Comma Dot Comma

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.

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).