Status report: Chloë, 4 years 1 month, and Maia, 28 months

These girls. How they grow. How they amaze. How they annoy. In other words, all is on schedule and perfectly healthy.

Chloë is such a big girl these days. She acts old...I mean, when she's not crying for ten minutes because we refused to let her change her socks so that her clothes would match. Eric has taught her checkers and a number of card games, and she wants to play those all the time now. She's also learned how to think about hypotheticals. Some time ago I asked her about a hypothetical, and she couldn't get past "but that isn't true." The other day we read "Olivia Meets Olivia," in which Olivia is designated Olivia One and does various things to deal with a second Olivia in her class. Afterward I asked her what she would do if she had another Chloë in her class. She said, "Well, I would be Chloë One, because I'm the first one I know, and she would be Chloë Two."

She likes to get in people's faces a lot--not aggressively, just darting in for lots of kisses or to show me something an inch from my eye. She's still pretty clingy; we had trouble leaving a few times when we were in Daytona Beach, even though she had tons of family around her and our assurance that we wouldn't be gone long. But she's eagerly looking forward to preschool again (next week!).

She and Maia are still great pals. In the morning they'll often greet each other with a hug. They squabble about who gets to play what--Chloë definitely isn't old enough to understand the "other people have rights too" concept--but they love to play together, and make up games and stories, and Chloë will include Maia on things like decisions while she's playing a game on her LeapPad.

Maia, in the meantime, is our fiery little girl. We're definitely getting more of the Terrible Twos with her than we did with Chloë. (Does this mean the threes won't be as bad?) She very often refuses to clean, saying, "I don't want to," and we then have to yell at her and/or threaten room time before she complies. Chloë tattles on her all the time, and it's annoying, but it's also true that she's not nearly as obedient as we'd like. When we bake I still have to yell at her about not putting measuring spoons in her mouth and not sticking her fingers in the bowl. Or picking up the spilled baking soda off the counter and licking it, though really if that actually appeals to her I'm not going to oppose it. 

She's not progressing on potty training, but she's not backsliding either; she uses the potty sometimes, but mostly she just uses her diaper. She's much more likely to use the potty the later it gets past her bedtime, though.

She loves to sing. She's not very firm on the ABC song, but she can do Twinkle Star and Baa Baa Black Sheep and part of the Dora theme song with the best of them. When Chloë wants to dance (which she does, often), Maia will generally dance along and start singing whatever's in her mind.

She asked me to sing a song about "woman" last night. After I did ("big women, small women, short women, tall women"), she sang, "I love woman, lots of woman!" As Eric said, maybe there won't be any grandchildren out of that one. However, her bedtime song is usually the Soft Kitty song from "The Big Bang Theory," passed on from Uncle Bob, with a couple of added verses by me because it gets monotonous when she wants to hear it for the tenth time that night. Her latest potty-training prize is a tiny stuffed kitten, now named Banana (mostly by Chloë) because it's light yellow, and when I tuck her in she hands Banana to me and says, "Sing kitty song," expecting me to make Banana dance to its tune. She still hasn't given up playing kitty, being kitty, loving kitties. And mewing when she wakes up. I think we all know what she's going to be for Halloween.

In the meantime, Chloë and I ended up talking about Christmas at bedtime tonight (it followed naturally from her checkup tomorrow and cranberry juice...just trust me) and she said, "I love Christmas and Thanksgiving! They're my favorite days!"

"They're good days," I agreed, and prepared to say something about having to wait for them.

"Every day is a good day," she sang, her head nestled against me as we snuggled. "Every day is a good day!"

Lullaby and good night

I thought to myself in the shower this afternoon, "This day has been so luxurious." Then I considered what I was calling luxurious: sitting in a coffeeshop for an hour without my children; then grocery shopping with just one of them; then an hour of digging in the garden without being called on to adjudicate or hold kites for them; then a shower, by myself, instead of having to make do with a quick splash of water on my face until they went to bed. My life has changed in the last three and three-quarters years, is all I'm saying.

Ahem. I really got on to share Chloë's newest song, which she sang while playing with her My Little Demon figurine just now:

"I am the skeleton one, because I have a skeleton
And I live where there are dinosaur and people...skeletons
And I live right here in the cat"

On with the show

Eric dropped the girls off to me at work yesterday, per our usual arrangement when he's teaching. Chloë was asleep, because it was a preschool day and she doesn't nap on preschool days, and despite her protests that she doesn't need one, she needs one. Maia greeted me: "Mom! Hi Mom! Daddy go? Toë teeping."

I talked back to her some and got settled in the driver's seat, and headed down the road toward home. Maia started singing: "Aay bee tee dee...you too, Mom!" So I joined in.

She knows most of the alphabet song, though "LMNOP" is rendered as "emopee," and she waited for me to chime in with S. But she did her best in her beautiful baby voice--toddler voice, really. Then she started again. "You too Mom!" So we sang, and sang, all the way home.

* * *

That night...no, I guess it must have been Monday night, because it was after Maia went to bed. Chloë and I were up, and she was looking at her spider counting book, which she made at preschool by stamping the appropriate number of spiders on each page. The front had three spider stickers on it. "That's the mama spider," she said, pointing, "and that's the big sister spider, and that's the baby spider. But there's no daddy spider."

"You could draw one," I suggested.

"I don't know how."

"I'll show you. We can practice on another piece of paper."

I expected her to say no, but she didn't. So we went to the easel, and I held up the spider counting book and demonstrated, then counseled her on how to draw a spider. "First a big circle for the body. Then a small one for the head. Then eight lines for legs. Four on each side." Once she had that down, we refined the legs by adding extra segments, and she added a face to the head all by herself. "Now I can draw one on my counting book," she said, and did, and executed it beautifully. She was so pleased to have the spider family complete.

* * *

We left the spider book on the table, and tonight when dinner was winding down she pointed it out, and the status of each spider: "That's the big mama spider, and the big daddy spider I drew, and the two small ones are the big sister and the baby."

Maia listened as she shoveled pasta into her mouth with her fork. Then she said, "That big Mama over there," pointing at me. "That big Daddy over there. That big sister over there." She considered. "Small Maia here, eating her food."

Baby mysteries

Maia got a "My Pal Violet" for Christmas. It's similar to, but much less creepy than, another talking puppy that Chloë has. (Had. Is it still around? I haven't seen it in quite some time. Oh dear, I suppose it's possible we may have accidentally mislaid it.) It says some pretty cute things, and has a bedtime-music function and an assorted-songs function, and by "function" I mean "touch-sensitive paw." It's been programmed with her name, favorite animal, favorite color, and favorite food. She doesn't have any of the latter, except maybe breastmilk, but apparently that wasn't a choice because Eric selected bananas. He also selected blue as her favorite color, on the basis that it is not likely to be her favorite color and he wants to see if she can be, well, programmed to prefer it.

This morning Chloë brought it into her room to play with. Chloë likes the thing more than Maia does; it's a good thing Chloë also received a gift that calls her by name (Tag Junior, also by Leapfrog). She pushed buttons and so on, and Maia didn't really notice until "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" came on. Suddenly she snapped to attention, listening and bopping her body to the music, as babies do. It was adorable. The only thing is: I've never sung her that song. Her bedtime song is "I Gave My Love a Cherry," with "Lavender's Blue" for variety. Possibly she's been present when I sang it to Chloë a few times, but she's only been exposed to it in toys, her stroller lion and her aquarium and so on. So where did she learn this preference for it? That'll teach me to think that babies have no secrets.

Silly symphonies

I've been pulling out some of the silly songs I made up during Chloë's babyhood for use with Maia. Of the half-dozen or so I thought worth remembering, one is for baby exercises, and goes like this (with appropriate accompanying movements):

Baby arms go up, baby arms go down
Baby arms go all around
Baby arms go in, baby arms go out
Baby arms go all about
Baby arms do the wave, the wave, the wave, the wave
They do the Macarena, the Macarena
They clap clap clap, they clap clap clap, they clap clap clap clap cheer!
They pull you up here
They put you down there
Baby arms go everywhere!

Don't you judge me.

Ahem. Chloë heard me chanting this with Maia and loved it. I don’t know whether she has a dim memory of me doing it with her or if she likes seeing me waggle her sister's arms all over the place or what, but she'll request it when the three of us are sitting together. She laughs when I try to clap Maia's hands together and they're curled tight (which they always are). Then she says, "Do Koë." So I take her wrists and go through it with her. When we're done she sayd, "Do Maia." It's the cutest thing. I'm not sure where she picked up "Do" as a verb, at least in this context (is this the same as "Chloë do" or not?) but then I don't know where she picks up a lot of her words.

Music to my ears

Chloë has started to sing. It's very short, hesitant phrases now, reminding me of when she first started to laugh. One of her favorite shows is Sesame Street's "Going Green," known in our household as "Green Elmo." We have this whole coding scheme for her videos. There's Number Show, Monkey Show, Sky Babies, Water Babies, Color Babies, Flower Babies, Big Bird, Elmo, and Green Elmo. Oh, and Snowman Show, by which she means the Baby Einstein Christmas video, which we stopped showing her long before she could say either "snowman" or "show" (and don't let her watch now) but evidently she remembers it.

Ahem. Anyway, Green Elmo contains a number of songs on the subject of saving the Earth. One of them contains the line "You and me Earth, we're best friends," and I heard her softly singing "Hue me Errr," after it came on. I sang it for her, and she beamed at me and said, as she does lately for anything upon which she looks favorably, "One more time?" We did the same thing with a later song. I love her baby singing. I sang "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" when we were working on dinner (after a ridiculous meltdown about whether she could have the entire pancake or just a bite) and she loved it. I can't wait to share my favorite childhood songs with her.

(Not music to my ears: Maia's crying whenever she isn't eating or sleeping. For a while she seemed simply to be hungry all the time. Now she's just cranky all the time. I caught myself thinking tonight during dinner, which she slept through, how nice it would be if she never woke up. Which I didn't mean literally, of course, but...yeah. Silence is nice.)