On to Sami… she just turned 17 months old. And she amazes me every day. And amuses me every day, too. Nobody told me how very funny these kids are. My absolute favorite thing, that I fear will of course be short-lived because she’s learning words now, is when she loses awareness of me watching her, and “reads” a book to herself. In that made up kid language, but with all the appropriate inflections and rhythms. I can hardly even stand it.
Some other items:
- She still doesn’t regularly call me mom or mama, and I have to place blame on Daddy for that. It is difficult for me to teach her my name for me. Someone else has to do that (like I’ve taught her the word “Daddy” and have reinforced it time and again.) I think he just forgets. She’ll get it eventually. But I still can’t wait to be called “Mom.”
- She can say “shoes” pretty clearly, although somehow she alters it to be more like “shoos.”
- Socks are “sots.” I love that one.
- Something is “bots.” But I cannot for the life of me figure out what that word means to her. She says it distinctly and often, but so far there is no correlation that I can reckon. Most notably of late, she says it when she sees the mirror rimmed with animal figures that I put above her changing table a couple of weeks ago. I think the other times I’ve noticed she says it is like, in the car. I don’t know – she’s got me there.
- But her most prevalent word is “please.” Which she says as “peace?” You can’t fault her for a lack of politeness, that’s for sure. It started out as this godawful grunt/scream thing when she wanted something – you know, reach for it vaguely, then grunt adamantly until someone hands it to you. And I’m serious, on like the day she started doing that, I let it occur about twice before my eyes bugged out and I looked at Michael and said, “We’ve got to nip this one in the bud NOW.” He couldn’t have agreed more. So we hatched a plan whereby we would show no reaction whatsoever to the grunt/scream, and would instead only react when she said please. Oh, it worked like a charm, my friend. Within a couple of days, she had “peace?” (or alternately “piss?”) down pat. You’d see her get overly anxious about obtaining something or another at times, and forget and do the grunt/scream, and then I’d be the typical mom and go, “What do you say?” and remind her. She says it constantly now. But I’ll take a “peace, peace, peace?” any day over that… noise.
- She’s adept at opening pretty much all the doors in our house, and has been for a while.
- She can unscrew lids off of things. Yeah, as you can imagine, I learned this one the hard way. Not once. No. Multiple times. It takes me longer to catch on than it does her, apparently. Mostly, as far as I know, she has eaten Chapstick, hand lotion, Aquaphor, a touch of Vaseline, and possibly some mustard.
- She’s been climbing the stairs for months, but just this week learned how to get back down them, all on her own. She could do it for a while, but needed our help to get her started on the top stair. Now she’s all over it with no help. Her dad amazed me months ago, by teaching her how to safely climb down off of chairs, the couch, our bed, etc. He showed her how to roll onto her belly, then slide down feet first. That way if something should go awry, she’s still pretty safe using that posture. And she has her hands free to slow her descent. Anyway, then using that same method, he taught her how to go back down the stairs that way too. It really was brilliant. Most kids learn to go down face-forward, scooting on their butts I think. But then if something goes wrong, they can easily tumble forward, headlong down the remaining stairs. This way, even if something goes wrong, she’s got full control to stop herself from falling at any given time. Seriously – try it if you don’t believe me. It is virtually impossible for her to tumble down the stairs.
- Well, until we got the puppy. Yes. It is a whole sordid tale of its own, that’s for sure. To summarize until I can revisit the whole thing on a follow-up entry – the whole thing drove me to the brink of insanity. And I am pretty sure I’m not kidding. Additionally, the puppy (a Weimaraner) has had about a name a day. We—okay, make that I—had a profoundly difficult time choosing a name. It got pretty ridiculous. We seem to have settled on Jasmine for now, though. And we mostly call her Jas, or Jazz.
