Catching Up

I haven't posted in so long not because there isn't a lot going on, but for the opposite reason. Every time I think of something I want to mention here, I wind up not having the time to do it and then within a few days Sadie's moved on to a completely new set of skills and bragging about a now-outdated accomplishment seems pointless.

So, ack! To sum up: in the past two weeks we interviewed somewhere around 8 nanny candidates and finally settled on one. No more broke post-grads, no more college kids looking to plug up their schedules, and DEFINITELY no more semi-retired suburban moms. We went the real deal this time and got ourselves a professional. Her name is Ana, she comes three days a week, and I don't want to jinx anything but so far she is the shit.

We share Ana with another family that uses her Mondays and Fridays, so we get her on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, which has been a little difficult to get used to. Today, for instance, I've been running ragged trying to get everything done around the house that might need doing this week, since for the next three days I'll pretty much be out of the house. (Sadie's much better about letting me come and go without losing her mind when I walk in the door and then out again, but we'd still rather not tempt fate). Five loads of laundry, plundering the garden for salad greens, straightening up, scheduling an upholstery cleaner because our couch smells suspiciously like a dog's butt -- these are all things I've spent my Monday doing. Times, they have a-changed.

Last week I responded to a request from my grandfather, who lives up in Napa, to send him a list of words that Sadie can now say. Now, one week later, that list is completely outdated. This should give you an idea of how quickly her vocabulary is growing. It used to be that getting her to learn a word meant using that word over and over again, saying it clearly and endlessly until, a few days or weeks later, she finally came up with an approximation: "nana," "apple," "otay," or "woof."

Now, she sometimes needs a word spoken no more than once to pick it up. This morning as she pulled herself on her changing table to look out the window, I taught her the word "window," and now all morning she's been happily chanting "wennow, wennow, wennow." Her repertoire of animal sounds has doubled -- and the weird thing about that is that she knows what sound a monkey makes. How does she know this? None of her puzzles or picture books have monkeys on them. Where did she pick up the ability to imitate one? It's a mystery.

Although she still isn't walking, she's now tantalizingly close. When she began standing by herself for a few unsteady moments at a time, I pledged that I would encourage this by making "stand up" as fun an activity as I possibly could. So now when she's standing by herself, we play games like "if you're happy and you know it clap your hands," or I give her instructions like "stretch your arms up to the sky." These mini-challenges give her something to focus on other than the fact that she's standing without support, and the longer she stands, the more confidence it gives her. Perhaps even more importantly than the standing, she's learned how to plop down onto her butt or forward onto her hands and knees without getting discouraged and starting to cry.

If Scott's around, we'll sit cross-legged a few feet apart and encourage Sadie to "walk" back and forth from his lap to mine. She'll try every trick int he book to avoid the actual act of taking steps without one of us holding her hand -- reaching out for us like she's on a boat trying to fetch a hat that's floated away, or falling forward into my arms instead of walking two whole feet -- but last night we actually did get her to take one or two steps on her own. Nobody has told me this, but I already know in my heart that the key to getting her to learn how to walk, to get her to want to walk, is to make it fun -- to cheer her on and praise her and make it seem like she's just utterly blown us away.

Toddler group seems to be a key part of all of this, as is having her be around other kids at the park or the mall or anywhere where there is activity. Sadie has had two toddler group sessions so far, and seemed to really enjoy them both. For the first 30-40 minutes the kids have free play -- there's a play-dough table and a musical instruments table and a kitchen area and dress-up clothes. Most of the kids run around from one area to the next, but some are shy, and Sadie, in typical fashion, is perfectly fine with all of it as long as she's allowed to sit in her own corner studying a toy or a book with nobody bothering her.

The only part she really doesn't like is clean-up time, and for that I have only myself to blame -- I'm terrible at making her clean up her toys, so she thinks that when all of the toys go into the toy bucket, it's so she can pull them out again. She got annoyed at me last Friday when I insisted she throw her plastic cow toy in with the other farm animals and wouldn't let her take it back out, but the other nice thing about toddler group is that there's so much going on (and the teachers are really, really good at distracting kids from tantrums) that she quickly got over it.

After free play, we all sit in a circle with our kids on our laps and sing songs while Shelley, one of the teachers, plays her guitar. There's something about the guitar that utterly mesmerizes them. There are songs meant to encourage the kids to get up and dance or jump, but most of the kids don't do this yet, and Sadie, of course, prefers to sit on my lap and watch the action.

My favorite part of group so far is snack time. We walk to the bathroom to wash our hands, and Sadie loves this -- I hold her hands and help her step up onto a stool and then she holds her hands under the sink while we soap them -- and then we come back into the room, where the kids sit on tiny chairs at tiny tables to eat tiny pieces of watermelon and Cheerios, and drink water out of tiny cups. The first time Sadie was all, "What the hey is this?" and ate like two pieces of melon and dumped the water out of her cup onto the table and was done. But the second time, she'd caught on, devoured two helpings of snack, and even drank from the cup without spilling.

After snack is yard time, which Sadie and I are both pretty meh about -- she's too intimidated to climb on the equipment, and I don't like how all the moms have to sit in a circle and socialize for half an hour while we ignore the kids. Sadie isn't hot on that idea either -- last week she gave me about ten minutes before crawling over, covered in dust and sand, and pulled up on my leg, yelling, "Hi!" But I'm hoping that as the weeks pass and she gets braver and more comfortable, she'll care less and less about my presence there.

Okay, I think that's all for now. Enjoy the video below, especially the part where I almost knock over a two year old and hastily apologize.