and circling her arms in the air.

Verbally, Abigail is making big progress as well. She must be using a few hundred words regularly now, and can even put together a sentence every now and then. But my favorite thing about her speech development is the lengths to which she will go to make herself understood. She kept repeating “beard” (which sounds a bit like bee-ow when she says it) to her dad and he wasn’t getting it. So she switched tactics and patted her head and then face. “Hair. Chin,” she clarified. And today, I couldn’t tell if she was saying “watch” or “wet,” so she added, “need towel!”

She is very fine-tuned to emotional and social situations. If I seem tired, Abi will hug me, press her cheek to mine and say with concern, “Sleepy, Mommy? Want nap?” She responds with similar concern if I cough, sniff, or say ouch. The idea of constant supervision has also entered her mind recently. Big Bear, an old favorite, has been a little out of circulation during playtime lately, but whenever we go somewhere in the car, stay outside for a long stretch of time, or wake from a nap, Abi will stop what she is doing and announce, “Big Bear crying.” Then we drop everything and check on him. She has made a bed for him out of a cardboard box and he spends a lot of time there, getting medicine and resting. But whenever she eats, we must fetch Big Bear to sit at the table to eat too. A bee came to hover over her wading pool and I told her it was just getting a drink. “Big bear need drink,” she announced. We went inside in our wet swimming suits to give him a drink.

One area where she struggles and gives up easily is spacial intelligence, and it’s actually become a source of nighttime angst for her. We were laughing the other day as she tried to bring one of those long styrofoam pool noodles in through the back door. Bonk. Back up, try again. Bonk. Back up, try again. Bonk. She gave up. It never occurred to her to change the way she was holding it. And those nesting cups? Forget it. She always ends up with three little piles instead of one. Puzzles make her impatient– she can get a piece in if it is already lined up in the right direction, but if you hand it to her backwards, she’ll try it twice and quit. So how does this come in to sleeping? Well, the blanket. She gets in her mind exactly how she wants the blanket to be draped over her. I will help her get it all arranged, and then, of course, she rolls over and it is messed up. Struggling and frustrated screeching occur, sometimes for an hour. “Banket ON!” she wails, but can never seem to get it on herself how she wants. So we switched her to a bigger, tucked in blanket, and that seems to help so long as she doesn’t decide it should be untucked. O girlie! I told her that when she is older, she should probably refrain from putting in her own lawn sprinklers (speaking from my own dunderheaded experience in that matter).

Abigail wakes at night so much more than she used to. Our M.O. is to let her spend at least a couple minutes trying to get back to sleep on her own. If she can’t, one of us (Dr. G if it is before 2 am, me if it is after) goes in, helps her with her problem, soothes her, and puts her back in bed until morning. Last night she went to sleep very early without dinner or a drink of water so when she woke, wide awake and ready to rumble at 3, a snack and drink were in order. Then a diaper change, a book, a song, and a prayer. I kissed her goodnight and told her I’d see her in the morning. The wails and the shouting began pretty much immediately. She would pick a phrase and repeat it seven or eight times between sobs before switching to another one. After she got the through the list she took it from the top and went through again, for an hour and fifteen minutes until she finally, and suddenly, fell asleep. If I had had a mast handy I’d have lashed myself to it, her pleas were so hard to resist. It went like this:

Mommy
like it (by which she means “don’t like it”)
one more song
boogers
want eat
table
want mommy
love mommy
one more book
one more drink
daddy
all done nap
I sleep good
like it
(angst-filled shriek)
mommy
need mommy

Read. She loves to take advertising postcards, shopping lists, and other little pieces of paper and try to read them. She creases her brow and shouts out letters. “A-E-I-E-B! Readin, mommy!”

Jump. She bends her knees, leans in, thrusts upward, and goes… nowhere.

Sing along with songs. Right now the best she can do is come in on cue for a few key words. I love listening to her sing to herself when she wakes in the morning: “happy know dat, happy know dat, happy know dat, hooray! Cock-a-doodle-doo!”

Know her colors. She practices her colors several times a day. So much so that we picked up some paint cards at the home improvement store for her to use as color flashcards. When we are driving around she likes to guess the colors of the cars passing by. She is also into looking at crayons, markers, and game pieces and announcing their colors, or going through her shirt drawer and finding different colored shirts. Some days she does better than others. She can get purple and brown pretty consistently.

Count things. She can sometimes get all the way to three. Normally, she gets stuck after two. “one baby, two baby, … nother baby!”

Open a daycare center. We spend a lot of time each day cooking for, feeding, changing, rocking, walking, singing to, reading to, and putting to bed her babies and stuffed animals. There are washcloths all over the house and yard that are used as blankets for naptimes. It is not unusual to see five little animals in a row tucked into a cubby or resting on a chair, each with its own little blanket. When they wake up we put them all on the potty and then help them wash their hands. I’m surprised at how accurately Abigail understands what it takes to care for someone small. And I kind of wish she had more models to emulate than just me– it’s kind of lame to take a break from chores to play with my daughter and then pretend to do chores with her the whole time. Good thing we also have parties and stage animal rescues.

Sleep. She has such difficulty napping that she has become obsessed with sleep. Even at the park she will go under the slide and smooth out the sand with her hands. “Makin bed, mommy!” she tells me. Once she has it set up to her satisfaction, she lays down and pretends to sleep. She also puts me to bed at least once a day, complete with blanket and stuffed animal, tiptoeing out of the room. Then she feels lonely and gets teary-eyed when she comes back to check on me, so I wake up.

Abigail has taken maybe five naps in the past three weeks. She was sick and her stuffy nose bothered her, and of course she’s given up the bottle, but really her nap problems seem most closely related to the changes in her sytem. She used to be a morning pooper, doing her business in the pack n play while I took a shower. Then she had a few days of irregularity and when it was all over, she was suddenly an afternoon pooper. For some reason, Abigail will not sleep at all if there is a bowel movement involved. Even if I catch it right away and clean her up and do a naptime routine reset, it is all for naught. The chance of sleep is lost. I’ve tried waiting her out, but she seems to deliberately hold it until naptime. If I put her down to nap at one, she poops at 1:15. If I put her down at 2:40, she poops at three. Today as I was reminding a sleepy Abigail that it was almost time to nap she even said, “Nap. Poop.” I guess she just likes the privacy and lack of distraction. Can’t say I blame her– I miss the days when I could always do my duty in private, with the door shut, taking as long as I wanted! She has completely lost interest in potty training, and I don’t want to force it when we are doing sleep training too. I am at my wit’s end with this. The girl needs her nap. After 45 minutes of joy at no longer being stuck in the crib, she drags around all afternoon at half-steam. I could probably get her to sleep again around 4 but that seems way too late for a nap. Help! Anyone, anyone?

UPDATE: Wrote the above last week… after several pre-nap poops, it has become apparent that she has just decided that she no longer wants to nap. She knows if she just holds out long enough at naptime I will rescue her. The only sure way to get her to nod off is to drive around in the car, which is NOT an acceptable long-term solution.

Abigail has recently named a toy all by herself. Most of her anthropomorphic and animal toys have names, but they were given by us and are flatly descriptive at best: Big Bear, Little Bear, Baby Doll, Moose, Kitty Cat, and so on. One of the Little People that she plays with in her toy house, however, has received a special name of his own. It is a little boy with a yellow bowl cut and a frog on his shoulder. He wears a backpack. His name is Daddy.

Daddy’s main job in the play house is to ring the doorbell, come through the door and say, “Daddy home!” Just in typing this I realized the connection to her real daddy– he wears a backpack too, having had his shoulder bag and laptop stolen earlier this year. I introduced little Daddy to big Daddy (heh heh) the other day, and the response was lukewarm. Dr. G. wasn’t sure how he felt about being identified with a cherubic, frog-toting, two-inch piece of plastic. I told him he should be honored, since the very first thing Abigail named was after him. He decided that he was.