Egged On

Yesterday I was in a hurry to finish my post because Sadie went from peacefully reading books to herself in the bedroom to crawling over to yank on my leg and ask to be picked up. Because she regularly has conversations with herself, this is verbatim what I hear when Sadie wants to be picked up:

"Up? Up? Pease. Up pease? No. Hold on. Yes. Okay. UP UUUUUUUUP."

"Hold on" is one of those expressions she picked up because she hears it so often, not because we tried to teach it to her. As you can guess, waiting is not this kid's strong suit, but it's hard to complain when you have a kid that effectively scolds herself to be patient.

What I wanted to add was that we really had a great Easter Sunday, thanks to our parents, who regularly make it clear to us that as grandparents go, Sadie couldn't be luckier.

Scott's mom, Sandy, is a fan of ceremony. Whatever the holiday, you can bet she's put hours of time and effort into making it special. When we got to her and Carlos's house, they greeted us with a green felt Easter bucket and instructed us to allow Sadie to search the living room for Easter eggs.

If you'd asked me first, I'd have assured you that 19 months old is too young to hunt for eggs -- I mean, she only recently learned what an egg is, much less grasp the concept of what it means to collect them. Sadie proved me entirely wrong. While she was a bit confused at first, the minute we led her over to an egg, then allowed her to "find" it and lavished praise upon her for picking it up and placing it in her basket, she couldn't wait to find the rest. She walked around the living room, the basket in one hand and my hand in the other, finding eggs on bookcases, on top of tables, behind picture frames. She LOVED it.

At the end, she was rewarded with a crazy giant Easter basket, but really that was a gift for me. Or my stomach, anyway. All Sadie wanted to do was hunt for more eggs. She settled for a giant breakfast of homemade croissants, berries, eggs and bacon. Sandy even made a "Mona Cake," which is a Catalonian Easter tradition, since Carlos is from Barcelona.

When we got home, Sadie passed out. Two hours later she woke up in full sugar withdrawal, so to distract her we took her to my parents' house, where we celebrated Easter in my family's favorite style: relaxed and nontraditional. She played with some new toys, then Scott went out and brought us back Italian food for dinner. In short, Sadie spent the entire day with some of the people she loves most in the world: Yaya, Yayo, Grandma and Grandpa. Thanks, guys, for showing us a fabulous Easter Sunday. Some people say Easter is about Jesus, or zombies, but for us it's about gorging ourselves on comfort food and appreciating our awesome, unique family.

A Million Little High-Fives

The hitting phase seems to have passed...at least for now. The lesson we've been teaching her is that hitting animals and people isn't okay, but that when she feels the need to whack something (don't we all?) there are other things she can hit instead: the floor, the couch, or even our hands. Now I could just get her to stop throwing sand...oh well.

Scott left yesterday for a three week business trip. We were both feeling sad and trying to hide it as we spent the day at his mother's house for Easter brunch and my parents' for dinner, since it's right near the airport. Scott's afraid he's going to miss something momentous in Sadie's development, and while I don't think he has to be afraid that she's suddenly going to discover a love of the high jump, she is changing so much from one day to the next that three weeks from now, who knows who she'll be?

It's a Hit

She's into hitting these days.

Remember when I said last time that she'd turned into an angel? Yeah, not so much. Lately she's been delighting in pushing my buttons, and that includes taking whacks at my face and chest because nothing gets my attention faster.

I can always tell when it's going to happen. In Scenario #1, I pick her up against her will, either because it's time to do something else or because she's misbehaving. She gets angry, and hits my chest as hard as she can. In Scenario #2, I lean in to give her a kiss or otherwise provide her access to my face, she gets a mischievous glint in her eye, and the next thing you know she's bonked me in the nose.

In the words of Tina Fey, I will not have that shit. So we've implemented the Time Out Chair.

The Time Out Chair is the saddest thing you've ever seen.

Isn't that sad? It's sandwiched between the china cabinet and the computer desk, possibly the most boring spot in the whole house. Friday was the first day I had to use the Time Out Chair for hitting. I put her into it and set the Timer App on my phone to beep in 90 seconds.

She didn't like the chair, but funnily enough, what really freaked her out was the sound of the timer going off. She wanted to tell us about the "noise" for the rest of the evening.

Yesterday, I had to use Time Out again. This time she was throwing her pasta on the ground so the dogs could eat it, and repeated warnings only made her throw it more enthusiastically. This time she knew what was coming, and whined the entire time she was in the chair. "Up peese," "Mommy," "Daddy," "Hug," anything she could think of. THIS KID IS EIGHTEEN MONTHS OLD. I can only imagine the psychological torture she is going to inflict upon us when she gets old enough to slam her bedroom door.

You know what, though? I think it's working. Today when I came home I picked her up. She hugged me, and when I asked her for a kiss, I saw that glint in her eye as she wound-up for the pitch. She literally stopped herself mid swing. "Good girl," I told her. And later she made up for it by biting her cookie into a crescent shape, showing it to me, and proudly saying, "Moon."

Walkie Walkie

...is what Sadie says when she wants to get up and go. So this is what happened last night right after she announced her intention to Walkie Walkie. I'm glad I pulled out the iPhone when I did, because I've never seen Sadie walk more than a couple of feet at a time and suddenly...well, see for yourself!

What We're Into Now...

I thought it might be useful to share with this blog's few regular readers Sadie's current obsessions, entertainment-wise. If your kid has/had their own random obsessions that you bust out to cure a bad mood or shamelessly exploit to occupy them for five minutes while you brush your teeth, I would LOVE to hear them.

"Elmo's Song"

Sadie knows this song so well that her way of asking for it is "Elmo la la la."




"Elmo's Ducks"

Elmo's Song has recently been surpassed by this video starring Elmo, a catchy tune, and four ducks that yell "QUACK" at regular intervals. Toddler crack.



"Goodnight Moon" by Margaret Wise Brown

I don't think it will come as much of a shocker to any parent that Sadie needs this book read to her at least three times before she'll deign to go to bed. When she's done with "Moan," as she calls it, her next request is inevitably:

"When You Give a Mouse a Cookie" by Laura Numeroff

If you don't own this book yet, I highly recommend you go out and get it. It stars a hyperactive mouse whose personality suspiciously resembles a two-year old. Sadie likes to yell out certain words in this book while I'm reading it to her, and she always mimes "sweeping," "washing," and, bizarrely, "mustache."

"SoundTouch"

This is an iPhone app, and it can reliably be used to occupy Sadie's attention for a solid 15 minutes in the morning while I'm making her breakfast. GET THIS APP. It categorizes illustrations of animals, instruments and common household items, then when you touch each one, it shows a photo of that thing along with the sound it makes. So if you press the tiger picture, it shows a photo of a real tiger along with the tiger's roar. You're also treated to the sound of "TIGER!" being delightedly shrieked in your ear.

So, people? Any recommendations of your own?

Big Girls Don't Cry

A running theme throughout the past few months has been the overall difficulty of dealing with a kid this age. Months 15, 16 and 17 were marred by nightly wake-ups, daily tantrums, and a general exhaustion (hers and mine) that, by the end of every evening, usually manifested in tears.

This month we've emerged into something resembling...well, I don't think it would be an overstatement to describe it as UTTER HEAVEN. It's as if a large percentage of the hard work we've been doing has paid dividends all at once. For one thing, the sleep schedule has stabilized -- it's 6:30pm to 6:30am, every day. She's not teething anymore, so she doesn't wake up from discomfort. With Ana's help, we moved her daily nap back from 9am-11am to roughly 11:30am-1:30pm, so she's less tired in the afternoon and evening, and thus less cranky.

What's really gratifying, though, is the gradual phasing out of the tantrums. (FOR NOW, that is. I might be doing all of this for the first time, but I'm not naive enough to think that she's left the tantrum phase behind at a year and a half.)

I've cataloged her tantrums on this blog exhaustively, so suffice it to say that anything and everything used to set her off. I've tried hard to be consistent in my method of dealing with the tantrums: namely, I don't. I sit nearby and wait them out. I stay quiet and, beyond telling her once that I'll be ready to talk to her again when she's done screaming, I disengage totally. Usually she cycles through them within 5-10 minutes, but I remember one epic tantrum in which she and I sat on her bedroom floor for what seemed like FOREVER. She wanted her blanket, which was hanging over the side of her crib four feet away, but she REFUSED to crawl over and get it -- she wanted me to bring it to her instead. We had a showdown. She almost won by sheer force of lung power -- I swear my ears were ringing afterward.

It seemed like such a silly fight to be having. I could have ended it easily by just handing her the blanket, and believe me, I wanted to. Was it petty on my part not to give in to her? I don't think so -- because what she knows now is that screaming for things doesn't work. So she's found other ways to get what she wants, they work much more effectively, and things are more peaceful all around.

That said, she threw a whopper this morning, the first in a couple of weeks. I was in my usual morning haze, eating a bowl of Trader Joe's Peanut Butter Puffins (if you haven't tried them yet, you haven't lived), and Sadie was playing across the room with her toys.

"Mama!" she yelled, showing me a toy that she hasn't figured out how to use yet (it's this one, if you're wondering). "Mama!" is Sadie code for "Come over here and do this for me." I told her I was eating and that she could bring me the toy, or she could be patient and wait for me to finish. She didn't like either of those options.

After the screaming had scaled down to mere sobs and sniffles, she did something she's never done before. She crawled over to me, laid her head in my lap, grabbed my hand and put it on her back so I could rub it. I stroked her hair and told her that I loved her and that next time it would make more sense to BRING ME THE DAMN TOY, GOOD LORD, CHILD, I'M RIGHT HERE AND IT'S NOT THAT HARD, WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU, IT'S SEVEN IN THE DAMN MORNING.

Of course, I said it very sweetly. I want to encourage that sort of behavior. Forever and ever.

Hoping for Coping

Sometimes I think back to when Sadie was a little younger. One of the hardest things for her has always been coping with the waves of feelings that would come over her when she was upset (as Joy dryly put it, "This girl goes from one straight to eleven.") There was never a ramping-up period -- if anything upset her then her mood went from Fine to Utterly Catastrophic.

As she gets older, learning how to speak has helped tremendously. She can't always go after what she wants, but she is now very good at asking for demanding it. Still, it's been hard when she gets frustrated or angry or disappointed and instantly dissolves into a miserable mess. To snap her out of it, we employ a variety of tricks -- distraction, singing a song, bargaining, reasoning. Sometimes they work like magic, other times not as well, others not at all.

More recently, she has decided not to waste time waiting for us to help her snap out of an episode and has put her mind toward ways to figure it out by herself. The ways in which she does this are utterly fascinating to me.

This morning, Scott left for work as he always does. Sadie saw him off with a cheerful "Bye bye!" She climbed up onto the couch by our front window, and when she did so I thought maybe what she wanted was to see his car drive off...like maybe it was something she did with Ana when I left in the mornings. So I opened up the window, and as Scott's big silver sedan pulled away from the curb I pointed it out I said, "There goes Daddy's car -- bye bye, Daddy!"

You've never seen a face fall so fast in your life. I guess she'd already reconciled herself to the fact that Daddy was gone, and by pointing it out a second time I'd caught her unaware -- she absolutely crumpled, and burst into tears. I felt terrible, and all I could do as she wailed for "Daddy" was to tell her I was sorry and I knew she was feeling sad, but that he'd be home from work later tonight. She cried for a minute longer, and then she kind of sucked it up, and repeated several times, "Bye bye, Daddy." Then she came over to me and -- by the way, she never does this -- gave me a hug and kiss as if to reassure herself that I was sticking around.

I've noticed this coping method a lot. When she doesn't want to let something go, she copes by telling it "bye bye." If she can't say good-bye to something, it become relegated to a terrible purgatory in which it's still hovering around, but she can't have it. She gets upset and cries and asks for it over and over -- but if we just wish the water in the bathtub bye-bye, if we can wish Daddy and Ana bye-bye, then those things have been sent to their proper places and will be okay until we see them again later.

Parting from a beloved object is a different skill from being able to see something but unable to touch it, but equally hard for her. Again, she's developed ways to cope. For awhile, the flowers that sat on the dining room table while she ate dinner were a source of crazy frustration for her -- she wanted to grab them, and didn't understand why she wasn't allowed to. "No touch" is a command she learned early on, and she mostly respects it, but it's never fun to hear.

So she learned instead that when you like an object but can't touch it, it's okay to blow it a kiss instead. The more forbidden an object, the more feverishly she sends air kisses in its direction. This coping method was put to the ultimate test a few hours ago when we went to the library for weekly story time.

Story time is a mixture of listening to books and singing songs, and Sadie always starts out shy and then gets more adventurous. After about ten minutes she'd shaken off the initial hesitation and began standing up and craning her head to check out the other kids. (We were on the floor down in front, her favorite spot). That was when she spotted a little girl sitting directly behind us, sitting on her nanny's lap. She was holding an Elmo doll.

Fuck.

"Elmo. It's Elmo. Elmo. ELMO."

"Yes, I know. That's Elmo. He belongs to that little girl."

"It's Elmo. IT'S ELMO."

She was moving fast, and I busted out the magic phrase: "You can look, but don't touch."

Oh, the rage. The indignance. Was I KIDDING her? There was a perfectly nice, lovely Elmo doll within two feet of her, and she wasn't supposed to touch it? "EH-HEH-HEH-ELMOOOOOO." She began to cry.

I picked her up quickly and removed her from the other kids. We stood in the back as song time commenced, and she calmed down right away, but I had already pretty much written off library as a lost cause now that she'd zeroed in on Elmo. I decided to give it one more shot, and once everyone was lost in a nice loud chorus of "I Like Shaking (My Hands, And You Shake Along Too Parents, If You Know What's Good For You)", I sat her back down.

Although we were facing front, she whipped her head around and I could see her eyeing Elmo with laser-like intensity. If I'd been that other little girl, I'd have been genuinely afraid.

And then...

Sadie put her hand to her mouth and said, "Mwah." Blowing Elmo a kiss.

"That's so nice, Sadie."

"Mwah. Mwah. MWAH."

She proceeded to blow Elmo kisses throughout the rest of story time, her eyes shining with love but resigned to the knowledge that this particular Elmo, for reasons beyond comprehension, was not for touching but merely for admiring from a distance. And I watched with hidden glee when, a few minutes later, three toddlers got in a near fist-fight over a toy truck that one of them had brought and did not want to share.

My kid's growing up.