Status report: Chloë, 3 years 4 months, and Maia, 19 months

This will be a short, incomplete update. I'm sorry for the lack of posting and pictures this month. I've been focusing on (a) other writing and (b) Christmas crafting, and I'm at full capacity for my concentration, so with those shifting to the forefront other things are having to feel the neglect, and that includes the blog.

Also, Eric has the flu. He's been incarcerated in the bedroom (with bathroom privileges) because the girls got flu shots, uh, yesterday. Cross your fingers that I don't get it, because if I do, the girls are doomed.

Regarding Christmas crafting, I've completed a sweater for Maia (...by finishing the one I started last year for Chloe) and mittens for Chloë, and next up is dolls for each of them. Chloë asked me yesterday what my "best present" would be for Christmas. (I assume a preschool teacher asked her.) Hers was, "A dolly or a third piano. We already have two." She's correct on that last, so I'm glad I'm already working on the first.

She continues to love preschool and draw ever more complex pictures. Today she drew a bird. An oval for the body, with a smile and eyes for the face, and two ovals for the wings. She fretted that they weren't the same size, but she was proud of herself all the same, as was I. She builds up "walls" and "boats" and "twists" out of Duplos, screaming in frustration when things break. She keeps coming up with very adult-sounding conversational phrases. She's going through an "I told you" phase at the moment (usually when she hasn't, in fact, told us anything). We've pushed her to be more independent with  the bathroom, and she'll now wipe herself completely, but still wants us there to check--and since her attention to her bottom is sporadic, we still do. The next step is getting her off the potty seat.

Maia continues to be ridiculously verbal. She had her eighteen-month checkup yesterday (there was a scheduling mixup) and the doctor was astonished when she pointed to the pink fish on the wall and said clearly, "Pink."

"She knows colors?!" he said. Later, he said, per routine, "Do you have any concerns about her development?" and then paused and said, "I'm guessing not."

She does, indeed, know colors. She mixes up blue and purple a bit, and will occasionally switch red and green, but mostly she's gotten really good at them. She also knows number names, and may understand what "one" actually means, and can help fill in the alphabet song when Chloë sings it. And she's just started on two-word sentences...as in, if I'd posted this on time I couldn't have said that. Yesterday Chloë was helping me wind a ball of yarn and Maia said, to my surprise, "Maia turn." Of course she got her turn. She's excellent with her "please" and "thank you," and knows her body parts, numerous people, numerous characters, animals and their noises, colors of course, and an assortment of other things. She's finally started consenting to give Chloë a good-night hug and kiss and "Night" instead of running off, giggling, or pushing her away.

Tonight I sent Chloë to get her room ready for bed (it requires turning on the moon and the stars) while I changed a late poopy diaper on Maia. Afterward I told Maia to go tell  Chloë good-night while I washed my hands. I arrived in Chloë's doorway in time to hear Chloë say "Do you want a hug, Maia?" and Maia say yes and toddle toward the bed, and Chloë stretch down to embrace her.

Maia's favorite toys at the moment are the Duplo Pooh and Piglet, and she's formed a big attachment to her Winnie-the-Pooh mobile (and can name all four characters dangling from it). Unfortunately it's a manual wind-up and doesn't go for very long, so we've been having a lot of bedtimes involving two minutes of quiet followed by screaming and "That! That!" since that's how she indicates she wants the mobile on, "mobile" apparently not one of her hundred-plus vocabulary words. (Eric read somewhere that her age  group should know eighteen to twenty words by now. We are very prideful.)

The girls continue to do well together, thought Chloë can be territorial. They play pretend games together, including Tea Party and Rocketship and Naptime ("Nap" is another of Maia's words) and, the other day, Santa. ("Who is the pretend Santa in our village?" Chloë asked. "Tom," I said. "No, here," she said. "I don't know," I said. "Then you are, Mama! I'm going to be Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.") They had a great time when I raked the leaves the other day (for real, though possibly too late; the leaf pile has been in the street for over a week), Chloë alternately ordering or beseeching Maia to do this or the other, and Maia generally happy to accede.

In the still of the night

Chloë is sleeping now, I hope, after a long and protracted bout of screaming on the toilet because she wouldn't wipe herself. It's not entirely her fault. We'd done the wiping at night to get her into bed more quickly. But in the last couple of weeks, she's started delaying longer and longer, and insisting at bedtime that she didn't need to pee but getting up twenty minutes later to say she did. So we decided to start getting stricter about wiping. It probably wasn't a good idea to start with nighttime right away, though.

Maia had her own screaming fit before bedtime, because Chloë's Froot Loops necklace from school was not to be hers. Chloë had brought it up, I'd made her take it off for bathtime and then again after she got out of the bath, and Maia wanted it, wanted it, wanted it. I put it up on the post and she screamed, "Os! Os!" and "That!" and "Maia! Maia! Maia! Maia!" Then I took it downstairs, and she stood at the top of the stairs and she screamed wordlessly. I gave her milk instead, and she tossed it away from her and fell on her butt, still screaming. 

A little while later I picked her up, and she curled up against me and quieted. I fetched her milk and she drank thirstily. I winced when Eric came in from work and Chloë explained that Maia was upset about the Os necklace, but Maia didn't revert. Once they got in bed, they both went down quickly. Maybe it'll be a late morning tomorrow.

The dancer and the butterfly

Halloween came early and often this year, at least for Chloë. She decided a while ago to be a dancer, and so I bought a leotard and tights, and she had a tutu. Then my coworker Tina offered to lend us her daughter's old dance recital costume. Chloë adored the fancier outfit (though we made her wear it over the other, for warmth), and was glad to have several chances to climb into it.

First there was the Pumpkin Path at the zoo, where she got a small bagful of treats. Then there was the Halloween Parade with her preschool class. The parents were asked to come and pass out treats, so I came home for my lunch hour that day to accompany Eric and Maia:

How cute are these kids? And who would guess Chloë is the youngest?

Since there were only eleven kids in the class (now twelve; Chloë informed me today that a new boy, Dennis, has joined them), I bought full-sized candy bars to pass out. Eric and I thought maybe we were going too far, but no; when Chloë came home her bag was full of little gift bags that contained homemade candy-dipped pretzels, handfuls of treats, Scooby-Doo stickers, spider and skull rings, and temporary tattoos. Ours was nothing.

Then there was Halloween itself. It was a cold, windy night, so we dressed the kids up as warmly as we could given what they were supposed to be:

Maia only went to a few houses (which was all we'd intended anyway) before retreating to the warmth of Memaw's house. Chloë walked around a bit more, with her fleece hung on her head by the hood, and then gave up. But they're both quite pleased with their hauls and their costumes. "Trick or treat!" Chloë said, and Maia would say, "Tweet."

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.

Linguistics one-on-one

Maia woke up half an hour earlier than Chloë this morning, so we had some rare quiet time together. "Rwead," she ordered me when we settled on the glider together. I remember Chloë doing the same, except she said, "Heed." In the same way, Maia says "Yeah" while Chloë said "Hah," and Chloë said "Puhpuh" while Maia says "Pubbuh." (Usually this is at our prompting, because left to her own devices everything is green.)

But they both said "pakey" for "pancakes" in the beginning. Maia asked for "More pakey" the other night and I melted.

ETA: And while Chloë used to say, "Chloë do," Maia just says, "Do it!"

Exactly what I deserve for trying to foist my decision-making on a one-year-old.

Me: Chloë, what do you want for dinner?

Chloë: I'm not hungry.

Me: Maia, what do you want for dinner?

Maia: Food.

After dark

We went clothes shopping for Chloë tonight, because she is simply enormous and, shockingly, last winter's clothes don't fit her and it's getting cold for short-sleeved shirts. We found a couple of leggings at Babies R Us (where we had to go for a diaper pail because ours finally gave up), but 5T is the highest they go and there isn't much, and that's what she's now in. So we made our way to Kohl's and bought five shirts and three pants, and a hooded vest because she loved it and was too stinking cute in it for me to refuse when she asked to take it home*, and some Dora the Explorer pajamas for Maia because "Dowa!"

It was dark when we left, and while we were still in the parking lot Chloë said, "My eyes hurt."

"That's because of the bright lights in the dark," I said, because it doesn't help to bring up how she's woken up at six the past couple of days and not napped enough and is probably tired. "That's not why--it's not because I'm tired," she always insists, after a bout of fingernail-on-chalkboard whininess.

We drove along. "No more stops, Mama," Chloë said, as if warning me.

"Right!" I said. "We're going straight home."

"Well, except for stop lights and things."

"Okay, yes, we'll probably stop at lights and stop signs," I conceded.

"But not green ones."

I ground my teeth and cursed Eric's genes and agreed. Before long Chloë said, "Maia?" Maia didn't answer. "Maia? Maia? Maia. Maia. Maia. Maia. Maia." At a stoplight (red) I glanced back. Maia was hugging Friendly Bear, contentedly ignoring her sister. "Maia, do your eyes hurt?" Chloë said finally.

"Yah," Maia said.

"That's because of the bright lights. In the dark."



*Also because she first got interested in the vests via a sequined magenta monstrosity and I was so relieved when she didn't like that one best.