Parrot

The other day Sadie and I were over at our friends D and T's house for a play date with their incredibly adorable year-old son, and the topic of my cracked-out day care instructor came up. This led to a conversation about baby development. T mused that the time in between nine and twelve months was when the most stuff seemed to "happen," -- the big developmental leaps, the ability to move around, the refining of personality.

Sure enough, in the weeks following that play date, Sadie has been transforming day to day before our eyes in ways that completely astonish me. Her growth from six months to nine, while impressive in little individual ways, was almost a throwaway compared with that she's suddenly done in between months nine and ten. At six months, she sat and fell over frequently. At seven months she...sat longer and fell over slightly less frequently. At eight months, she was still rejecting anything but puree, napping three times a day, and still occasionally falling over.

Now? It's basically impossible to catalog the things that are drastically and immeasurably changing, as she leapfrogs over her past accomplishments every day with new ones.

For one thing, she stands. Like, LOVES to stand. I place her standing up in her play pen, holding onto the top bar, and she stands there, squealing with glee from her new, tall vantage point. She's tall, this baby. She looks like a skyscraper, all weirdly narrow and still going when most other babies stop. She has realized, from watching other people, that moving your feet up and down is a necessary component of walking, but she doesn't quite understand how it figures in -- so when you support her while standing up she lifts her feet in place and stomps them back down again, all, "Am I doing this right?"

And remember all that lunacy over the crawling, or lack of it? Yeah -- last week, she decided she was ready to start. Some babies take months to learn how to crawl; this girl had utterly no interest in it until she hit ten months old and NOW she's not just ready, she wants to master it immediately. So she flips over all the time -- on the changing table, on the floor, when I'm putting her in her carseat -- and commences with the very loud grunting and flailing of limbs as she attempts to move forward. What happens right now is that she actually moves BACKWARD, and please believe me when I say I've been attempting to capture this on video, because this is the kind of shit I'm going to enjoy showing her when she's older.

Lastly, my very favorite development is the parroting. If there's one area in which I never had to do the stupid first-time mom "my baby isn't as far along as ALL THE OTHER BABIES" panic-dance, it's talking. Right from the start, Sadie couldn't wait to start babbling, and now she keeps up a steady stream of conversation at all times, even if it's just to her toys, or, casually, to the air in front of her. 

And now, quite out of the blue, she's begun mimicking the cadence of words and phrases. Not the words themselves -- but the tone of them.  "Uh oh!" is a favorite, that being the thing I sing-sing most often when she drops stuff, because it's more pleasant to the ear than "Really? You had to hurl your pacifier across the room AGAIN? You know that's the last clean pacifier, right? All the others are in the dishwasher. I'm not going to go wash off this pacifier. I've done it five times already. A little dust is not going to kill you. Here you go and this time try not to -- DAMN IT TO HELL WHAT DID I JUST TELL YOU?!" And so instead I say, "Uh oh!" and she sings it back to me in the same pitch, smiling sweetly and waiting for me to shriek, "smart girl!" and cover her with kisses, which I do, inevitably, every time.

8 Month, 1 Week Check-In

I'm soooo behind in updating. It's been a busy couple of weeks and there's a lot to report.

Starting next week, Sadie's going to be in day care 3 times a week. I think this is going to be a good thing all around. We've just lost our latest babysitter to the Peace Corps (she's moving to Central America for the next two years to build latrines -- and what have you done lately?) and after doing a little hunting to find a new sitter, I came to a realization: having Sadie at home all day, with or without paid help, isn't an ideal situation for either of us.

For one thing, it means I need to leave the house to work. Our house is small enough that the office and the living room are essentially two ends of the same room; the nursery is too small to play in, so when Sadie and the sitter are playing in the living room I'm about fifteen feet away. This ensures that I get no work done, so it forces me to leave the house and work elsewhere. While that can be a good thing, it's also a costly habit -- when you use a restaurant or cafe's free wi-fi, they expect you to patronize their establishment, every time. The idea of having an empty, quiet house three times a week is very tempting, in no small part because I've been booking more and more work recently and desperately need more hours in the day to complete it all.

But it's not just a selfish need. I think it's going to do Sadie a lot of good, too. She spends a lot of time with adults, aside from the occasional playdate. Frankly, I suspect that after spending so much time rolling on the floor with King and Pepper, she may actually consider herself a dog. Going to a place where there are other kids in other stages of life, crawling and walking and playing and talking, can only be good for her. We found a place only two miles away, run by a kindly Armenian woman who serves her kids borscht and swears they love it; Sadie was entranced by the three well-behaved toddlers who already attend. I feel good about leaving her in the care of this woman, who reminds me of Penny, the French woman who used to watch me and my sister when we were young and would regularly make us butter sandwiches and macaroni in tomato and cheese sauce.

One reason I want Sadie to start watching other kids is because she isn't doing the things kids her age are generally doing by now, which is starting to crawl and pull themselves up on furniture and in other ways experimenting with getting around on their own. She pretty much sits, and reaches for what is within grasp, and when she can't get to it she fusses, but she still hasn't figured out that it's within her power to go get it herself. And no, I'm not freaking out that she'll NEVER get there, but on the other hand, it can't hurt to have a little visual demonstration, courtesy of other kids.

What she lacks in getting around-ability, she makes up for in other ways. She's already figured out clapping, waving, and has a full vocabulary of nonsensical baby babble. She "talks" pretty much constantly, "dada" being her favorite word, and often sounds for all the world like she's speaking a fully realized language that happens to bear a close resemblance to English. No endless "da-da-da's" for this one. It's more like, "a-blah-ya-yo-dah-dum-ggg," spoken in a conversational tone to me while she's on the changing table or to Pepper while she's yanking her ear.

More later, but now I've got to go make Her Highness a bottle.