Status report: Chloë, 3 years 6 months, and Maia, 21 months

Meet Toë McWhinerson, age three and a half.

These are Chloë's most prominent traits at the moment. She whines. All day. For no reason. (Well, sometimes for reason.) She whines for food. She whines to snuggle. She whines that she's tired, and then that she's not tired. She whines because she wants a shoooooooow, right noooooooow. She whines because I gave her a straw cup instead of a sippy. (And let me tell you, it annoys me when my clients get upset with me for not reading their minds. It annoys me no less when my daughter does it. Though she did learn--this morning she said very carefully, "Mama, will you give me my hot chocolate in a sippy? In a sippy.")

We've moved to a sort of hybrid temporary sleep schedule for her. She really still needs a nap after lunch, but she's very reluctant to get it, and if she does, she generally doesn't get to sleep very quickly. So she gets a mandatory fifteen minutes of quiet time during the day. If she sleeps (as will happen when Eric snuggles with her), she gets to stay up an extra hour at night. If she doesn't, she goes to bed when Maia does. I'm hoping this settles out one way or the other, because I don't like the variability, but it seems to be working so far. But the no-nap days she's particularly whiny, and snaps angrily whenever we suggest it's because she's tired.

And then there's the "Toë, Maia's Big Sister" aspect of her. Especially now that Maia can really communicate and understand and respond, she's very in tune with what Maia's saying and where she is and what she's doing (or not doing). There's plenty of bossiness there, but also plenty of concern and affection. She craves Maia's company. Several times a day she'll say "Maia, grab my hand!" or "Come with me!" or "Don't you want to play?" Maia would obviously be just as happy to be left alone, but she goes along with whatever Chloë wants, and they're both happy. The other day Chloë was upset about something--I forget what--and said plaintively, "Maia, do you want a hug?" Maia agreed, indifferently, and Chloë swiftly closed in because what she really wanted, of course, was to get a hug from her beloved little sister.

Maia is also devoted to her sister--her most frequent question when they're apart is "Where Toë?"--but is definitely working on her independent and defiant side. She continues to be happy to play by herself much more than Chloë ever has. And she's showing an inconvenient amount of rebellion, often running away in the store or in the street, refusing to do things I ask. Possibly her most annoying habit is, when Chloë gets told not to do something, to immediately do whatever Chloë was just forbidden. I assume she would have gotten to it sooner but didn't realize it fell into the "forbidden therefore desirable" category.

But she's also working on becoming her own little person. She's very sweet about saying "thank you" and "you're welcome" and "I love you too." And her sentences! Were there ever any girls so good at language so early! (Yes, I'm sure there were, but don't burst my bubble.) One of her favorite Christmas presents was Big Dog, Little Dog, and she often comes to me to say, "Read Big Dog Little Dog please Mama." Then she'll recite, "Big Dog Little Dog P. D. Eastman," because I have a habit of reading out the author's name when I read books to the girls. (I can tell you where this comes from, too. When I was little I had an audio book of Sleeping Beauty, by Freya Littledale. I remember it distinctly, after some twenty-five years, because the tape said so at the beginning and I played it so often.) She says "Help Maia Mama. Dolly falling down!" and "My banana. Daddy banana," pointing, and "Maia eat cookie too."

And then there's Chloë, talking about "the proper order" for her Memory cards (because Scout and friends talk about it on the "Numberland" LeapFrog show) and saying knowledgeably, when shown a picture of me at eight, "When you were little we looked similar." She often comes out with some tidbit she learned from Diego or preschool, or remembered from a book. 

Maia is progressing nicely, developmentally. She knows her colors and can sing most of the ABCs, and can recognize some of the letters. She can draw circles and lines, and sing along with songs, and tell me "Take pants off Mama please" when I'm in the middle of getting dressed and have neglected to remove my pajama pants quickly enough.

Her canines have finally started filling in, and she's started saying "poopy" to mean a diaper with anything in it. She's had a few successes with the potty, but I consider this "hey, I just went in my diaper" to be the best next step for her potty training. Though considering the trouble we went through with Chloë, I can hardly set myself up as knowledgeable about it.

Oh, and I forgot to say, but Maia was definitively weaned a little over a month ago. We'd been down to once a day in the morning anyway, and then I just quit. She didn't fuss too much. She still talks about "milk in there," pointing to the glider, but she doesn't argue when I then take us downstairs to get milk. She'll even sit in the glider, snuggled with her dolly or Beep, and wait for me to get it. It's nice. 

And then there's this morning, when the four of us were all in our big bed. Maia leaned over and poked at the R.I.N.D.S., alternately, saying, "Pop pop pop."

They're silly girls, is what I'm saying. They're funny and happy together, and growing well and not driving us crazy...totally...all the time. Smart, sassy, strong girls, and I'm proud to be their mama.

Status report: Chloë, 3 years 3 months, and Maia, 18 months

Our dear 3.25-year-old Chloë is currently fast asleep, despite being stuffed full of candy and Halloween excitement (I'll try to make that another post) and Busytown episodes. Netflix is great, but it's created certain unintended consequences. One of these is Chloë asking constantly for shows, particularly "Busytown Mysteries" (based on the Richard Scarry books; organized or whatever by his son, Huckle is rather predictably the hero). "Can we have just one show before we wake up Daddy?" she asks hopefully in the mornings, though she knows my answer is always "No, Daddy controls shows on the days I go to work."

She's definitely starting to wade into the waters of literacy. She can spell her name, and write all the letters, though she hasn't yet gotten a firm grip on the concept of left-to-right. She's getting better at lower-case letters, and delights in pointing out letters she sees on signs when we go out, especially if they're letters that "are in my name!" She knows how to spell "on" because I always ask her to push that button on the scale when she's helping me bake, and that "zero" starts with a Z for the same reason. She sounds out the beginnings of words quite often, and sometimes I'll prompt her to sound out the rest.

She says, "I know," often, as in "I know, I know," when we tell her to do something, or "I know that," when we correct her. Interesting how early that starts. She puts on all her own clothes now, except for her socks and the occasional difficult dress. She still hates having her hair brushed. She loves the temporary tattoos that she's been getting with her three or four or five (!) Halloween events. She likes playing dress-up (except that she doesn't have a lot to dress-up in) and with her jewelry...also with her piggybank money. She used to love playing with my buttons. Why do we buy kids toys again?

I don't know where she learned to do thumbs-up, but she did. She knows "arrive" and "liquid" and other words you wouldn't think a three-year-old would know. She loves to jump. She's anxiously protective of her shoes, because they're her school shoes and she needs them for preschool because she's a big girl. She's very quick to look out for the concerns of big girls. There's a rhyme in one of the books that goes: The man in the moon looked out of the moon/and this is what he said:/"'Tis time that, now I'm getting up/All babies went to bed." Chloë's response was, "What about big girls?" I told her that big girls could stay up a little later than babies and she seemed satisfied.

I took the girls to Imagination Station, the local science place, on Saturday while Eric was away and the girls had a good time there. Most of the exhibits went over their heads, of course, but they had fun climbing on bridges and going into the wind tunnel, and there was a kids' area that they both had a great time in. I love when they get caught up in play together.

Maia is an adorable sweet eighteen-month-old who will not lie still for diaper changes oh my GOD. Usually I end up tackling her and tickling her, then wiping her quickly. Then she wiggles and escapes, and I fold up the dirty diaper and put it away. Then I tackle her again to try to get her down to put the new one on. She does love to be on her own...though she also loves to be held, especially when she's tired. And she never wearies of being thrown around, dropped, rolled upside down...and now she's learned how to do it herself. She can somersault, sort of; she calls it "tumble" in the cutest little baby voice as she puts down her head and launches herself, sometimes forward, sometimes to the side, at least once straight off the couch and into a laundry basket, and once off the side of the bed and luckily into my waiting arms.

She usually wakes up early in the mornings for our nursing session (I have GOT to get up the gumption to endure her screaming and give her a milk sippy in the mornings; I'm sure that after a few days to get used to it, she'd give up the R.I.N.D.S. without fuss and she might even sleep later--but it's just so easy when I stumble half-awake into her room at six A.M. to pick her up and sink into the glider and pull up my pajama shirt and doze) and when we're done, if it's not so early that I put her back to bed, I'll often lie down on the floor, my head on the Boppy, while she wanders around and refuses offers of diapers changes. When she spies me, she says, "banky! banky!" and toddles off to get me a blanket from her stack. She attempts to spread it on me, and then more often than not joins me under it. It's the sweetest thing.

Then there's the converse, when I'm sitting on the floor and she pushes me. I fall over, yelping, usually taking her with me. She snuggles and laughs, and then scrambles up and says stridently, "Pull! Pull!" I put my hands out. She grasps my thumbs and pulls at me until I sit up. Then she knocks me down again. Oh, the cruelty of children.

She's so curious and independent and self-motivated. We went to Michael's the other day to entertain ourselves, which was a mistake since there were so many movable, interesting things to look at and take off the shelves and manipulate:

But we had fun. And she was good about helping put things back. She's very good about any request or command that doesn't involve diaper changes or "come here": picking up blocks or Legos or books, bringing me a particular toy, attempting to take off her clothes for bath (of course she'd do anything for "bubbuhs!"--she routinely brings me the bottle of bubble bath when I start the water).

She's in the middle of a linguistic explosion. Her only sentence is "Read Dora please," but she can point out hearts and stars and moons and circles. She knows "sleeper" and "Grandpa" and "candy" and "Halmoni" and "drawing board" and "nap." She can draw a circle, which she calls "moon," and what she calls a line (well, I suppose technically they are; they're just not straight lines like Eric keeps demonstrating). I went to the Ann Arbor Fiber Expo with the girls to meet Carol ("you are a dedicated fiber person," a vendor said fervently to me as we passed) and had to buy a finger puppet when she spied it and exclaimed "Puppy!" so clearly the vendor came over and started showing her the different dogs she had. (Actually we ended up buying four, since they were $2 each or four for $5. Then we got a fifth one when someone called out, "Would she like this?" as we passed. Chloë got a free button and beads to string into a necklace. It's good to be an adorable little girl.) Someone else commented on how much she could say, and, when he asked her age and I answered, said, "Someone is linguistically talented, isn't she?"

The girls continue to be good friends and playmates, though Chloë's doing more "Maia's in my waaaaay!" and "Give me that Maia!" Maia is usually very responsive to things Chloë says she wants, even if she doesn't say it nicely or not to her. Chloë will say to me, "Maia's not letting me have the Legos because she's in my way," and Maia will turn and pick up a Lego and hand it to her. Maia's keen to do most things Chloë does...such as get up on chairs to "wash her hands" (read: splash in dirty water) in the kitchen, get on my left knee if Chloë is on my right, and wear her blue-striped sleeper because Chloë is wearing her pink-striped one. Or get tattoos.

I'm keeping this picture to compare to another picture of them coming home from the tattoo parlor together in seventeen years or so. I hope it won't be spiders that time, though.

Status report: Maia, month 15

So Miss Maia the Mischievous is fifteen months old. She had her checkup yesterday, and was pronounced fit and healthy and linguistically advanced. She's at 75th percentile for weight and 90th for height. She's starting to talk, walking competently, understanding a lot...so funny and so happy and so capable.

Her vocabulary stands at...well, let's see. Mama, Dada, more, milk ("mohhhh"), bath ("BA!"), bye-bye ("ba-ba"), cheese ("tzchse"), shoes ("tzchsu"), star ("da"), moon ("moo"). Yes, she also learned "moon" before she learned, say, "cow." (Though she can tell you what a cow says: "Boo.") What can I say? We like science more than farming. She says "down," but more often "downdown," especially when we're talking about going downstairs, and plenty of "yahyah" and "nanana." And, just barely, the sweetest hesitant "baby" you ever heard.

She can point to various body parts, and likes to touch our noses and hear the different sounds they make, and investigate what new people's noses sound like. (Be warned if you come to our house.)  She's gotten quite good at manipulating small objects--she often hands hairs or detritus to me to dispose of, though she'll also put things in the garbage if asked. She's taken to putting raspberries and olives and anything else that will fit over her fingers as she eats them.

She's still majorly into putting things into her mouth, which is to be expected but is annoying since Chloë's into toys with small parts. Nursing is getting more troublesome, partly because she seems to be using her teeth a bit when latching on (though not so much I can call it a bite) and partly because now that she's mastered shaking and nodding her head, she likes to do it all the time, including when she's got a mouthful of R.I.N.D.S. I want to try weaning her, but it's so hard to say no when every day I come home from work to her squealing "Mama! Mama!" and toddling toward me as fast as her legs will take her, and as soon as I pick her up demanding, "Mohhhh!" with a finger stuck into the R.I.N.D.S. "You want juice?" I asked her this evening. "Cheese?" She just looked stridently at me until I behaved. She'll make a great mom one day.

She and Chloë (or, as she prefers to be known these days, Sarah) still get along very well together. They play together, sort of, and enjoy being in the new sandbox together and poking around in the garden (though Maia tends to stand in the path and block Chloë and me in until I maneuver around to bodily move her). She's still stealing Chloë's sippies, but she'll give them back when asked, and if Chloë says something like "I want to try Maia's popsicle" she'll be right there, offering her popsicle by trying to stick it down Chloë's throat. Chloë just grins and accepts it.

She has to be coaxed or distracted into diaper changes, but the coaxing can include having her get the wipe, or doing her new favorite RollerCoasterMommy move, hoisting her up so her legs are around my neck and then letting her fall backwards until she's horizontal and I catch her in my arms (well) before she hits the ground. She likes being naked, and continues to love her baths. She keeps trying to climb in while I'm still getting the water going. Afterwards, she struggles to be put down while I struggle to dry her, and then I call "Naked baby alert!" and she toddles out to find her daddy while I finish with Chloë.

 She's become quite the ham lately. The other day we harvested some food from the garden, including a monster zucchini that I have yet to turn into zucchini bread. When I wasn't looking, she grabbed it and started gnawing at it. When I went for the camera, she did this:

She's still waking up in the night, more recently a couple of times a night, which I've got to train myself to train her out of. Ugh. I suspect weaning will help.

She gets picky about the funniest things--she won't accept broken crackers, for instance, though half a cookie is perfectly fine. When we brush her teeth, she then wants the toothbrush so she can try herself, but she must be on the floor for it, not in my arms. Chloë wanted to play dress-up once with swim diapers (among other things), and now she picks them up and puts them on one leg and toddles around with a blue blob stuck to her leg all around the house. She's such a funny girl. She thinks we're funny, too. She laughs a lot. Her baby laugh is one of the best sounds this house will ever hear.

More on milk

Maia hasn't given up the R.I.N.D.S. yet, though I'm slowing down on pumping and today, for example, she only nursed four times (when she woke, before naps, and at bedtime). She also bit me again today, which resulted in her being shouted "No biting!" at and dumped (gently) on the floor, which she seemed to take personally. I've given up reading or playing on my phone while we nurse, partly because she gets distracted by it and partly because I know this isn't going to last long--either the individual session or the activity in general--and I want to be present for it.

It's funny how individual a baby can be in the act of something as supposedly simple as nursing. At this age, as I recall, Chloë was engaged in Extreme Nursing, wiggling and throwing herself everywhere and pushing her butt in the air as she nursed. Maia doesn't do this, though she does tend to end a little early, wiggle around so she's more on her stomach than on her side, and then go back for a last mouthful or two. But when she's lying on her left side, she puts her right leg straight up in the air, sometimes grabbing it, sometimes pushing her foot (so much bigger than it used to be!) into my face so I'll rub it or pretend to eat it or wave it around like a wand to make her smile. But only that side. When she's lying on her right side, her left arm is constantly in motion, groping over and under my shirt and, lately, patting and stroking the other R.I.N.D.S., which is peculiar and irritating and I've been trying to get her to stop it. But it only happens on that side.

She'll grab and play with my hair on either side, which will generally make it swing free and tickle her in the face, which makes her smile. And when she's done she invariably pushes herself upright and reaches for the books, saying earnestly, "Da da da da." I love how her vocalizations are purposeful now, even though I don't know what she means.  She doesn't often demand to nurse, instead getting generally irritable if I'm not getting into position, but if she's thirsty and I happen to be lying down she'll come over and bounce her mouth off the appropriate place a few times to tell me to get a move on.

I'm looking forward to giving up pumping, especially since the lactation room at work is getting a little crowded and will be more so in the summer, I'm told. (I acknowledge this is still better than not having a lactation room at all like last time, especially with the scalding requirement.) I'm not looking forward to giving up nursing, but I think it's going to happen sooner than later, unless I make a special effort. Maia seems to be less interested in it, more independent. It makes me wistful, but it's a good thing, and it's characteristic of her. I'm looking forward to seeing more of her personality, too.

Baby-led weaning

Eric comes in shortly after Maia and I have settled down for Maia's bedtime feeding. She immediately squirms onto her back to grin up at Eric and reach one stubby arm toward him. "Hi, baby. Now pay attention to mama," he tells her. She turns toward me, and then immediately back to him, so he says, "Okay, okay, I'm going," and leaves.

We nurse for a few minutes on that side, the right, but she gets restless, so we switch to the left. After a couple of minutes, she starts squirming again. She pushes herself up on her hands and knees. She sees the bottle from her last afternoon feeding, still holding a couple of ounces, on the table beside us. She reaches and grabs it. She twists around until she's sitting, then topples backward onto my right arm. She puts the bottle to her mouth and starts to drink, snuggled happily against me.

I call for Eric. When he appears in the doorway, she smiles and raises the bottle in her fist in a triumphant salute.

Maia Maia, nighty-night

Maia leans over in the bath to drink the bath water. "No!" I say, but that doesn't stop her doing it. She mouths the faucet, too.

I wash her soft back and her strong legs with a warm, soapy cloth while she stands at the bathtub's edge, holding on with one hand, the other keeping a toy crab in her mouth. She drools. She grins. She lets go and for a second, she's standing there, unsupported. She drops softly back into the water and I take the opportunity to wash her arms and underarms, her chest and feet. I'd play This Little Piggy with her toes, but there's no time; she's moving again, onto her hands and knees to get the magenta cup floating just a bit out of reach.

She sips at the water again, and I say "No!" again, and she looks thoughtful and says, "Buh." She often answers me when I talk to her nowadays, though I don't usually understand her responses. Occasionally I do. This is not one of those times, unless "Buh" means "Oh mother." She splashes at the water with her hands, watches where it goes, splashes again.

I wet her fine, still-sparse hair and her face, and wash her well to get the sweet potato off. Eric asked at dinner if he should bother washing her off, and I said something about getting the big chunks at least, and he took me at my word; there are still sweet potato splotches on her eyebrow, her neck, the top of her ear. She did enjoy being able to feed herself, though. She protests a little as I scrub, but not much; she's too engrossed in gnawing at her cup and crawling after the monster ducky.

I rinse her off and get her delicate bits, and then open the drain. I take her towel off the rack and tuck it under my chin. She sees it and grins, her eyes lighting up, and drops the monster ducky. I pick her up and place her against my chest to wrap her in the towel so we can sit on the toilet and dry her off. Today she twists in my grasp before I've even gotten her fully wrapped up. Is she unhappy and wants me to hold her close? No, she's peering at the shiny knob on the towel closet in the corner and trying to take it.

I try to turn her, but end up drying her face and head and feet in that position and carrying her, monkeylike, into her room. I deposit her on the changing table and keep a hand on her as I'm selecting a diaper and a sleeper. She gets up and starts exploring like a spelunker, arms spread wide against the wall, toes tucked into any cranny, perilously close to the edge. "I'd have thought I'd have intelligent babies," I tell her. "Why aren't you afraid of falling?" I gather her in, hold her high above the changing table, and blow on her as I send her down onto it--quickly, but with a soft landing. She's delighted, but the charm only lasts a second. I manage to get her diaper on her and adjusted properly after five or six of these. Then I'm too afraid, even if she isn't, to stay on the changing table, so she gets flown to the floor.

She picks up a cloth from the laundry pile and covers her head with it. "Where's Maia?" I say, and she yanks it down. "There she is!" I say, and we both grin. When the charm wears off she crawls next door, where her big sister and daddy are playing, and I follow, sleeper in hand. Then it's Chloë's turn for a bath and a good hair-combing; then Maia comes to me again for some milk, at least until she gets up on her hands and knees and finds she can't get her head down to the R.I.N.D.S. satisfactorily, and gives up in favor of trying to reach the lotion bottle. Then it's time for her Sleep Sack and a short book. She's fighting to get me to put her down before I've gotten two lines into her lullaby, so I cut it short and put her down and turn on her aquarium, which is what she wants. I whisper, "Sleep well," and leave her staring raptly, her face blue from the aquarium light. Before a minute passes I hear her I'm-falling-asleep growls, and smile.

Status report: Chloë, month 30

Oh, my big funny sweet smart strong silly two-and-a-half-year-old girl. What fun two has been so far, even with the tantrums and the discipline issues and the total insistence on a lack of potty training. It's not hard to focus on the positive when your little girl calls out, "Mama I really like you" (even though what she seems really to be saying is "Don't go") or listens to you tell her to dream about the good things that are planned for tomorrow and adds, "And cats and dogs. And rainbows. And cats. And Olivia."

Chloë starts every morning lately asking to have milk and be buried (sit against the green cushion and have her "friends" and blankets piled around her until she's enveloped by them). But beyond that, it's anyone's guess what will happen. Maybe we will blast off! by counting "ten, nine, eight, teven, eight, fibve, torr, twee, two, one...blast off!" Maybe we will get on a carousel in the kitchen (the bouncer again) and ride around and around. Maybe we will play with the candy game (Candyland) or the Elmo game (Memory, Sesame Street version). Maybe we will play with Legos, or in the winter house, or read the map to get through the cornfield while we see Swiper.

I'm totally digging the imagination thing, though it bugs me slightly that she's mostly cribbing from her shows (is it a problem that we don't let her watch a greater variety?). And the repetition can get irritating. Oh gods, the repetition. But then she does things like insist everyone wear helmets for going to outer space:



Outer Space is very in mode right now. The Purple Planet Dora episode is still tops, and the space book (or books with space in them, such as "The Einstein book," actually titled Starring Lorenzo, and Einstein Too, in which a theater family's misfit son goes to outer space with Albert Einstein) gets frequent rotation, and Chloë's always putting on a space suit or a helmet or finding new rocketships. Or making them.



She's so talkative, so eloquent; I've stopped keeping track and started to accept that she just talks now, like a real person. Even if a lot of her sentences are taken from things we say...but isn't that how most language works? "When we go to the fabric store next time I will see the rabbit," she says, referring to a sign on a gas station. "I didn't mean to talk with my mouth full," she'll say, after answering some question I've asked at the dinner table. "I'll try to remember next time." "Will you sing the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo song?" she says, and when I do, "That sounds like the Rudolph song from my Christmas show." When asked why, she'll say, "Just because."

Though her constant repeating things hasn't gotten any better. She cut herself at the grocery store the other day, and had to have a bandage, and all night, and all the next day, it was "I need another Band-Aid," "I know I need another Band-Aid," "Daddy I need another Band-Aid Daddy," "Mommy, Daddy got me another Band-Aid," etc. She was very upset about this "ow," expecting it to be gone much sooner than it unfortunately will. She hasn't had many bad scrapes or sores.

She made up her first song the other day. Something about "I am Chloë, I am Chloë, I am Chloë, and I am two," and then I think it went into something esoteric, but I'm not sure. I was too busy being admiring.

I drew kites on the tub wall at a recent bath, and she colored in the triangles--surprisingly well considering the medium and her age. She's always asking me to play now, when before she wanted a book, or a show. Even when I suggest baking, mostly she'd rather play. She even beat Eric at a game of Candyland tonight, and me at a game of Memory (two-year-old's edition, in which we put rejected cards down face-up and I gave hints so broad a semi could have driven over them). She likes to play with Maia when Maia will, but if not, she'll play around her.



(You'll see her "winter house" in the background there, the little fort I constructed out of her blanket on a whim and haven't been allowed to take down. Why is it her winter house? I don't know, but I find it a charming name.)

She continues to do well when Maia has demands on me, though I continue to feel that I'm giving her attention more than I am Maia, which worries me. But then Maia has particular ways of requiring my presence that Chloë can't compete with, at least not for the next few months. When we nurse Chloë will hang on my knees, or play with Maia's toys, or ask me to read, or if she's tired or unhappy lay her head on the Boppy while I stroke her hair with one hand, keeping Maia at the milk with the other. I feel very motherly in these moments. A week or two ago, after nursing the three of us played on Maia's floor a while, and Chloë decided Laughing Baby was thirsty, so she gave her some milk:



"Elmo is thirsty, too," she said afterward, and put him to her chest. Then she gave him to me. "Mama, give Elmo some milk." So I put him to my chest. "Mama, you have to open your shirt," she told me, but I refuse to nurse a Muppet, so he went thirsty.

The potty training thing would drive me insane if I let it. She would be potty-trained now if she wanted to be. She just doesn't want to be. She says she likes her diapers, though I prompted her for that answer so it's not trustworthy. But she's so totally ready, and she's got control. She'll wait to poop until she's finished her food, or until we go upstairs to the bathroom (she was reluctant to do this until we made it clear she was not expected to sit on the potty, just be in the room). During naked time at night she'll hold her pee until she gets back into a diaper again, asking for one if it's gone too long.

Her Grandpa and Halmoni sent a package of underwear to help motivate her, and yesterday I asked if she wanted to practice wearing some. She said yes excitedly, and selected the deep blue-green ones (other options: sparkly Ariel, and seahorses and stars), and ran around in underwear for a while, and even sat on the potty twice (and demanded the stickers to go with it). We ended up in the bathroom for something and Chloë said, sounding surprised, "That's pee," as she wet herself. We got her (and the floor) cleaned up and into a new pair (seahorses and stars), and sometime later she said, "Mommy I need a diaper." I put her into a diaper. She peed into it. I sighed. I'm wondering if we should just have a "boot camp" sort of weekend: tell her "Okay, we're getting you potty trained this weekend," and take away the diapers except for at bedtime. The pediatrician suggests a stepwise approach, getting a reward chart and rewarding her for doing her business in the bathroom, and then while sitting on the potty whether clothed or not, and then eventually for doing it in the potty. We'll see. I'm trying not to let it get to me. I think when she decides she wants to be trained, it will take hardly any time at all, so that's a good thing. Right?

Food and its provenance

We bought formula for Maia a couple of weeks ago. We haven't quite run out of frozen milk yet, but I'm still not pumping enough, and losing too much sleep to the evening amount I do get, and supplementing a couple of ounces' shortage is annoying with the 8-oz. bags we're freezing to avoid losing more than necessary to the bag, and she has an overnight with the mothers planned that will use up our stock. Eric's given her a couple of half-and-half bottles and she didn't even blink. Traitor.

I'm a little disappointed I'm not able to supply her fully, but it's not like we're switching her over entirely--she's only had a couple of ounces this week--and I decided that the difference between exclusive breastfeeding (other than all those solids she's now consenting to eat, as long as they have texture) and almost-entirely-breastfeeding is not worth losing any more sleep over. Particularly since one of the benefits of breastmilk, the immunologic properties, is pretty much negated in her bottles by the scalding anyway. And it's not like she's been sick a lot. If I hadn't had to throw out the backstock when we discovered the lipase problem, or if I'd been able to stay home another couple of weeks to build up more, or if she'd been my first child so I'd had more time at home to pump, or if I could stay home instead of working--well, then she'd be getting a few ounces more breastmilk every week rather than a few ounces of perfectly nutritious formula. And it's only going to cost us a few dollars before she's old enough to get cow's milk instead. So that's that.

As for Chloë: I made rosemary-artichoke hummus the other day, because I mentioned hummus and she was in favor of it, and a couple of nights ago when Eric was gone for the evening we had the leftovers for dinner, with carrots for me and chips for her (really a chip, until it breaks, as she uses them as spoons rather than food), and grapes and some Morningstar Farms "chicken" nuggets to round it out.

"I like hummus," she told me. "But it's spicy."

"It is spicy," I agreed. "That's because it's made with garlic. But that's part of why I like it."

"What is it made of?" she said, and by now I recognize this to mean "Tell me more," not "I didn't hear you the first time," so I said, "Well, it's made with garlic and chickpeas, and rosemary, and artichokes, and oil, and lemon juice, and a little salt."

"What are grapes made of?" she said.

"Grapes are just made of grapes. They grow," I explained. "You know how we grew tomatoes to eat? They grow like that."

"What are chicken nuggets made of?" she said, pointing to the one on my plate.

I hesitated. "Well, there are two kinds of chicken nuggets. This kind is not really chicken; we just call it that. It's made of vegetables and flour. Then there are the real chicken nuggets, and they're just made of chickens." (I forgot the coating, I guess.)

She nodded knowledgeably and went on eating. I inquired, "Do you know what chicken is? Roosters and hens like in the Our Town book?"

She nodded again and said nothing, so I went back to eating myself. I guess it's not time for the "we eat animals" talk yet.

Turning the tide of indifference

Maia is already pulling herself up to stand. She adores Chloë's potty, partly because of the stickers on it and partly because it's convenient for hoisting herself up on. "Sit down!" I tell her. "It is too soon!" Crawling is trouble enough. She's already stuffed various overlooked paper products in her mouth, plus a small foam star that she luckily couldn't quite swallow. I think I need to devote more time to cleaning from now on.

We've determined that if I pump every night, and maybe also on those occasions that she ought to be hungry but is popping on and off and looking around at things instead, we may be able to avoid formula. We'll see how this goes. We've also determined--we think--why she's been so indifferent to food up until now. I offered her some grapes recently (well-chewed by myself, thank you) and she loved them, and Eric decided to offer her some banana from Chloë's banana when it looked like Chloë wasn't going to finish it, and she loved that too. She was also interested in applesauce--the real stuff. And she's loved her introduction to finger foods in the shape of puffs and Cheerios. Apparently she just doesn't like purees.

So we're going to work on giving her more "real" foods, and once we get through the stage 2s we've got--if we can--we'll move on to the stage 3s which have good texture in them. It feels awfully early to be moving on this, but she's getting close to eight months old, which is about the time to start introducing things like yogurt and pasta and bread products, teeth (or lack thereof) allowing. It's just that she hasn't been all that interested in food so far, and I haven't been as invested in getting her on it as I was with Chloë. But with the milk shortage, it's now become more important. Let's hear it for food!

Status report: Chloë, month 28, and Maia, month 7

Maia is crawling now. I waited to post this update until I could say that honestly. Yeah. We'll go with that excuse.

Ahem. So our house is no longer safe. How do other parents handle having a mobile baby and a toddler who likes to play with small toys? Just forbid them all? Christmas Day is going to be ridiculous, between a girl who's discovered she loves presents (I asked her what kind we should get for Daddy, and she said, "A brown one") and a baby who's discovered she loves eating paper products.

Putting that aside, the girls are bright and beautiful and growing up, up, up. Let's talk about:

Motion. Maia's spent the last couple of weeks working on the whole crawling idea. She tried out going backwards for a while. Then doing a roly-poly method that involved sitting, then getting on hands and knees, then swiveling to sit in a slightly different location. Then getting up on hands and feet. She's still doing that and I each time I expect her to just stand up. Now she's doing a slow classic crawl. We don't expect it to last long. The slow part, that is. The gates are back up.



She's started flipping over during diaper changes, and refuses to leave her socks alone. We were in Babies R Us the other day and I looked over and noticed she was sockless. I spent the next five minutes going back up the aisles we'd just gone down because I couldn't find one of the socks. Eventually it turned out she'd flipped it out of the carrier to the bottom of the cart. I suppose that's not the worst place to discover you suddenly need baby socks, but I was still a bit annoyed.

She's in the big tub now, because she started doing her best to climb out of the little one, and is loving it. She plays with the toys Chloë is happy to throw in after her, and doesn't protest when I lay her down to wash her belly and thighs and delicate bits. (Incidentally, Chloë has started getting interested in her bits. I guess it's that age.) It's ever so much nicer this way.


Chloë was overjoyed by the arrival of new boots from her Grandpa and Halmoni. She put them on as soon as we opened the box and she didn't take them off until bedtime, and was reluctant even then. I didn't think much could compare with the enticement of naked time, but these boots did it. She's now big enough to climb up some ladders at the playground by herself, and delights in going across the monkey bars (which is to say, she touches them as I walk below the monkey bars carrying her along before she steps on my chin in her scrabble to get up on the platform on the other side). She loves to "hang," and does it from anything she can: bars at the playground, my chair and desk, Maia's bouncer.



Sleep. Maia sleeps pretty well now; she goes down easily (except a few nights ago when she screamed for two hours, burped, and then murmured herself to sleep within minutes) and stays down for anywhere between six and ten hours. Chloë has started waking up more during the night. We go and ask what's wrong, and usually she says, "I want you to stay." Then either we do, while she talks and pats our faces, or we don't, and she screams. She's also woken up yelling "I don't want that, I don't want that," or "I want a snack," or "The other one," so I can only assume she's having vivid dreams just like her mama. (I think I dreamed the other night that she called my knitting "needling." It sounds so totally like something she'd say, especially since she likes to ask for a needle when I'm knitting with double-points, and I was doing it the other day to make her a hat, but I can't get her to repeat it.)

Talking. Maia is babbling, babbling, babbling. "Ba ba ba ba," she says. "Na na na na. Eh." She's so happy, most of the time, and has this great rumbling belly laugh. Chloë's language grows ever more sophisticated. "I want a bite of your toast," she'll say, or "We are going to the mall to get a present for Grandpa." She's taken to saying, "What did you say?" and "Where did we go?" and I'm thinking she just wants to talk about it, so we say, "What did I say?" and "Where did we go?" Sometimes when I ask her whether she knows something she says yes, and then I say, "Okay, what is it?" she says "Yes" ("Heth") again. I told her it was okay to say "I don't know" when she doesn't know something, so now when I ask her if, say, she knows what a reindeer is, she says "Heth," and I say, "What is it?" and she says, "I don't know." And sometimes she surprises me by what she does know. So sophisticated.



Food. The innovation here is all Maia's; Chloë is her usual food-lovin' self. Maia is still a bit temperamental when it comes to eating solids, but she loves her puffs, and she's taken to trying to steal Chloë's sippy/straw cup whenever possible. We've given her her own, which she's very interested in. Carrots still seem to be her favorite. In the meantime, she's drinking more in her bottles than I'm pumping at work. We'll see how this situation develops. Especially since she's also developed that clawing-at-the-R.I.N.D.S.-as-though-they're-supposed-to-have-handles thing that Chloë went through, she doesn't have to remain a formula-free baby.

(I threaten her with formula constantly. I don't at all mean it, but with the current pumping/eating differential I'm worried that I'll have to actually go out and buy some formula, and then she'll simply refuse to drink it because she's already repeatedly shown herself willing to starve rather than eat the way she prefers. I'm trying to get up the will to pump more at night and on the weekend. I'm really starting to hate pumping,  especially with the added scalding requirement, so this is difficult.)

Chloë does continue to get better at using her fork, even cutting her own bites of lasagna recently, and she can hold a small, firm piece of pizza whole in her hands and eat it that way. (She likes to eat them cold for this reason. Eric says it's because she takes after him.) She's been happily consuming her Halloween candy, a piece or two a day, or alternately homemade popsicles ("pockle") when she's been a good eater. She's taken to knocking her fork against her teeth and lips when she's nearly done, which is annoying.



Discipline. This one is all Chloë's. She's definitely more rebellious and challenging these days. "Don't tell me that!" she says frequently. However, she then generally does (or doesn't do) whatever we've just told her to do (or not do), so it's more bravado than anything else. I get impatient with her at tooth-brushing time--she get the brush to try herself, but generally just bats at her teeth a few times and then sucks at it to get the taste of the toothpaste--and try to take it away from her, and she bursts into tears and wails, "I want to brush my teeth!" She also says she wants Daddy to brush her teeth, but she always says that. If she had her way I would be her slave all day until it came to tooth-brushing time. Then come back to sing her songs when I tuck her in.

We'll actually negotiate the number of songs sometimes. "You can stay," she says. "You can sing a song?" (We're still working on the right way to ask for things; currently she thinks saying "Do you want me to read a story?" is the way to get me to read her The Very Hungry Caterpillar one more time and "I want more pasta," is the way to get a second helping at dinner) I usually say, "I will stay and sing you a song." Then she says, "Maybe three songs!" or occasionally, "Five!" I say, "Two songs," and she says, "Okay." Wait a minute...I just realized that's me doing the negotiating, not her. Dammit.

But she actually knows some songs now. She can sing her ABCs, although N usually gets left out, and knows "Twinkle Star" with help and bits of "Row Boat" and "On the Loose" and "My Star" and a few others. She'll name the one she wants me to sing, or leave it up to me by saying, "Something." She's a funny girl. They're both funny, happy girls.

If I ever write a mommy book, it will be called The Milk Diaries. Or maybe The Milk Must Flow.

Late yesterday I was working on something urgent and annoying that had to go out before I left work, so I didn't get my last pumping session in. When I got home, Maia professed to be hungry until she actually got down to nursing for a few minutes on one side and then ignored me, so I decided to pump the other.

When I was building up stock on maternity leave, Chloë would hang around and want to know what I was doing and prod the pump, and I had her "help" me by pushing a particular button when I told her to in the hope of stopping her from pushing it all the time. Last night she wanted to help again, so she held the pump horn and watched while I plugged in the power cord and got otherwise set up. I turned on the pump. "Push button now?" she said.

"Not yet," I told her.

"Push button?"

"Not yet," I said. "We have to wait for the milk to come."

She looked down at the R.I.N.D.S. and howled, "Come, milk!"

Eric, playing with Maia nearby, collapsed in laughter. "Are you okay, babe?" I said after a minute, when he seemed unable to breathe, and Chloë ran over to him and said anxiously, "Are you okay Daddy?" He said he was, and she came back to me, examined the R.I.N.D.S., and said, "Milk!" so I finally let her push the button.

Feed me

Chloë ate a ton of peanut butter toast this weekend--I think she had something like four slices altogether, plus another this morning. This morning Eric said for the first time that we need to make sure she gets enough vegetables. She's been eating well at breakfasts and dinners but not so much at lunch lately, and we don't generally serve vegetables at breakfast so that limits the possibilities. However, she also ate a ton of tomatoes this weekend (we bought a pint of yellow cherry tomatoes at the farmer's market Saturday that are nearly all gone, plus there were our tomatoes and pasta sauce) and she'll eat those any time of day, so it may be tomatoes for breakfast for a while here. I've got a couple of plants in pots in the backyard, and they look like they never produce anything, but in fact a couple get ripe every day; it's just that whenever one even nears redness she picks it and stuffs it in her mouth. (She's learned that it's best to put the tomato entirely into her mouth before biting it, to cut down on her shirt changes.) Hey, it's summer; she needs to enjoy them while she can.

(Also, the imaginary food game gets ever more interesting. Yesterday she handed me some pretend cheese to put on some pretend pasta. I sprinkled it on and tasted it, and offered her a bite. She refused, because, she said, it was spicy cheese and she didn't want spicy cheese.)

And Maia has decided that nursing for more than ten minutes at a time is for suckers. So to speak. She sits down with me readily enough and nurses for about five minutes. Then up pops her smiling face. She gurgles. She grins. I wipe her chin. She nurses again for several seconds, then stops, and smiles, and repeats. Eventually I get tired of it and switch her to the other side, where the same thing happens, and then I give up. The only exception is when she's tired, when she'll actually settle down. It's much faster than nursing used to be, but I worry a bit over whether she's getting enough, and particularly whether she's getting enough hindmilk (the fatty stuff). Still, she's moving out of her 0-3 month clothes and into her 3-6 month clothes right on schedule, so I'll try to trust she knows what she's doing.

Eat and sleep, eat and sleep

We bought Chloë a new booster seat for the dining table. Her previous one has been strapped to the same chair since she was about three months old and she's used it, first with and then without the tray, ever since. When we realized that Maia was in fact getting close to being able to sit in it (when does she grow? How does she do it?), we further realized that a new one must be purchased, and it would be nice if the new one didn't have the annoying bumps and straps that the current one does that get in Chloë's way.

So the new one is a little lower, a little flatter, with the straps and sides removed, and she can climb into it herself. This is a big improvement, and makes her feel very proud. She can remove her own bib, too, and is getting much better at using her fork so her hands aren't always the food-encrusted blobs they used to be. Mealtimes are much less messy than before. Of course, with Maia a little over a month away from potentially starting on solids (really? When did that happen?), it's a very temporary reprieve.

In the meantime, Maia continues to do well with her bottles and to nurse to sleep almost every night. I find it so annoying that I can't remember how we did bedtime in Chloë's early months; but I don't think it was quite like this. What particularly frustrates me is that if I nurse her to sleep in the glider, I can often pick her up and put her in the bassinet for the first part of the night, but only if I fall asleep with her. If I stay awake in the chair to read, even if I wait until she seems dead to the world to move her, she wakes up. You wouldn't think that being drowsy and grumpy would make me a better lay-the-baby-down-er, but apparently it does. Or else when I'm sleeping something gets in the milk that makes her sleep harder. I can't imagine what would happen if we were bottle-feeding only. Would we be insane with sleep deprivation? Buying D batteries weekly so she could sleep in the swing? Or would she have decided it wasn't worth taking advantage of us over and started to stay asleep when out of our arms?

At any rate, I can't wait until we can start getting her to sleep by herself a little more. We were doing great for a couple of weeks, but she seems to be regressing, which means I'm getting less time in the evenings to do things and she's getting less sleep. She does seem to be lengthening her time between feeds, going two and a half hours or so much of the time, and that's a good step. Someday I will sleep four hours in a row again.

Surrender

So Maia has not liked being deprived of the R.I.N.D.S. while I’m at work. Last week, she took one bottle late Wednesday, and then none on Thursday and Friday, and we worried. Each night when I came home I nursed her, and I think she figured "Hey, if I wait long enough, Mom will come back." We tried different bottles, different locations--and when I say "we" I mean "Eric," because we figured my trying to offer the bottle would only make matters worse. We discussed offering formula. Saturday, we tried nursing half and then offering the bottle. Nothing worked. We decided that we must have a serious standoff, no R.I.N.D.S. allowed until she had successfully taken more than one bottle, no matter what, until she cracked. Or we did.

So early Sunday morning, Chloë and I went to the park and played on the slides and the swings while Eric stayed home with Maia and offered a bottle every half hour. Chloë and I came home for napping and lunch and pumping, me avoiding the room Maia was in whenever possible. We went out again to shop at various places, which included having a snack in the car on a ninety-degree day (yes, I kept the AC on) since I didn't think we'd be welcome in the store with fingers sticky with grapes and trailing goldfish crackers.

And Maia accepted a bottle, perhaps sensing that we were serious. (It probably also helps that people other than Eric had tried and failed to get her to take a bottle, so he knew it wasn't his technique causing the problem and was more confident.) Then she took another one. We nursed for the night, and Monday and yesterday she's taken her bottles quite competently. I think she may not be taking as much as she ought--two and a half or three ounces at a time--but she's eating, and that's what matters. The siege is over.

Demurred

I've mentioned before that there's a moment at the beginning of most nursing sessions when I hate my own skin and everyone else and realize that everything in my life has been a big mistake and I'm trapped in it forever. It happened with Chloë, and I didn't think about it much. It started up again with Maia, and after I realized my dissatisfaction with my life and my second child mostly stemmed from those moments, it occurred to me that maybe I should do something about it.

I started with the Internet, of course, and came upon something right away: D-MER, Dysphoric Milk Ejection Reflex. As far as I can tell, this is exactly what I've got. Essentially, the milk ejection reflex (which happens a short time into a nursing session and makes the milk actually flow rather than being sucked out) is coupled with a bigger-than-it-ought-to-be drop in dopamine levels, which causes various negative feelings until they level out again, which takes a few minutes. A couple of sites I read regarding it say that simply knowing that it's physiologically caused can help, and I've been finding that that's true. Now I get Maia settled, start feeling lousy, and then remember that it's because we just started nursing, and I'm usually okay. Sometimes I persist in feeling lousy, but it's gotten a lot better.

I mentioned it to Heather at the midwives' at my six-week checkup, wondering whether (a) they'd heard of it and (b) they had any other suggestions. She'd never heard of it. She was concerned, because we'd already discussed my increased risk of PPD ("If you think it's coming on again, we want to treat it pretty aggressively, because that works out better for women than if you don't fix it the first time") and wanted to know if I just wanted to go right back on an antidepressant, which I didn't. She promised to look it up and check with a couple of lactation specialists to get any advice they might have. A few days later she called (well, had a nurse call) and suggested counseling, because "a pill won't help; you can't take on every time you breastfeed." (I bet I could, but they'd have to make the pill first.)

I don't think this will help, so I'm not going; I'm doing okay now, there's a much more tenuous link between D-MER and cognition than PPD and cognition, and their previous recommendations for counselors have worked out poorly. At this point it's just something to put up with. Between this and the lipase problem, though, I'm starting to wonder whether I'm actually (physically) cut out for motherhood.

The trouble with lipase

I've been pumping milk for the past several weeks, here and there, to build up a back stock for when I go back to work. The midwife at my six-week appointment pointed out that all I really need is enough for the first day, but it was very nice last time being able to send frozen packets along to the mothers' or aunt's with Chloë at will without having to pump extra, so I pumped enough for a decent bagful in the freezer and was quite pleased.

Then, when we realized we needed to reintroduce bottles to Maia and figure out what size meal she needed, I pumped a test bottle in the wee hours and we tried it that night. Maia refused it, howling and shrieking. After a couple of attempts, Eric noticed the milk smelled a little off. I pumped a completely fresh bottle and she still refused to take it, so that didn't explain the bottle troubles, but it did present a concern of its own. Milk usually stays good around forty-eight hours, at least twenty-four, and this had been twelve. We tried it again the next day, and again the early morning milk smelled and tasted off.

Eric did some research and found out that some women produce milk with too much lipase in it. Lipase breaks down fats and causes rancidity, and an excess makes that happen much more quickly than normal. It doesn't technically spoil the milk, but it makes it taste nasty enough that no baby will drink it anyway. He also read that scalding the milk, on the stove or in a bottle warmer, will deactivate the lipase and save the milk, without causing quite as much destruction as microwaving it would do.

I was somewhat skeptical that this was what was going on, since I didn't have this problem last time and felt vaguely that I was being criticized. But it made most sense to proceed as if this were true, so we bought a bottle warmer and I started scalding all my pumped milk. Then I thawed one of the stashed aliquots to verify, since lipase will continue to work when frozen, if more slowly. It smelled and tasted awful.

So, we're throwing out the entire back stock. Luckily we--Eric--caught this in enough time that I'll have just about enough time to pump enough for my first day back at work without being crazy about it. I'm also going to have to bring the bottle warmer to work with me, which will be a pain (and too bad for Eric, since it would be very useful for him--I don't know why we didn't think of buying one last time; they're pretty inexpensive and very fast). But it's better than the alternative. I do wonder what's causing it, though. One possible cause is diet. It better not be the chocolate.

Status report: Month 2 (Maia)

Two months? Really? No wonder the 0-3 month clothes are fitting so much better. Maia's' two-month (really eight-week) checkup last week went very well; she was 11 lb, 3 oz, which is perfect, 50th percentile. She's also 50th percentile for weight, and 95th for head size. I guess our kids are just that way.

She was furious about her shots and let us know, and then slept. A lot. Which was a change. Like Chloë, she hasn't been doing as much sleeping as the books say she should. She also gets very cranky at night and usually about half an hour after feeding, though that half-hour is usually pretty pleasant these days. She looks around, smiles, follows faces with her eyes, puts up with her sister's kisses and prods.


But the crankiness, oh, the crankiness. Nights have been especially bad, high-pitched screaming that usually only gets stopped by a cork (i.e., the R.I.N.D.S.). It's bad enough and inconsolable enough that we're considering it night colic. The pediatrician suggested that reflux might be causing it, as she also much prefers being upright and in motion, never, ever refuses a R.I.N.D.S., and I have my suspicions that she doesn't actually need to eat every two hours so much as she needs to suck on something, and she won't take a pacifier. Or a finger. Or a bottle, we've discovered. (More on that later.) We got a prescription for baby Zantac; we'll see whether it works.

We're having no issues with the R.I.N.D.S. this time around, at least as far as the direct interface goes. We have discovered, though, that she won't take a bottle. She did a few weeks ago, when we left her with the mothers for a few hours for our anniversary dinner; but Eric's been trying to get her to take a bottle for several days now in preparation for my return to work, and no dice. Our parents and the doctors say that when she's hungry enough, she will; which seems heartless but there's really not much we can do, since I must return to work and it's not close enough to come home every two hours, and I doubt they'd let me bring her to work with me. She'd bring down productivity too much.


(That's Chloë's doll. She'll get her own, but it'll have to be when I've got time to make one, which is not going to happen while we're nursing every two hours and walking the halls with her at night until bed.) My plans for a summer quilt for Chloë are also scrapped for now. I'm pleased I finished Maia's before she was born. Maia's slept under it a few times and seems to approve.


She goes to bed with me around 10-11, usually nursed down. The bassinet has been much emptier during her first two months than with Chloë's. She's still waking up mostly every three hours, though we've had a couple of four-hour stretches. I'm wondering if nursing her in bed is part of the problem, but she's still awfully little, so I'm not sure. She sleeps when she sleeps. And usually with her hands in the air, for some reason.


I think her birth hair is starting to fall out; I've been seeing fine strands here and there. Her eyes are still blue, but very dark; I suspect they're at least going to be like Chloë's changeable eyes, if not fully brown. She's mostly able to keep her head up now, and has kind of rolled over--not true rolls, I think, but it indicates some trunk strength, which is good. She is a sweet little girl.


Thank you. Thank you very much.

Chloë - Status report: Month 22

Chloë's twenty-second month was punctuated by the arrival of her new baby sister Maia, and that's been the big story of the month: working out how life with a baby sister works. She's been a champ mostly. She was so patient while we were in the hospital and she stayed first with Mimaw and Omi and then with Grandpa and Halmoni--though Grandpa tells me she was getting sad and bewildered by the end. She hangs on my legs whenever I'm nursing Maia, and tends to ask for food and drink and books and hugs more often during those times. It's heartrending and also slightly annoying to see her plead for a hug when I'm in the middle of nursing the baby and she knows quite well by now that I'm not going to move for the next forty-five minutes unless it's an emergency.


She's definitely jealous, but she's also our "big helper," fetching things and putting diapers in the diaper pail and being pretty good about our constant injunctions to be gentle around the baby. And she seems to like Maia herself (though I'm not a hundred percent positive that this isn't because we praise her whenever she shows signs of affection); she's always asking to see or hold her, and likes to kiss her head and stroke her hands. She's started chanting "Dubuduba Maia" in the car (when she tends to babble nonsense, for some reason). I vaguely wonder if she's using it as an epithet, the way I say "Oh brother," but it's adorable anyway.


She seems to have developed a favorite color: green. She has a pair of green shorts, and now that it's finally warm enough to wear them, she's obsessed. "Green pants?" she asked multiple times. "Green pants icky?" she said sadly when we convinced her that they were in the wash and couldn't be worn. We went shopping recently and bought her a bunch of 3T summer clothes (also bathing suit and hat and life vest in anticipation to a water park trip with family later this summer), and looked almost desperately for more green shorts, but there were none. Today we went to Target to get, among other things, blackout curtains for her room, and after she picked out the ones she liked (green) I spotted a pair of green boy's shorts. I pulled the 3T size off the rack and waved them at her, saying, "What do you think?" She responded, "Green pants!" and started to pull down the shorts she was wearing.

She's become more interested in her clothes recently; she often picks out her pants or shirt, and often her socks. She likes playing with her jewelry box and the bracelets and earrings ("ingy") inside. One thing I've noticed is that her memory is better than it used to be, and it shows up with the jewelry--she keeps her earrings in a little bag, and if I ask her where they are, she can tell me if they're in the bag or on her bed or what. She can take complex instructions now ("Put down your sippy, then pick up that green ball beside your coloring table, and put it in the box."), but is also showing more willfulness. She has a hat and sunglasses and hairclips and various other things, but it's anybody's guess as to whether we could actually get her to wear them for appropriate lengths of time; it's all we can do to get her to wear them long enough for pictures.


Her language continues to develop at an astounding rate. It's incredible how quickly she picks up words and their meanings, just from hearing two people talk--I mean, I know it's not just us, she hears other people and watches TV and such, but still, it's amazing. She's up to four-word sentences ("No go see Mama," "Chloë have some yogurt raisins?") and is game to repeat pretty much anything. She discusses the people she sees ("go see people?" she said excitedly when we mentioned a shopping trip the other day) and when things fall or roll, and who's coming down the stairs, and what's going on in her shows, and what she's doing, and what we're doing, and on and on and on.

She's fascinated with computers and cameras; as Eric said earlier today, while he videotaped her turning somersaults ("tumbling"), it's difficult to capture the native Chloë because when she sees a camera, she wants it so she can look at the pictures. She wants everything these days. She's constantly saying "Chloë have some-a?" which is her way of saying "I have the munchies." If we have something, she wants a bite. If we bring out something new--a pen, say, or an old toy she's forgotten--she wants to hold it and play with it. At Target we stopped in one of the toy aisles to look for tricycle pedal blocks (no luck) and she wandered to a nearby stand of cheap toys. She picked up several things in turn, squeezing them and saying "Chloë have yellow ball?" "Chloë have red ball?" and just "Chloë have?" when she couldn't identify the object (it was a mold for sand at the beach, so fair enough). We didn't respond to these requests, if they were requests, and she didn't object when we walked away without any of them, but I don't know how long that will last.


Now that it's warmer she's finally been able to go outside more, which has been great. She still likes walks and just wandering around the yard; she loves the sidewalk chalk she got for Easter; and Grandpa and Halmoni bought her two early birthday presents: a tricycle and a slide. She's too short for the tricycle (thus the need for pedal blocks) but loves being pushed around on it, or even just pulling it behind her as we walk. She loves the slide, too...theoretically. We've gone to the park several times lately, and while she talks excitedly about the swings and the slide, she's had a hard time actually using either one on her one. On our last visit she finally used a swing by herself for a couple of minutes, and was eventually coaxed into going down a baby slide by herself. (She likes going down the really big slides on Mama's or Daddy's lap, though.) She hasn't yet gone down her own slide. We're thinking we may need to have her cousin or her friends model for her.


Eric's been talking a lot lately about how big Chloë is, and how sweet, and how autonomous. Having Maia around as comparison helps, of course, but she really is seeming way more grown-up and more a person than she used to be, even than last month. She can do and say and understand so much, and she has her own little quirks, some adorable and some maddening, and she's so loving and so fun to be around when she isn't driving us crazy. But we'll take the crazy, and the love. We're all about both of those in this family.

The parrot and the banshee

Chloë is a regular parrot these days. She still can't say S or R or L or TH or W or F, but she's evidently gained enough of a grasp on language that she's able to start repeating what we say--so when I say to her, "You like playing in water, don't you, sweetie?" she says back, "Water don't you sweetie?" Or rather, "Howah doh hoo teevie?" I would love to know how she decides what consonants to substitute when. Why does "there" become "bear" and "that" become "dat"?

"Maia Maia Maia" is a frequent refrain these days. She hangs on my legs while I'm nursing Maia and pats her sister's head, or kisses it, or points at her long, slender fingers and says knowledgeably, "Tingah." She's also started pointing at random things and saying "Maia!" so that I'll correct her with "That's not Maia, that's Mama!" or "That's the couch!" or "That's the Boppy!" She's not excited about my unavailability when I'm behind the Boppy (for that matter, neither am I), but she's dealing with it pretty well. She delights in taking diapers to the trash for us--usually saying "Baby diaper?" when accepting one, and calling "Diaper in garbage!" as she runs back. She's up to four-word sentences on occasion. Her aunt says she misses this stage in her own daughter, and I can see why. It's so interesting to hear Chloë's thoughts coming out as speech. I wonder whether having words to put her thoughts into speeds them up or slows them down.

Maia, on the other hand, is mostly pretty quiet. This is not, happily, due to unnatural sleepiness such as Chloë had when she was this age, just that she hasn't fussed much except when she's had an exceptionally yucky diaper or when we haven't attended to her nutritional needs immediately. Kid loves to eat. At her checkup it turned out she'd gained seven ounces in five days. She generally falls asleep about every ten minutes of a feeding, and a full forty-minute feeding lasts her a little under two hours unless she has a sound nap, so if I didn't wake her up she'd be eating pretty much, oh, constantly.

She has had a few opportunities to exercise her lungs, though. She cried herself to sleep, or maybe to resignation, on the way home from her checkup because I just didn't want to sit in the pediatrician's for an extra hour to nurse her. And the other day Eric was trying to soothe her while I finished something up--or just sulked at the prospect of yet another feeding an hour and a half after the last, I forget which--and her cries turned to what sounded like actual screams. All was forgiven once we were settled and the R.I.N.D.S. was in place, but I was fairly alarmed. I never heard this before. Her cries don't sound like Chloë's did, either. I can't say I remember exactly how Chloë sounded, but this wasn't it. Maia has this burst of particularly demanding vocalization in the middle of every cry that Chloë didn't. I'm having this feeling that it's a good thing Chloë is the oldest, because otherwise Maia might run her right over.

A mother's memory, refreshed

I forgot how warm a newborn's head is.

Miss Maia is doing well, settling into home life, I think. Mom and Dad are here for another day--they arrived the day she was born--and have been a huge help in keeping the house running and getting us all a chance to take a breath and sort out what this new life is going to be like.

Labor and delivery were delightfully short and uneventful. I'll post a birth story later...hopefully less late than Chloë's. It'll also be shorter. I must say, I'd forgotten how annoying those hospital beds are, especially when you've got an IV in one arm and three hospital bracelets in the other. Also, how many different nurses you get in the course of a two-day stay.

Nursing is going well this time. It's still in the hurty stage, but Maia's weight is about where it should be, according to her pre-discharge and first-checkup measurements, and she's happy to latch on and stay there, except for a penchant for drifting off for five-minute naps and then waking up, ready for another refreshing drink, just when I've gotten up and am trying to use the bathroom or get a snack or a glass of water. I'd forgotten how thirsty nursing makes me. Also how sleepy. And how, when everything is quiet, you can hear the milk moving through a baby's tiny body as she drinks.

Also, I'd forgotten that moment at the beginning of nearly every nursing session where I feel awful and everything in the world is hateful. Ah well.

I've been told I can start lifting Chloë again, which is good because she's been very annoyed about being denied. She likes having a baby around to kiss and point at and say "Baby baby baby baby baby baby baby" to, but she's not so hot on being forbidden to climb on me because she's in danger of squishing her sister. I've been trying to have one-on-one time with her when possible. Having Maia around makes me notice how grown-up Chloë is, so loose-limbed and tousle-haired and talkative. And fun, except when she's being whiny, but I can understand that at a time like this.

We've been tense as Maia has gotten yellower, but we discussed jaundice at her checkup yesterday and the pediatrician had us go get a bilirubin level, and she's fine. We're going back later this week for another checkup, just in case, but I think she's doing fine. Everything is so much easier this time around. I know about changing diapers and clipping nails, and while I dislike the nighttime wakings as much as ever I know exactly what to do during them. I'm a little concerned about Thursday, when we wake up and have no Grandpa and Halmoni around, but every other family of four is able to deal with it; we will too.