Comma Dot Comma

What is making me laugh the most lately, other than Abigail’s non sequiturs, is her singing. I’ve been wanting to write about it for awhile but have struggled to come up with a) an accurate description or b) a recording, since her ditties are spontaneous and short. Suffice to say that to call it “singing” is pretty generous. Sometimes the best clues that I’m hearing a song are her prancing, dancing feet. She also elongates certain syllables and gets quite loud. But the note she tends to belt out is most like what you’d hear if a doctor put a tongue depressor in the mouth of a sore throat patient and asked her to say ah. It’s more of a groan than a note, and usually in a pretty deep register. Take, for example, her new favorite post-bath song: Having a Fun Day. Sometimes she sings “having a FUUUHHHHN day!” and sometimes “having a fun DAAAAAAAAAYYYY.” She likes to mix it up.

About half of her songs are learned; the others are made up on the spot. If she passes by the piano and creative mood is upon her, she’ll bang on the keys a bit and make something up, such as “piggies dancing, baby pigs, baby pigs dancing!” The other day she was feeling morose about her dad leaving for work, so she brought me over to the piano to hear her composition “Daddy Song,” probably her longest work in any genre to date. The lyrics:

Daddy, daddy, daddy.
Daddy daddy.
Daddy GOOOOONNNNNNEEEE.
Sad.
Jesus, Jesus, Jesus COMMME
Blue Jesus, Red Jesus.
Daddy, DAAAAAADddy.

For unknown reasons Jesus is popping up everywhere in Abigail’s communications these days. But hey, he’s nice to have around. As are those heartfelt toddler groans.

Waffles: Awfuls
Humidifier: Moon hider
Flowers: Fodders
Humpty Dumpty: Hunty Dunty
Parachute: Pea shoot
Animals: Elmos
Tweezers: Cheeses
T.V.: Tee Eee
Refrigerator: Fidgety
Teddy Bear: Tiber
Ribbet: Reddit
Giddyap: Gib-up

what good ones do your kids have?

At our house we have three kinds of milk: Daddy milk, which is refrigerated rice milk; Abi milk, which is prescription baby formula in cans; and mommy milk, which is nonfat organic cow’s milk in a jug. Right now Abigail is deeply concerned with ownership and she carefully identifies the owner of every possible item in the house, including food and drinks. She is reduced to tears if Dr. G. sits down at the laptop in the family room because she thinks it belongs to me. She pulls at his arm and tells him to stop. She finds me and drags me over to the computer to show me the offensive behavior of daddy. She begs, “Mommy sit! Mommy try!” over and over until I manage to convince her that I want to share with daddy or he leaves. Similar behavior occurs if, say, I’m behind on the dishes and find myself using a baby fork to eat my spaghetti. When something is off-limits to her, like soda, she refers to it as “Mommy-daddies have it.” Conversely, if she sees me eating from a baby bowl or using baby utensils, it’s “Mommy-daddies DON’T have it! Abi’s fork!” and she does her best to wrench the item away from me.

Which brings us back to the milk. Today at the store she helped pick her own special jug of mommy milk. Mine has a purple lid, hers has a red one. At bedtime she asked specifically for her mommy milk, so I gave her about a half a cup of heated whole milk. She slowly sipped it all and asked for more, which I did not allow. That is probably the most milk product she’s had at a sitting ever, except for maybe yogurt. I told her we had to wait and see if it made her tummy hurt. But she’s done alright so far with yogurt, cheese, milk in baked goods, and ice cream. She does seem to get a mild rash on her cheek or shoulder an hour or so after consuming a dairy product, but it fades very quickly, and frankly, I’m not sure it is connected to dairy at all. And even if it is… big deal. A fifteen minute rash that doesn’t bother her is not even on my radar, really, unless it leads to other, worse things. My concern is pain and blood. We don’t eat a lot of dairy around here anyway, but it will be nice to have it as a high-calorie food option for her, and especially nice not to worry about it when we travel (which we frequently do, having all our relatives out of state). Most of us humans are not well-equipped to digest dairy (it is, after all, specifically designed for baby cows) so Abigail is in good company and I don’t plan to overload her. Though I do love me some cheddar cheese. And the dollar hot fudge sundaes at a certain fast food chain. That would be fun if Abigail started liking those. I picture us sitting there after school some day in the future, reading our respective books and munching low-fat soft serve.

Tonight after her bath Abigail felt like singing and running and dancing. Little Miss Naked grabbed both my hands and I was swept into her celebration. She made up a little song with the words “having a fun day” and we sang it as loudly as we could, over and over, spinning each other around, dancing, prancing, and sashaying all through the house. After a bit her dad joined in, too. I found myself thinking, “wow, this is really fun.” And then, “I want to remember this.” Thank you for the spontaneous delight you create in our home, my Abi, my chickadee.

“Look, Mommy! Two red cars!” Abigail said as we pulled into a spot at the grocery store parking lot. Sure enough, there were two red cars parked right next to us. She is proudly demonstrating her new mastery of most of the basic colors by announcing the hue of everything. Blue boots. Green cup. Pink owl. Dr. G says she is ready to make her big debut on Sesame Street. I am pleased as punch. She has been working so hard to get them figured out.

Although I am still Abigail’s uncontested Favorite, she is starting get her feelings hurt more easily and remember the offense longer, resulting in some tough moments now and again. Today, for example, I went in to take her out of her crib after her nap and she cried, refusing to let me lift her up. We went back and forth a few times with her saying she wanted to get up and then squirming away from me. Finally it dawned on me that she was still feeling badly about her very rough falling asleep time. The rule is that she stays in her bed for an hour during nap time, trying to fall asleep, and mommy does not come in for any reason. If she falls asleep, great. If she doesn’t, I will get her out after that time. But today I made a brief cameo twenty minutes into her non-sleep-related hijinks to remind her to lay down and sleep. Mistake. When she realized I was not actually coming in, she started wailing in a sense of abandonment. She kept up the wailing until she fell asleep, exactly 58 minutes into naptime. Two hours of heavy sleep hadn’t erased the pain and disappointment and now she didn’t want me to touch her. Boy, did I feel some guilt and regret.

I wondered what I should do, and decided to try talking with her about it. “Are you mad at me, Abigail?”

“Yeah,” she said, her eyes pooling with tears and her mouth pulling down into that heartbreaking little pout she has.

“Because I didn’t come get you out at naptime?”

“Yeah.” (muffled sob.)

“Oh, honey. I’m so sorry you felt sad. I missed you, too. But it was naptime. And you have to stay in bed for the whole nap, remember? But I’m sorry you were so lonely today.”

“I feel better. Ready. Take up!” she said, stretching her arms out to me.

Forgiven! Score. I’m kind of amazed that helping her verbalize her feelings and then validating them worked. If I could have figured out how to say it, I would have apologized for unexpectedly popping my head in as if naptime were over, and then just as suddenly disappearing again, leaving her to her own devices. No fair.

Recent favorite books:

The Red Lemon by Bob Staake
Kitten’s First Full Moon by Kevin Henkes
Pouch! by Ezra Stein
Music in heavy rotation (I love that you can download a whole kids’ album for like five bucks):

Songs for Wiggleworms by Old Town School of Folk Music

The Best of the Laurie Berkner Band
Fave Music Video:

New Way to Walk

Thanks to Abigail’s freewheeling imagination, life at home has become a bit of a mental whirlwind. One moment a piece of grass is a book about baby pigs that I am supposed to read to the toy boat floating in the wading pool; the next, a plastic hot dog is the daddy of a bee passing by. Her pillow is a pair of wings is a firetruck is a train, “Chooga chooga choo choo!” We must load all the animals in the vicinity onto the train and guess what? They are a “cute family.” Here’s the daddy, the mommy, the sister, the baby, and the grammy. Oh no! the baby needs milk! But wait… Mommy is a puppy. Abi is a puppy. Here’s our tails!

BUSINESS ASIDE: [If you are following her daily quotes at all on twitter, you can get a glimpse of some of her more creative scenarios. If you have a twitter account, you can subscribe to Abigail_says_so on twitter.com. If you have a blog reader, you can get the updates sent to it fairly regularly (every day or two) without having an account, by pasting in this url: http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=abigail_says_so. if you have neither, you can just bookmark the page at http://twitter.com/#!/Abigail_says_so]

One thing I’ve learned the hard way is that I can participate in her flights of fancy, but I must never alter the narrative, or worse, initiate my own imaginary play with her. She has a very clear grasp of reality, and she also manages the sudden flips and hairpin turns of her pretend scenarios with the virtuosity of a professional snowboarder. But she relies on me to be her touchstone of truth and to explain the world to her. Dr. G. says I’m her totem, like in the movie Inception. If I start saying a rock is a loaf of bread, how can she be sure of anything anymore? She stops everything she is doing and her shoulders get tense. “No, no, no, mommy,” she says. Sometimes she will cover my mouth with a hand to stop me from talking. For now, my role is to just try to keep up. I pity the poor preschool classmates somewhere in her future who want to play house with Abigail and discover that somehow the baby has turned into a magical flying unicorn in search of its missing eye, which tragically fell into the water one day while the unicorn was at the beach. Or maybe I don’t pity them. They are bound to have fun searching for that magical eyeball.