Tired

Chloe's been on a gluten-free diet this week. Her chronic stomachache hasn't responded to any other treatment, and it isn't responding to this one, either; we're giving it another day or two and then calling up the pediatrician again and demanding that they fix our child. I made a worse mess than I've made in quite a few years, baking-wise, trying to make gluten-free bread. I look forward to this being over too. But Chloe's been quite depressed about it--though much happier when she heard there was gluten-free pasta in the cupboard, and then in her bowl.

Yesterday, after school, the girls decided to take a picnic "lunch" out to the middle area of the apartment complex. This led to about three hours of play with the other kids, including, I was told afterward, the older boys coming to play school with them, plus some sort of parading and chasing game, plus a making-soup game with regular snack refills. When they came in for dinner I served up leftovers, including the last of the gluten-free pasta. "This is all there is?" Chloe said when I warned her that was all the leftovers we had, and she started to cry. 

It wasn't a tantrumy sort of crying; it was the crying of a tired girl who was very disappointed. I offered her rice and seaweed and tomatoes, which helped. "Can we snuggle on the couch and read before baths?" she said wistfully, and of course I said yes. We've been reading The Rescue Princesses, a series of books about princesses (well, girls who are called princesses; other than wearing tiaras all the time their lives are not actually different from the standard American chapter-book reader) who like to rescue animals in trouble with the aid of sparkly gems. And ninja moves. Don't ask. I only read a chapter, because it was getting late and I wanted to get her to bed on time. When we'd done baths and tooth-brushing and were snuggled in bed (after another chapter), I tucked her blanket around her and said, "You're tired, aren't you?"

Every other time I've asked this (of either girl), the response has been "I'm not tired!!!!" But this time she nodded and sighed. I kissed her good-night, and Maia as well, and she was asleep within a few minutes. My poor little growing-up girl.

On the poop deck

(Warning: discussion of gastrointestinal function ahead.)

"I don't need 'positories any more!" Maia said brightly yesterday. Then she took a wipe and tried to stuff it up her ducky's butt.

We went to Seattle last week. While we had a good time overall, travel didn't agree with Maia's digestive system. There were no poops for the first two days, and when she was straining but getting nothing out, we decided to use suppositories, which we've used for her once before. They were highly effective then, but she was ambivalent about them--she knew they worked, but she didn't like how they went in, which I really can't blame her for--and refused these. Of course, being two, her refusal didn't mean as much as she might have wished. We administered several of them, as well as tons of fruit and juice and gummy fiber pills (Chloë also had a couple since they tasted yummy, she said, but since she didn't need any of that sort of help and we're the ones who wipe her butt, she went off them), and eventually a vegetable laxative pill.

She didn't do terribly well the remainder of the trip, but it wasn't so bad we wanted to take her to a doctor. She did start crossing her legs when she was straining, presumably because it hurt--she mentioned this a couple of times when I was changing her, so I took extra care cleaning her, and when I forgot once told me, "Wipe gentwy!" We discouraged the leg-crossing, and by a couple days after we got back, she had gotten back to normal consistency and frequency. She got milk today for the first time in a week.

We're not sure how much each remedy helped, but I'm fairly confident that getting back to her normal schedule was a part of it. Funny how travel can affect something like digestion and excretion. She didn't have this problem our last trip out, admittedly. But it certainly wasn't the change in diet, since Mom and Dad pushed fruit and vegetables even more than we do.

Status report: Chloë, 3 years 10 months

"Maia has the softest skin I've ever kissed," Chloë said yesterday, after "group hug" time with all four of us, which she mostly spent madly kissing her sister. "And you have the slipperiest," she added to me, running a finger down my face. I'm not quite sure how to take that.

Chloë doesn't do naked time anymore because she would rather play "dance class," which consists mostly of wearing a dress and occasionally scolding Maia or me because class is about to start. She loves her dresses and her dancing. She can now dress herself entirely, except for socks which she continues to have problems with. You'd think that, considering she hasn't taken them off except for baths and momentary changes since, like, 2011, she'd have figured them out by now.

We've decided to get rid of her size-four clothes, except for a few loose shirts and skirts. Have I mentioned yet that she's a big girl? We're planning on taking away her sippy-cup rights, but she's not interested in this at all; she's even regressed away from straw cups, preferring actual sippies when she can get them. She's also showing a more typical-than-I-hoped tendency to be a picky eater. She doesn't like cheesy pasta anymore. She doesn't like green beans anymore. She doesn't like fried rice or peppers or smoked sausage. She has discovered a love for sweet potatoes, and still professes to enjoy frozen peas, and of course is extremely keen on candy and popsicles and ice cream. We're anticipating more fights at the dinner table wherein she demands something else for dinner and we refuse. Fun times.

She's also regressing a little when it comes to leaving Eric and me. We sent the girls to Memaw's recently so we could go out for our anniversary (six years! And we haven't killed each other yet!) and have left them at Aunt Angie's a couple of times, and each time she's wept and screamed about it. "I want to stay with you," she wails. We expected that she'd have fun once we left. And, the report goes, she did stop crying not long after the door closed behind us, but she was pretty quiet and was very, very glad when we came back. She doesn't like going downstairs without us, either. I worry a bit about this lack of...what is it? Independence? Self-confidence? Secure attachment? (Only I just looked up this last and no, she shows signs of secure attachment; the "secure" describes the attachment, not the child.)

We've signed her up for swim lessons, and she's agreed that sounds fun, though I anticipate a fight getting her socks off, just like last year. We're planning on going to Daytona Beach for the Snyder family vacation again this year, and she told me that she would "try to go in the water."

She now owns a few learn-to-read books, and we've started sounding out words. Sometimes she's delighted by this--particularly the one session we had with the foam bath letters--and sometimes she squirms and doesn't want to participate. I'm hoping to get her to the point where she can recognize a couple of words on sight ("Hi" is good, since it's the first word of her Dora learn-to-read book) and give her some confidence that way.

She remains a loving sister, though she does try to order Maia around more than I'd like and at the same time tends to wail and scream, more than Maia ever does, when Maia doesn't do what she wants. "I love Maia best of our family," she told me recently. I'm good with that. When we snuggle at night (another thing I want to wean her off of--not that I don't like the snuggling, but she needs to sleep without it eventually) she whispers, "I love you," and I stroke her hair and whisper back, "I love you too."

Status report: Chloë, month 35, and Maia, month 14

Chloë IS POTTY-TRAINED!

Now on to Maia...

Okay, I suppose I have more to say about Chloë than that. But oh the all-encompassing relief of the potty-training! She did it! She finally stepped over that threshold, out of the Pull-Ups wasteland and into the promised land of underwear and some $50 a month that doesn't go straight into the diaper pail! I would say it took her about three days after I put her bodily on the potty while she was peeing. That was a Saturday. The first few times, she wanted to be put on it and held. Then, she'd sit by herself and wanted to be held. Then she wanted somebody's hand to hold. Then she stopped being reluctant to go, and so the messes lessened (we also attached the pee guard meant for boys; now that she's not holding herself to bursting, we've taken it off again). She had her last accident, right after naptime, that Monday. She's been dry ever since. She used the portable potty in Target Tuesday, for the first time, with no argument; her only stipulation was that she didn't want to flush the toilet because it was loud.

Having her potty-trained is more work, at least at the moment, than having her in Pull-Ups was. She dawdles at the seat now until we ask if she's done. Then she wipes, but needs to be checked. Then she needs help stepping into her underwear and shorts/skirt (this will be the next thing we work on, I think). Then she needs to flush the toilet after we've dumped the results. Then she needs to wash her hands and be cajoled into actually doing it rather than just playing in the water. Then she needs a sticker. And if it's bedtime, or just after, in ten minutes it starts all over again. She's definitely discovered the advantages of being potty-trained.

But we're still definitely happier than before. And she's so pleased with herself, and with our praise and attention. When we got home Tuesday night she was so excited to tell Eric all about peeing in the red potty in the Target. It's so fun being able to converse, really converse, with her now. She doesn't just talk (though she still does plenty of that); she describes something, and listens to our questions, and answers them, and asks questions of her own, and proves she understands the anwers by talking further about the subject. Being verbal is so neat!

We've been talking about what kind of birthday cake she wants. She's settled on a moon design, but every time I ask her about flavor it changes. First she wanted chocolate. Then peanut butter. Then blueberry and strawberry (together). Then melon. Today it was Craisin. I love that she's got diverse tastes, but man, I should have quit asking.

Maia is also being quite verbal these days. She says "Mama" and "Dada" and "More" pretty reliably. Last night at bedtime she said them on command--only when it was just the two of us, of course, not when Dada was around; but she was all grinning and pleased with herself. So was I. She says "buh! buh!" whenever she sees a bird, either in real life or in the That's Not My Pirate book, and "da!" when she sees the stars in the latter. She whispered "bah-bah," waving, when Memaw left the other day after a day at the zoo. Dogs are still pant-pant, and cheese and shoes are "tzche" and "tzchu" respectively. Balls are "ba," and she's starting to get the hang of, if not exactly throwing them, then at least picking them up and letting them drop to roll. There are no words for bottle, because she doesn't take bottles anymore. Overachiever.

And of course she's still communicating quite competently nonverbally: stretching a hand to the crib when she's sleepy, poking at my chest when she wants a drink, flinging away the new diaper when she doesn't want a change. I get her to lie down by bribing her with a wipe, which she then applies to her bits (whether or not I've gotten her pants and diaper off yet) and "wipes" solemnly, watching me watching her.

"More."

She adores her shoes--or, more specifically, she adores having shoes on and walking around in them. When we get ready to leave she pulls down her shoes (and often Chloë's) and plops on the floor, and if we're too slow starts trying to insert her feet into them herself. Chloë likes to go out on the porch when she's ready, and now Maia follows her, taking slow, careful steps over the bumpy threshold until she's out on the porch and can poke around at the bubble wands, or point at a bird or the water table. She loves the water table. I foresee many summer hours getting soaked by it.

Now that she's walking, she can play on the playground independently (sort of), and loves to. She loves swings and slides much more than Chloë does; the past couple of months she's delighted in going down either with one of us or by herself, caught at the end and swung upward in the air. Chloë had been going through a phase of refusing to do pretty much anything on the playground other than climb up and down some steps, but now she slides some. Maia loves to climb stairs, and to toddle around in the store, pulling things off the shelves. But she doesn't seem to mind the cart, either, and when we place her in the seat she reaches for the straps and pulls them around herself.

Chloë's been doing a lot of building with Legos and playing with her train set, and has constructed some really very interesting structures with the Legos--no more simple towers; now they're complex skyscrapers or bridges (she's got a thing for bridges) or rocketships, or they're a two-stack tower with matching colors, or she's decided to use all the yellow. She doesn't color as much as she used to, but when she does she can make circles and suns, snakes, flower stems, and what she calls maps.

Chloë's slimmed down in the last several months as she's put on more inches; there's still a bit of a belly there, but she's not looking very babylike anymore. (And getting rid of the diaper padding helps her silhouette, I'm sure.) Maia's comfortably in 18 months clothes (except for dresses), still nicely chubby, but she, too, is growing and growing.

Chloë's still having sleep troubles, though switching back to a morning nap seems to have helped some. She clings to me (physically and verbally) whenever I leave, which is making me want to cancel the nightly bedtime story, but that's probably not a good idea. Bedtime is a bit fraught most of the time, especially now that she has the excellent excuse of needing to potty to get out of bed. But she's sleeping a little more, at least when Maia doesn't keep her up. Maia's mostly sleeping through the night, though now she's started getting me up at six, which I don't appreciate. I remember this phase. Ugh. She's also getting very unreliable about her second nap. It's too soon! Why don't my children like sleep? Sleep is great!

They're both still very keenly into books. Maia will happily sit and listen to a recitation of her entire bookshelf, as long as she doesn't decide to veto a book because she can. Chloë's getting into the longer books, the Dr. Seusses and Olivias and Berenstain Bears and such, though she still enjoys listening along during Maia's story time and is still fond of the touch-and-feel ones. We've got to work on her lower-case letters and start working on sounds. She'll be so happy when she can read for herself.

Maia is working on her seventh and eighth teeth, and is a total pasta hound, like her sister. Also pizza. Also strawberries and raspberries. When we go out to the backyard both girls always gravitate toward the fruit bushes, Maia saying "uh! uh!" and Chloë saying what they both mean, "Are there any strawberries/raspberries to eat?" I pick them and give them to her and she shares them with Maia, unprompted. What a sweet girl. She likes to kiss Maia good night, or hug her, saying, "Good night little sister." Sometimes Maia kisses and hugs her back. Sometimes she pushes her angrily away. Chloë doesn't seem to get offended, which is pretty big-minded of her.

They had a sleepover with their cousins Addie and Raegan last week, and it worked out very well, other than Rae apparently biting Chloë's toe when they were in bed (not very hard, but enough to get her banished to another room). They're both getting to be sociable girls, in their own ways, and everyone had fun together.  They do seem to have fun together. I hope it lasts.

Status report: Maia, Month 10

Miss Maia is right on that edge of becoming more than a baby. Sigh. Oh, she's doing her baby thing, but with style now. If she wants down, she pushes hard. If she wants up, she reaches eagerly. She yanks her bib off when she's done eating (or at least done tolerating the bib). She picks up paper products to cram in her mouth, but she does it looking at me, saying "See this, Mama? See this?"

She's eating a good variety of real solids now. We had roasted sweet potatoes, carrots, potatoes, and onions the other day and she couldn't get enough. She loves Cheerios and pasta and grapes and noodles and strawberries and beans and bread. She's still okay on the Stage 3s, some, but I could see that ending before long. She fed me a Cheerio yesterday, and seemed taken aback, but pleased, when I got all excited about it.

She's also very good with her sippy--not that we didn't know that, since she's been stealing Chloë's sippies for a while now. She still likes Chloë's better, but she'll drink from her own quite happily. I'm wondering if we should move her straight from R.I.N.D.S. to a sippy at bedtime. We'll see in a couple of months. 

She's standing for several seconds at a time now, then squatting and lowering herself to the ground. Sometimes she'll even bounce as she's standing there, like "This is fun! What do you mean, this is world-shattering?" She doesn't bounce in excitement when I come home the way she used to a month ago, but she does reach for me, and invariably gets upset when I put her down shortly afterward to change clothes. If we don't distract her she cries piteously in the mornings when I go, and I usually cave immediately and pick her up for another kiss before passing her off to Eric and making a dash for the door.

Lately she's taken to flopping backwards when she's sitting. She stopped after she did it on the floor a few times and found it unpleasant, but up until then it was on the bed and she'd topple over with abandon. A couple of times she was too close to the edge of the bed and started to slide over, and I stopped her by grabbing her legs, and she giggled. She'll have fun on the roller coasters in a couple of years.

She enjoys books with textures, and turning the pages ("Hey!" Chloë protests when we're all reading together, apparently forgetting the days when Turning Pages Fast was her own favorite occupation). She enjoys honking my nose, or getting me to eat her fist, and loves lunging at me to eat my face so that I'll say "Ew, yucky!" and wipe my nose/chin/cheek/forehead on her belly, making her laugh. And peekaboo remains a great game. She'll play it with any loose fabric lying around, or with my shirt when we're nursing. She tries to do it with her shrug when I'm changing her, but since it's a small tube that doesn't work so well. 

She has two teeth now, which we're scrubbing at night with the little fit-over-your-finger brush. Chloë may be a little disappointed we're not using the white toothbrush she picked out for her sister at the dentist, but she reminds us to brush Maia's teeth every day, so it can't be too deep a wound.

Her hair is starting to grow in, though she still doesn't have as much as Chloë did at birth. She took a while to adjust to the new carseat, but now she seems content in it. We went for a short walk this evening (using her snowsuit for I think the second time this winter) and she seemed to enjoy riding around in the big stroller--though she was also sleepy from missing her nap, so that might have been part of it. She responds to "no" now, and may be starting to understand some other things. She's a fun baby, careering towards toddlerdom but not quite there yet--which is just fine by me.

Vroomy vroom vroom! Maia at the wheel!

Status report: Chloë, Month 31

Today Chloë wanted porridge for breakfast, because Goldilocks eats it and so does Papa Bear in The Berenstain Bears' New Baby. I'd have just fed her oatmeal, but she knows what it is and claims not to like it (the same way she's claimed she doesn't like potato-cheese-broccoli casserole two nights running, but she hasn't gone to bed hungry), so I racked my brains and the pantry cupboards for a substitute. I came up with bulgur wheat. Somewhat dubious, I cooked it, added some milk and sugar, and served. She tasted it. "I don't like porridge," she said. Then she had another bite. "Maybe I do like porridge," she said, but she didn't eat any more, concentrating on strawberries instead.

I went to make some toast for myself, and asked if she wanted some. "Yes," she said. "With peanut butter and apple butter." (Eric's been feeding her PB&AB sandwiches at lunch this week.) I was in the kitchen waiting for the toaster to go off when I heard her say, "Mommy, I'm done."

"The toast is ready," I called back, and she said, "Maybe I'm not done after all."

Chloë is a hoot and a pain these days. She's so eloquent and interesting to listen to; but then she's also always contradicting, protesting our edicts with "But I like X," or tears, or both. She only occasionally gets truly "I'm absolutely not going to do this thing you've told me to do" rebellious, but that may be in the future. Bedtime and naptime are more of a trial than they used to be, as well as the end of anything she likes. We're getting more tantrums over things she wants to do but can't, rather than just misunderstandings. She's also taken to saying "I don't like [food x]," a lot, usually when she just doesn't want it at the moment. "I don't like juice" is patently absurd.

We introduced her to a table knife recently, but haven't had much opportunity to expand. I've also started giving her a "big girl cup" at dinners, and she's done very well with them--and is proud of herself for doing so, which I'm all for. Her straw cups squeak a lot. 

I love her imagination. A lot of it is derivative, but then a lot of it isn't, either. She's got Dora and Boots, and P.B. Bear, and other characters tagging along when we do things; but then on a walk today she said, "Look, a snowman!" pointing to the air, and said, "The snowman is following us. Run, snowman!" as she began running herself. We made the box for Maia's new carseat into a spaceship, and she loves to play in it. She also loves wearing a string of beads, say, or a scarf, and will call it her helmet, or her guitar, or her motorcycle. (What's with the motorcycles?)

I read somewhere that developing imagination also means developing fear of what might happen, and we may be seeing that; she's afraid of being alone now, and of going down the stairs by herself. She's pretty clingy to me, but that's normal. She has started to be more defensive of her property, and more intent on appropriating anything she's interested in, like a proper two-year-old. Mom and Dad sent some gifts for Valentine's Day, and she loved her beads and seemed to understand that the ducks were for Maia; but she keeps calling them "my duckies," and when I gently correct her she says, "But I like them! It's okay for me to play with them!"

She can draw "smiles" (faces, actually usually without a mouth), moons, circles, and balloons now, and loves to draw maps, though I'm never sure what's actually on them. I've drawn several things inside her spaceship, upon request, and she likes to color them in. Drawing isn't as big as it used to be; now it's mainly pretend games and some running and shouting. That's fine. Reading is still important, and the stories are longer now, which is nice--though she still enjoys shared storytime with Maia, too, especially Maia's big ABC book with the different textures.

Potty training...oh potty training. We decided on the stepwise approach, with reward chart: first go in the bathroom, then in the bathroom without pants, then in the bathroom without pants and on the potty, then in the bathroom without pants or diaper on the potty. We did great until it came to sitting down. She got two prizes and was very pleased with them; but now she simply won't sit on the potty. She will on my lap, so there's something, and I'm going to see if I can get her to sit on the potty at other times, to try to work around this. It's good, in a way, that she's not having control or recognition issues. She's been excellent about telling us she needs to go, and holding it until we get to the bathroom and get her pants off. But except for once a couple of weeks ago, she doesn't want anything to do with the potty itself. I'd hoped we'd have started saving money on her diapers by now, but in fact we're using more than we used to because we're changing them every single time she pees.

She loves singing her ABCs, both by herself and with me, Eric, or her Leap doll that Aunt Karolyn gave her. She can't keep in tune or in time, but it's great to listen to anyway, though her imitation of Leap's laugh is a bit disturbing.

She still likes to hear a song at bedtime, but the big thing now is bedtime stories. We started with Goldilocks, and I haven't been able to branch into any other fairy tales, but we're reading a lot from her Disney book, and I've also been making up Dora adventures, usually with her in them. So we've got the Dora space story (in which Chloë gets a ride to Pluto to get a spare engine), the ice cream story (in which Dora and Boots help Chloë get to the ice cream truck so she can treat them all--I realized after I made it up that last year we told Chloë that was the "music truck" and intended to deceive her in this way as long as possible), the naptime story (in which Dora and Boots get told by Dora's mom to take a nap) and so on.

She's interested in the things we do; she helped me start some seeds the other day, and has started putting the silverware away independently (I mean, once we set her up on the chair and such). She's keen on baking, but wants us to play her candy cane game more than anything. She's growing more independent and complex and infuriating, and we love her that way.

Status report: Maia, month 9

And our Maia-bird is finally nine months old! Her clothes have been saying it for three months already. I dug out the twelve-month clothes this week, the ones that are suitable. Since Chloë was this size in the spring and summer, we're going to have to go buy a few things, particularly pajamas, though her Christmas and Valentine's hauls have helped with that. I don't mind actually buying clothes for my daughter. It's a pretty rare event.


Maia at nine months is just below 21 pounds, 75th-90th percentile, so her growth has slowed a little...though we still need to go out and get convertible carseats to replace the infant carrier with all haste. I'm sorry to see it go. She caught a recent cold of mine, but has otherwise been in good health...although she had a little fever today, most likely from the same cause of her sudden incessant drooling. That's right, ladies and gentlemen: we've entered teething! I'm pleased, since she's still not keen on purees and teeth would make me happier about giving her real foods. Though lack of teeth hasn't been stopping her, and she's got a fine pincer grasp. Lately she's had apple, banana, grapes, mango (rather insipid, from a restaurant), clementine, bits of bread, vegetable Cheeto-style puffs, plenty of Os and oatmeal, more Stage 3s, pasta, roasted sweet potato, boiled regular potato, and some tiny bits of gingerbread cookie (YES I'M A BAD MOTHER).

She adores Chloë's sippies. If we give her her own, she'll play with it a bit; but what she loves is to motor over to wherever Chloë has left her milk or juice and suck at it with all she's got. We know she's gotten some this way, though it's hard to say how much. Chloë just kind of lets her. Maybe it'll become more of an issue when she's a more efficient thief.

She's been cruising everywhere, and walking while holding our hands, and has started letting go to try to stand alone. She fails miserably and falls after about half a second, but she's trying...oh my goodness is she trying. "It's so soon," I lament, but she doesn't seem to hear me.

She's still Miss Wigglebutt, refusing to stay still for diaper changes (though giving her something to chew on and singing the Changing Maia's Bottom song helps) or keep her socks on, zeroing in on any piece of paper or tissue we happen to leave about. She's still waking up in the night, anywhere between 2:30 and 6:30 depending, and I'm worried that we're keeping her up too late at night; she almost always falls asleep while we nurse and only barely rouses when I put her Sleep Sack on her and deposit her in her crib. I'm going to start putting her down a little earlier and see whether that helps.

She and her sister continue to get along well. She likes to pull Chloë's hair--mine too--and we're trying to get her to stop; but she also likes to go see what she's doing, particularly if we're reading, or crawl on top of her, or suck on the fingers that Chloë readily offers. She likes to be tickled, and flown, and surprised, and to bounce in my arms when I come home from work. I still worry that we're not giving her what we gave Chloë, but I think she's doing just fine with what she's got.

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.

Status report: Chloë, Month 29, and Maia, Month 8

I walked in the door last night after work. Chloë, standing in the kitchen, looked up and pointed. "Mommy, are you home Mommy?" she said. "Is it snowing outside?" Meanwhile, Maia sat in the opposite doorway and spotted me. By the time I'd put away my bags and taken off my shoes, she was there at my feet, grinning her "Pick me up!" grin. I love my girls.

Chloë grows ever more verbally mature these days: complicated sentences, complicated reasoning, advanced memory. "That is for the water park," she said knowledgeably of Maia's new life vest (...thing; it's not quite a vest proper). We haven't talked about the water park for months. "Mama, what day is it?" she asked a couple of weeks ago, and when I told her Friday, "Are you going to wear your sneakers to work today?"
 "We will use more sprinkles at our next Cookie Day," she says. Cookie Day was, admittedly, a pretty big hit with her. She got to wear an apron, just like Mama and Mimi and Addie, and was very, very useful in cutting out cookies and decorating with sprinkles and rolling balls in sugar. Who knew two-year-olds were so good at snickerdoodles?

 She's been climbing in and out of the bathtub "all by myself." In the tub, she still lies down to get her hair wet and now helps to soap herself up (bar soap is her newest fascination). Then, when she's all soapy, we turn on the showerhead. I have to use the head on her up close to get her hair rinsed, or she won't do it, but then I replace it and she cavorts under the water until I force her to come out. We're contemplating going to a water park again this winter with some friends, and if it works out I can't wait to see how happy she'll be.

She's been doing a lot of crawling lately, which I think is due to reversion because of Maia getting so much attention for it. (Except for the crawling she's doing in her Play Hut.) She wants to be held, and to "nuggle" quite a bit, too. I'm not sure if it's jealousy or insecurity due to getting to be a bigger girl, or what. I'm happy to hold her, though. And Maia is happy to play with her when she gets down on the ground, or try to steal her sippy.

 And for some reason she's been trying to lick people. It's mostly stopped after she got a time-out on Christmas night and a threat of not playing with her cousins if she kept it up.

Now that we're better at understanding her, her unhappiness escalates even faster when we don't. She also gets her feelings hurt easily--if I tell her I don't want to play with the guitar, or to stop saying "No Maia" endlessly ("I was just telling Maia not to pull my hair"), or snap at her to get something out of her mouth (especially when it wasn't). But she's still a happy girl, loving her shows, playing with blocks, wanting to read books and bake muffins and go outside.

She's playing imagination games like there's no tomorrow. Maia's bouncer is a motorcycle. The area by the front door is a park that she drives the Play Hut to. She made imaginary strawberry and blueberry pies in the bathroom out of cups and other toys lying around. She actually cooperated picking up the living room for once when she decided she was taking Tiger (actually a leopard) shopping and piled things from the floor into her cart for him to eat or play with.

She'll recite her favorite color (green), animal (snake), food (banana, though we think tomato is probably the true favorite). She knows how old she is, how to play Ring Around the Rosie, how to sing her ABCs, how to count to ten and occasionally beyond, how to sign "I love you." She also knows how cute and awesome is because we tell her all the time.

Potty training is de-escalating again, and we need to work on getting her to put on her own clothes--and be less frustrated when taking off a short-sleeved shirt, as she has trouble with those. And between Halloween and Christmas candy, she's gotten into the habit of asking me "Mama how much did I eat?" at every dinner, meaning, "Did I eat enough that I can have some candy?" which she'll then ask for by saying "Maybe I can have something after this." And every morning she says "I want some eggnog in my milk." She's going to be a sad, sad girl when the eggnog runs out. (Though we've restricted the eggnog aliquot to once a day and she still drinks milk at other times throughout the day.)

Maia can do high-fives now: put up your hand and say "Baby high five!" and she baps at your hand with hers and grins, probably because we've been so delighted she does it. Now that she's crawling, I've been across the room from her and gestured with my arms, saying "Come here!" and she moves her arms too in windmill fashion, and I can't tell if she's excited or imitating me. Or maybe just mocking.

She's expert at pulling herself up to stand, and can now easily reach the top of the coloring table, to our chagrin when we were trying to wrap presents on it. She's attempted cruising a little bit, though mainly in a specific effort to reach Eric or me. She likes to bounce in my arms, and to sit with her sister.

She persists in disliking purees, but she snapped up some stage 3 chicken dinner Eric offered her, and she loved last night's pre-chewed potato chunks and chickpeas. And she adores picking up her own Cheerios and puffs and yogurt melts and sweet potato chunks. We're going to give away the stage 2 foods and be selective about stage 3s, and move to "real" foods as much as we can--and mash as we can, because prechewing all her food is annoying. (Especially when she gets upset that it isn't coming immediately. As I tell her, milk is the only food my body manufactures on-site; everything else has to be imported and processed first.)

She loves to laugh; she's much more of a giggler than her sister was at this age (or ever, really). She's very happy, even when she's got a poopy diaper, which is actually a bit inconvenient at times. She makes up for it in nighttime unhappiness. I've got more work to do on nighttime feedings, as I've gotten back in the habit of settling her for a nursing and then falling asleep, and if we do that she wakes up every couple of hours after that, which is no good for either of us. Especially if Chloë's waking up with a nosebleed or a bad dream in the meantime, as she occasionally does.

Chloë likes to get in Maia's face when she's eating, and Maia likes to pull Chloë's hair, but they do really well together. They play together on the floor; Chloë lets Maia play with her toys, even her favorites like Elmo and Newborn Baby and her new electronic ones (until Eric and I ruled otherwise). She asks us if a particular toy, or a particular snack, is okay for Maia (generally yes to the first, no to the second). I keep finding her stuffed animals in Maia's crib. I don't think I've ever seen her try to lash out at Maia, even after hair-pulling or similar offenses; she just cries "No do not pull my hair Maia" in a teeny pained voice and waits for it to end. We may have to do something about that once Maia is big enough to understand "no" better. But right now it's very convenient to have such a patient big sister to such a sweet little sister.

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.

You've got to start somewhere

Maia has finally started showing interest in food. She's been especially keen on...wait for it...green beans and peas. That's right: it took green vegetables to get her excited about solids.

Now that she's showing more interest in food, we've introduced a sippy as well, really more as something to occupy her at the beginning of mealtime when Eric or I am shoveling food into our mouths before we start on her food. Today at dinner, I demonstrated how to drink, and shortly thereafter she was holding it the right way and looked as if she might have actually gotten some water into her mouth.

"Yay! What a big girl you're getting to be!" I told her (she cannot be called "big girl" without modification in Chloë's hearing). "Soon, you'll be able to drink from a sippy without a handle. And then a straw cup like your big sister. And then, you'll be able to drink from a big-girl cup!"

On the other side of me, Chloë spread her arms beatifically. "And then she can play blocks!"

Status report: Chloë, Month 27, and Maia, Month 6

Obviously I'm way overdue for this month's status reports. The mood I've been in these past couple of weeks (through no fault of the girls') I could have just posted "status: lucky to be alive" and left it at that. A couple of days ago I was considering "I was supposed to do this right, but I don't have pictures or patience, so I'm going to serve up some text soup and you're going to like it because I said so and I'm the mommy." However, today I'm feeling human again, despite all the tramping around for trick-or-treating last night. It's still going to be text soup, because that's all I know, but you're going to like it. Because I said so.

This month has been mostly about language for both girls. Chloë has, over the last several days, gradually started using "I" and "me" instead of "Koë." She has also gotten obsessive about "thank you," thanking us for things like "bringing me a drink" and "bringing Maia a toy," and much more precise about "please." This has lead to carefully crafted sentences like this one from this morning: "Mommy can I please have a cookie?" It was so well done and she'd obviously put so much thought into it that I considered saying yes for an instant. Unfortunately for Chloë, an instant isn't long enough for my mouth to open to let "okay" emerge, so she got praise and a "no" instead. I didn't stay for breakfast, but probably she had blueberry yogurt. It's all she's had for weeks, except when we run out of blueberry yogurt. Then it's strawberry or peach.

Maia, in the meantime, has discovered babbling. "Da da da da," she's been saying endlessly. It's highly cute, especially when she's confronted with Eric after an absence and bursts out excitedly, "Da da da da da!" She's been a very happy girl ever since she mastered sitting, though she'd probably be even happier if she could sit up from a supine position. She can push herself up on her hands, and I'm told she can kind of rock up on her knees, but not both at the same time. And she can now roll from her belly to her back--not that she does when she's been put to bed and decided to roll onto her belly and then decided she hates it more than life itself.


We had our nieces for an overnight Saturday evening to Sunday morning, which was fun but very tiring, and Maia was excellently behaved, even when she was very tired because I'd lost track of time trying to get everyone else in bed. I think she liked the stimulation. She loves her bouncer, certainly, which is a great relief. Chloë had a lot of fun at the overnight but woke up screaming twice, once for no good reason--she's been doing that a lot lately--and once for a nosebleed. We made cookies Sunday morning, mainly her and Addie, and when Addie started talking about "Now it's my turn, now it's Chloë's turn," when it came to putting in the ingredients, Chloë got into the act: "Now my turn!" They both ducked whenever I turned on the mixer, and they each got a beater to lick.


We also went outside, Chloë and Addie and Rae, and it was chilly enough I had to break out last year's winter accessories, of which there were luckily enough, of ranging sizes, that everyone's hands and heads got covered. Addie and Rae had a great time going down Chloë's slide. So did Chloë when she could, but she wouldn't push herself in line and with her two cousins leaping from the bottom of the slide to climb right back up the ladder, she didn't get on it very much. She did demand that we go on a walk, and she and Addie ran along the sidewalk while I walked with Rae. She's been loving being outside, and we're going to have to ignore our bodily comfort and go even as it gets colder, I think.

Unfortunately this means bundling Maia up, and she's a simply enormous baby, 95th or higher percentile for everything, 18.5 pounds at her checkup last week. We have "prams" (big fuzzy body suits) for 6 months, and 6-9 months, and one 6-12 months that always seemed a little small on Chloë...but we just put away the 6-month clothes and have some 12-month pants out because they're not too long, though the 9 months are okay too...for now. And they don't seem to make prams any bigger than 9 months at the places we've looked. In the later part of the winter we're going to have to just wrap her up in a lot of blankets when we take her out, I guess.


Speaking of clothes, we went and bought Chloë some long-sleeved pants and shirts the other day, all 3T, which is pretty much the end of the line at Babies R Us. We need to get used to clothes shopping again, and at other stores. But we picked out a green shirt and a sparkly purple shirt and a pink Care Bears shirt, and Chloë found some really hideous purple pants she had to have, and then we went to the boys' section to give my eyes a rest. There we found a rack of hoodie/pants sets with Mickey on them. There was one of a Mickey DJ looking pretty angry that I vetoed, but we both liked the gray with blue Mickey heads. It's been her sweater of choice ever since.

On that same trip Chloë wanted to look at the toys, so we did, and I decided I had to buy Maia a stuffed animal. I've been feeling bad that she has none other than Ugly Bear, donated to her by Chloë who never liked it anyway, and a huge pink rabbit that is still bigger than she is. So I selected a few and let Chloë decide which one to bring home, and Maia is now the owner of a soft brown cow with a jingly bell. Chloë's much more possessive about her toys and books now (and it doesn’t help that Maia is so very grabby with everything) so we're going to have to build up separate collections for Maia of a few things--mainly, "friends" to sleep with and upstairs books. I think we can persuade her that the downstairs books, like the downstairs toys, are for general use.


Maia's still not keen on solids. I did feed her some carrots yesterday; she loves her carrots. And I've offered her a couple of bites of oatmeal and apples, well-chewed, and she was okay with those, maybe because I was holding her at the time, maybe because I was offering her my finger instead of a spoon. Now that she's six months old, it's time to start getting supplementary foods into her. So we'll be working on that this month.

So, in summary: Chloë is awesome and talkative and sleeping restlessly and running around a lot. Maia is awesome and talkative and huge and grabbing at things. They're both playing, sometimes with each other, sometimes separately, and they both give me the most beautiful smiles and wonderful hugs when I come home at night. Status: their grumpy mama is lucky to have them.

Maia Maia pants on fire

Maia can totally sit up now! Like a real baby! We got the bouncer out and everything! We're very excited about the bouncer. This is the big one where she sits suspended with her toes on the ground and has a little "keyboard" and some toys and rings for hanging things and so on. We assembled it and put her in it and then sat on the couch for a blissful twenty minutes or so while Maia bounced and explored and Chloë explored with her. She may be having more fun with it this second time around than she did when she was still small enough to go in it herself. Maia seems to enjoy it, and enjoys the attention from Chloë. I had her in it the other day while I was cooking dinner and only looked over at them when I heard Maia laughing at something Chloë was doing. It is the most wonderful sound.

She is decidedly not taking to baby food. I never understood mothers who breastfed exclusively until nine months or whatever, but now I do. She'll eat, yes...sort of...with lots of dexterity and patience on our part. Since I have no patience, I'd just as soon let her nurse and not struggle to get her to eat from a spoon. She doesn't seem to totally have the hang of getting and keeping food in her mouth, and her interest is just not there. Every once in a while she'll be really keen, but mostly she's much happier gnawing on the bib, or her fist, or pulling the bib off (until I wised up and got a tie-on one instead of the Velcro one), or slumping down, or grabbing the spoon, or making her bird calls. She does get some, enough to change the quality of her dirty diapers, but I'm convinced that at her six-month checkup she's going to have fallen from the 97th percentile to the 37th and the pediatrician is going to give us a talking-to. Not really. I need to get out the nine-months box for warmer clothes. But seriously, how does she stay so chubby and content when she only nurses for nine minutes at a time and won't eat solids?

She remains a stubborn baby in her own way. She still won't take a bottle from her Omi or Memaw. At night, sometimes she's okay going down, but sometimes she stays up and cries for an hour and a half. And if I give up and go in and offer to nurse, she beams at me, and she sucks for a few seconds and then breaks off and looks up at me to laugh. She wakes often in the early evening, and I wonder if the noise we make, or maybe the white noise we run, is bothering her. We've got to figure it out.

She digs being able to sit. She likes to play the sit-stand game, and to lounge in my lap while we're sitting in the bathroom while Chloë's on the potty, and to giggle at her daddy playing peek-a-boo, and to gnaw softly at my face. Chloë has agreed to let her play with her duckies at bathtime, so we pop one in after we've got her settled and she promptly lunges at it and stuffs it in her mouth. I bought her a new toy while we were in Seattle, one of the ones with a handle that makes a whirring noise and vibration, and she'll sit in her carrier and pull and let go, pull and let go. I remember five or six months being the time when I started to really warm up to Chloë's babyhood, and I think the same is happening here. But I'm wistful at the same time. I look at Chloë and how tall she is (she can climb up a couple of the ladders at the park by herself now!), and I look at the newborn pictures of Maia and how much bigger Maia is now, and I understand why people sigh about why babies can't just stay babies, even though the diapers and the blowouts and the food issues and the night waking and the crying and the dependence can be, shall we say, wearing. They're so sweet, all the same, and they're so soon gone.

(I do a short chant with Maia while playing with her feet: "So sweet-- such a treat--baby feet!" She's mildly amused, but Chloë will ask me to repeat it again and again until I cry enough. She doesn't ask me to do it to her own feet, though. Her feet are cute, but they're big hulking toddler feet now.)

Status report: Chloë, Month 26, and Maia, Month 5

Well, the plan was that I'd get pictures uploaded from the camera sometime this week and write up proper monthly reports, but it hasn't happened and it's probably not going to, seeing as we're preparing to fly across the country tomorrow. So I'll try to get to it when we get back. In the meantime, camera pictures and a summary will have to do.

Let's start with Chloë. This morning Eric announced he was starting a cold. I stared at him and Maia, who had been coughing heavily that morning, and pronounced, "You people suck." Chloë, on the bed beside them, said, "No! People do not suck." Chloë at 26 months is active, eloquent, opinionated, joyful. We went to the Andersons store the other day to pick up a few things the local Kroger doesn't carry, and Chloë was what I would normally call badly behaved--running, touching things, shouting--but she was having so much innocent fun I really couldn't be upset, though I did continue to yell and correct her behavior to keep up my societal obligation. Of course the people around us only smiled and talked about how adorable she was, and one old lady said to her, "You bring life," so I didn't even feel like I was providing a public service by restraining her.


She has yogurt for breakfast almost every morning, through her own choice. She picks out her own clothes (though we have veto power) and can take them off herself, including putting them into the hamper, though she still needs help getting them on. "Chloë take clothes off all by Chloë self!" she says proudly. She's still hooked on her shows, particularly the Care Bears movie, and on Sesame Street. We tried her in size 6 diapers today because she's got persistent redness in the diaper area (they're bigger than I thought and she didn't like that, so possibly not useful after all), and she was unhappy that the Elmo picture is much more simplistic than the one on the size 5s.


She's interested in the simple puzzles Eric got her recently and in playing catch; also in taking out the drawers of her toy chest and dumping them out (thank you cousin Addie who showed her how). She likes to play at being asleep, which she now pronounces "tweep" rather than "deep," and continues to find pretend fish everywhere (including in a poopy diaper, which both Eric and I found deeply disturbing). She's LOVED her water table, and asks to go to the park much more often than we take her (admittedly, we don't take her as often as we should). She loves being outside in general. She asked to stay out in the rain the other day, and since it was warm I let her. She's already looking forward to playing in the snow, and to wearing boots while she does it, "just like P.B. Bear."


She still loves being tickled and roughhoused with, and will ask for "one more time" over and over...but if I say "this is the last time," then afterward she'll say "no more," and seem satisfied. She's much more biddable when we warn her what's going to happen. She enjoys the bedtime routine, especially "naked while," during which she jumps around in only her diaper and asks for "evyping," on her bed, and then when we pile all her various blankets and toys on her to her chin, says happily, "Koë buried?" She likes naming all the things we have to do to get ready for bed, and then when we tuck her in she'll say "night night," or "sweet dreams," or "see you in the morning," because she's heard us say them so often.


She's particular about her socks being on right and her pants not being too long, and will say "Socks/pants not okay," until it's fixed. Yesterday we made an apple cake and she got cinnamon in her eye. There wasn't as much crying as I would have thought, but for a while after I'd wiped off the major stuff and was flushing her eyes with Visine she kept saying "Chloë eye not okay." Then she said the Visine "peel punny," and squirmed and giggled, and wanted more when I'd gotten out as much as I could and she was no longer complaining. She's keen on having medicine. So far she hasn't made any serious attempts to get any, but we need to be careful about not leaving stuff out. She's so good, most of the time, but she's started being more grabby and inquisitive than she used to be, and that could mean trouble.

After dinner last night, we sampled the apple cake. I set down Chloë's plate with its thin but substantial slice of cake and its toddler fork in front of her at her coloring table and sat down across from her, Maia on my knee, to eat my own. Chloë looked at her cake and said, "Chloë have more pieces?"

I laughed. "You get one piece of cake."

"More pieces," she repeated.

"Eat what you've got," I advised.

So she picked up her fork, stabbed her piece of cake, and gamely tried to get the whole thing up to her mouth, because I'd totally forgotten she doesn't know how to cut her own bites yet. I apologized and cut the cake into more pieces, and she ate, much more happily.


Then there's Maia. Maia at five months is a very mellow girl, except when I'm changing her diaper instead of feeding her late at night. She likes to sit in her carrier and chew a toy while we're in the kitchen; she likes to look around when we're at the store, unless she's asleep. She's going down around 8:30 and sleeping until between 3:30 and 6:30, which I regard as a most glorious mercy. She generally doesn't wake screaming; she murmurs a bit, and when I come in and uncover the blanket that she's inevitably got wedged in her mouth, she smiles at me. But we'd better get feeding quick.


Despite that, she's not very steady at the R.I.N.D.S.; if she's tired she'll settle, but mostly it's a few minutes of sucking, then popping off to stare at her hand and murmur "gtscha," then another thirty seconds on, then off to gaze lovingly at Eric or Chloë or the picture of the baby on the diaper boxes stacked behind the glider (they contain size 9-18 month clothes), and so on. I don't know how she's maintaining her superchubbiness on this kind of a feeding scheme, but she is. The baby food can't be helping much; she's had several fruits and vegetables and rice and oat cereal, but only an ounce or two a day, and sometimes she's not interested. She does love to sit in her chair with us at dinner, though.


I've started wearing my hair up in the evenings and weekends because she's at the grabby stage. Chloë has also commented "Maia got Chloë hair" several times, though she doesn't seem as annoyed as me. She loves to grab and bat at and chew her toys, or a blanket, or her socks and feet, or my face. She likes to suck on my nose and chin; when she does it I squeal "Noooo! I need my nose to smell dirty diapers with! I need my chin to keep my mouth on!" and she grins. Last night she wasn't terribly hungry and so we cuddled a little before bed. She reared up and started toward my face with an open mouth, and I swear she was doing it so I'd protest and make her laugh. She likes to laugh. We play the usual baby games, tickles and "flying" and sudden movements with funny noises, and she'll often start to laugh during it. It's a wonderful sound.


Chloë continues to like to hold Maia, though often she asks while she's watching a show, and by the time I've got Maia in her lap she's staring mindlessly at the TV again. So I take her away. Chloë protests: "Have Maia!" and I say, "But you're watching your show," and she insists, "Chloë have Maia," and plays with her for a few seconds before turning back to the TV. If I've got Maia with me when I come to her room in the morning, she says, "Hi Maia," or "Good morning Maia," first, and climbs into my lap so she can get closer to her sister. She also keeps asking for Maia's baby food, and tends to act up if I'm turned away to feed her (I sit between them, with Eric on Maia's side) and dinner isn't particularly yummy. But she's doing pretty well. We were supposed to go shopping together the other day, just her and me, but when we got in the car she said, "Where Maia?" and when I said she was in the house with Daddy, insisted, "Maia come." So we went shopping, just her and me and Maia.