Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey hey

A quick rundown of Chloë's vocabulary thus far:

Dada/Daddy
Mom/Mama
Baby
Ap-ul (applies to apples, oranges, strawberries, cherries, and occasionally tomatoes and peppers)
Ah (eye)
Ah-ee (owie, mainly the scar on my knee)
Uppee (up please)
Pee (please, always said with a big grin)
Pee (pants)
Tzcheee! (cheese--I haven't actually figured out what that first consonant sound is; always said with extreme enthusiasm)
Babul (ball--we've regressed)
Babul (button)
Babul (bottle)
Babul (potty)
Duh (duck)
Dahr (star)
Dah (shoe)

And, within the last couple of days,"Nanana," which as far as we can tell is her imitation of us saying "No. No. No! NO!" I say it when she tries to grab the toilet paper off the roll. Eric says it when she takes dishes out of the dishwasher. (He did allow her a dispensation for helping me unload the silverware, because she carefully took out a piece at a time and handed it up to me until it was all gone, and he was unable to resist the cuteness.) Yesterday, she pointed at both while we were using them, saying, "nanana," and keeping her distance. "That's right, 'no.' Good girl!" I said. Then I asked her if she needed a diaper change. She said, "Nanana," and walked away.

Little fish, chatterbox

Chloë's Uncle James and his girlfriend Amanda got her a nice little sweater and some foam letters for the bathtub while we were out in Seattle. I like the sweater more than she does (a sweater, in her eyes, is something to take off) but she adores the foam letters. They're bright but not obnoxious colors and stick to the side of the tub when wet, even if they've got chew marks on them.

She's recently become attracted to running water (thus her new nickname, OCD Baby, because whenever she hears water running she wants to "wash her hands") and her favorite way to start a bath is to select some of these letters and toss them in the bathtub, then be lifted in so she can sit among the letters and play with the water as it streams from the faucet. She also likes playing with them while she's sitting on the potty, looking at them or chewing on them or, for some reason, trying to shove them between my glasses and my face. I've been showing her the A and saying "A is for apple!" and the C and saying "C is for Chloë!" Now she calls all the letters As.

She's also evidently gotten to the "let's pretend" developmental stage. She has a toy remote that makes noise when you press the buttons, and was putting it up to her ear the other day. (Obviously, we use the phone more than the TV.) When I was on the phone with my parents last night and wanted to stop her continually pushing the pretty red button that ends the conversation, I fished out the remote and she happily pressed it to her ear, which made the different buttons make their different noises. Then this morning, when she was on the potty and playing with her As, she happened to have the H. I said, "H is for hello! Can you say hello?" She put it up to her ear and said, "Ah." So I picked up a G, put it to my ear, and said, "Hello, is this Chloe?" She didn't want to continue the conversation, but she passed me more letters so I could. Then she picked up a couple herself and chattered into them.

Andrew Lloyd Weber I'm not.

Baby, baby
Give me your answer, do
I'm half crazy
Being the mother of you
I'll love you all of your days
Even if they're in a haze
But how will I
Ever get by
Being the mother of two?

The answer, my friend, is blowing

We're all sick, Eric the worst of us, Chloë the least; she doesn't seem to have any symptoms other than a stuffy nose and somewhat more short-temperedness than usual, and that last may just be normal tantrums due to her communication skills not keeping pace with her comprehension and desires.

But she's finding solace, as her mother does, in Kleenex. (Accept no substitute!) She spent a chunk of last night blowing her nose. She aims the Kleenex (or washcloth, or whatever she's got in her hand) at her nose, but doesn't necessarily cover it. That doesn't stop her from blowing. These are productive blows, too. She was quite pleased with herself, and I had to wash her hands several times. She screamed when I took the dirty Kleenexes away, then quieted when I handed her new ones, and continued to blow. She wasn't excited about me wiping up the leftovers from her nose and lip, but she allowed it. She seemed to like the application of Aquafor (petroleum-based lotion) to keep her skin from drying out, too. This morning she allowed me to apply a Kleenex to her face, and when I instructed her to blow, she did. If she's inherited my nose, this is a very, very good thing.

Eat at Maummm's

This pregnancy is giving me food trouble. I can't remember whether I had this much trouble last time. I know in the first trimester I was sicker, but in the second was I having so much "nothing sounds good"-itis? Yesterday I was home early to watch Chloë and trying to come up with something for lunch. I didn't want toast. I didn't want peanut butter. I didn't want pasta or a burrito or soup or anything we had handy. I rifled through the cupboards in desperation and found the ingredients for rosemary-artichoke hummus, and decided that that didn't sound bad, and anyway I needed protein. First I had to get Chloë her lunch, but she's easy; she ended up with scrambled eggs with cheese. Then I started the hummus.

Chloë got interested and, when I spooned it into a bowl, wanted a taste. Now, this stuff has garlic, and rosemary, and lemon juice, and chickpeas. It is very much Weird Food, as Eric calls it. But Eric had also just told me about an article he'd read that mentioned strong tastes, like garlic, get into amniotic fluid and babies whose mothers eat such things prefer them afterward, and I know I wasn't having food trouble my entire pregnancy with her. So I figured I'd let her try. I scooped a little into a baby spoon and handed it down.

She made a peculiar face, and I looked around for her sippy to help her wash the taste away. Then she made her "Uh! Uh!" noise and pointed the spoon up at me. "More?" I said hopefully. She nodded, and I gave her another spoonful. And another. Eventually, replete, she stopped begging for more and I was able to eat some myself. Yes, she's definitely my daughter.

And very recently she's started claiming me as someone other than "Dada." We've been coaxing her to say "Mama" for months. She still doesn't, quite, but she does say "Mom." Or rather, "Maummm..." like she's trying to say that final A but it gets stuck on her tongue. It's cute, and I love it. Though she woke up in the night last night and was screaming "Maummm...! Maummm...!" and I thought it might have been better to let her keep on calling me Dada.

Many a slip twixt cup and lip

Chloë went to bed early last night, after drinking only about half her bottle and then sliding off my lap to wander aimlessly around her room. We put her in one of her new sleeper pajamas for warmth, and she went down easily, except for the aforementioned spitting. Around nine-thirty she woke up screaming. She hasn't done this for months, so I went in to check on her. I couldn't find anything wrong--diaper okay, not feverish, no tarantulas in the bed--so I put her back down. Ten minutes later Eric went to check on her. A few minutes after that I pulled her out and rocked with her. Normally this quiets her down, but she kept crying, so we applied some Orajel--we think her molars are coming in--and put her down again. She kept screaming. After another interval we tried baby ibuprofin. I took her out of the sleeper, in case she was too warm, and put her down. She kept screaming. Eric and I looked at each other, confounded. "She must be overtired," Eric said finally. After another twenty or thirty minutes of crying (not helped by me going in to cover her with a blanket too early and starting her off again), she went to sleep.

I woke at twelve-thirty when she started screaming again. I kept my eyes closed, thinking, What could possibly be going on? and noticing that I was thirsty and needed to use the bathroom as usual, though not as much as a few weeks ago--I'm definitely moving into the second trimester.

Then I got up and told Eric I was changing Chloë's diaper and would he please bring her a drink of water. Her diaper wasn't very wet, but I changed it anyway. I was pulling her pants back on when he came in with her sippy from dinner (with dinner detritus wiped off). She shrieked and reached for it. I set her upright as Eric handed it to her, and she drank. And drank. And drank. Eric and I exchanged looks of horrified guilt. Eric sat down in the glider with her so she could keep drinking, and I told her, "I'm going to bed, but I'll see you in the morning." She nodded, unconcerned. A few minutes later I heard Eric put her back to bed, where she lay quietly. The next word we're teaching her is "drink."

There and back again

Chloë, Eric, and I went to Seattle Wednesday through Sunday to see her grandparents. It was a great trip, though the travel itself was wearing; it turns out Chloë doesn't sleep well while flying. She was also disconcerted by the leash we put on her in the airport, but other than that she did pretty well. In Seattle, she woke up every morning around 4 AM Pacific time, and despite this was spoiled by her grandparents anyway. She came away with several new tricks, including:

-the word "baby."
-a much more accurate pronunciation of the word "ball." (One syllable, even!)
-when you hand her a paper towel and say "Wipe hands" or "Wipe face," she obeys.
-pointing to her grandpa when asked "Where's Grandpa?" ("Halmoni" was a little harder.)
-spreading her hands out, palms upturned, with a wide-eyed innocent look as if to say "What happened? I just don't know!" We haven't quite figured out what she means by it, but that doesn't stop us from being slayed by its cuteness.

Possibly also:

-making spitting noises to herself in bed. She did this tonight after we put her in bed. I'm thinking she was remembering the sort-of-spitting contest she and Grandpa had at dinner Saturday night in which Grandpa got covered in baby spittle and, speaking as a mother, totally deserved it.