I Tried

Growing Up as Hard as She Can

I see my little baby, and she isn't a baby anymore. She's a kid now.

A kid, with a full vocabulary and the ability to carry on conversations with herself. "Where's paci? I don't see it. Oh! There she is. Hi, paci," is an exchange she might commonly have with an inanimate object, one of many.

She is developing patience. She isn't very good at it, but she's trying doggedly to get better at it. As I make her dinner, she hangs on to my knees, burying her head in the leg of my jeans, begging please and suggesting, "Dinner's ready!"

She tells us what she feels like eating. When we tell her no, that we're out of watermelon or that a cookie comes after dinner, she shrugs it off and eats what's on her plate -- or doesn't eat it, and asks to get down to play. Her appetite is healthy and she has passed the picky phase that saw her eating butter noodles with Parmesan cheese for weeks on end.

She's a brat, but we're working hard not to spoil her. It's easier said than done.

I have a philosophy now when it comes to raising her, and when I stumbled upon it, it felt comfortable and right. The philosophy is: allow her to fit into the life that we already live, and avoid molding our lives around fitting her needs.

This sounds like I'm saying that I make her eat sushi-and-sake dinners, take in an 8pm Friday night showing of "Cowboys and Aliens," and leave her to her own devices while I check my email. That isn't case. (Okay, so the last one is partly true.)

What is really means is that I use this philosophy to stop myself when I realize that I'm spending too much time trying to guess what Sadie wants and what will keep her happy. I need to be better about deciding what the routine is, telling her exactly what that routine will be, and then expecting her to go along with it.

Take, for example, the process of getting ready in the morning. We eat breakfast, change her diaper and put on her daytime clothes, then move her into the bathroom where she brushes her teeth on the sink and I comb and brush her hair. On any given morning, this simple routine might be ambushed for a dozen different reasons. Perhaps today is the day that she re-discovers a book on her bedroom floor at the exact moment that I'm trying to move her to the changing table, and she demands to be able to bring the book up with her. Perhaps she would rather put the toothbrush aside and instead, put the cap on the hairspray bottle and take it off half a hundred times.

There are ways to keep her happy throughout the process, and I've learned them all. Swap out a forbidden toy with a safer one. Distract by singing songs, by making funny faces in the mirror, by promising "five more minutes and we're done." It didn't take long for Sadie to figure out that all it would take was a passing whine and her mother would contort herself into any position necessary to fix the problem.

One day I asked myself: "what would happen if I didn't fix the problem?" And instead of trying to fix it, I just let it happen. The whining continued, but it eventually wore itself out. Occasionally, it did lead to bigger fights. One toothbrush war in particular ended with blood shed on both sides, as I forcibly wrangled a toothbrush into her mouth while she screamed bloody murder and tried to stab the pointy end into my eye.

But by and large, the tactic worked. Go along with the plan, expect her to do the same, and make occasional -- but infrequent -- concessions to her changes of mind along the way. What I want her to do is to see that Mommy and Daddy are PEOPLE. We are not robots, designed for the express purpose of giving her happiness and new toys and occasional bites of their delicious pumpkin pancakes. WE ordered those pancakes. Because we were hungry, and IHOP sounded good, and you live with us now so you were lucky enough to be included on the trip. That in an of itself does not mean you have a right to grab the pancakes off of our plates, push a piece into your mouth, declare it "too much," and let the pancake molecules rain out of our mouth onto the IHOP floor.

My hope is that as I get better at applying my new philosophy, Sadie will come to understand that she is not the princess in the throne room, seated with a long line of admirers come to pay respects. I want to teach her that she has the ability to affect the feelings of people other than herself. I know that this is something that kids her age are only just beginning to comprehend, but I see the beginning of it in her and I want to encourage them. A boy cries at Target behind us and she turns to me and whispers, "Baby cry."

"Yes, the baby is crying."

"You hear that?"

"Yes, I hear it."

She focuses harder. "Why baby cry? Baby sad."

"Maybe he's sad. Maybe he wants his mommy to hold him instead of his daddy. Maybe he's tired and needs a nap." I watch her face, as she struggles to understand why another baby would be upset when she herself is not feeling upset, and what that might mean.

At home, I ask her for a hug and she pushes me away without another look, more interested in the new toy we've just bought. Then she catches sight of my face, which I have exaggerated to look extra sad. "I feel sad," I tell her. "It makes me sad that you didn't give me a kiss."

Instantly she leans forward and blows me an exaggerated kiss, followed by a bright smile that shows she expects everything to be better, now that Mommy is happy.

Just for Me

The list of words she's mastered has reached into the hundreds, with new ones every day. She knows piano, picture, purple and puppy. She knows wagon, waffle, water and window. She counts to ten (who cares if "two" gets repeated twice and five comes after eight?). She knows her colors (who cares if blue and red are interchangeable?). She sings the alphabet song (LMNOP might be a garbled mess, but at least she's trying!). Here are some of the other things Sadie says:

1. It used to be that I would habitually greet her each morning, as I walked into her room, by saying "Oh, hi." Somewhere along the line, she picked it up. Now when she rounds a corner and sees me making dinner in the kitchen, she says, "Oh, hi."

2. We have been working to teach her the concept of possession -- something she now understands and takes very seriously. "Mama beads," she says wistfully, when I walk her past the necklaces hanging from the mirror on my vanity.

3. A signed poster from TAM6 hangs above our living room couch -- one of my most prized possessions, a gift from my Mom. The poster includes images of Phil Plait, Richard Wiseman, Adam Savage -- all geeky white dudes with glasses. Occasionally she'll glance up at the poster, point to each picture, and identify each one as "Daddy."

4. More than two of anything equals "many." When she gets tired of pointing out each individual Poster Daddy, she will sometimes sweep her hand in a gesture of inclusion and finish with, "Many Daddy."

5. While she pronounces most words remarkably well, there are a few words whose incorrect pronunciation she clings to stubbornly. For the longest time, strawberries were "shaw-shees." Upside down still comes out as "Uppa-sown" so regularly that we're starting to pronounce it that way too. She still insists her own name is pronounced "See-hee."

6. If asked to do something she doesn't want to do, like turn off Elmo or eat a final bite of chicken, her response is typically the following: "No? No? No? Okay." The final "okay" does not signify resignation, but rather signals her satisfaction that you understood her: "I have no interest in this chicken. It tastes like butt, and at this moment I'd like to go back to watching 'Abby's Flying Fairy School,' so let's put an end to this farce. Okay."

7. Come to think of it, "okay" serves as an all-purpose punctuation mark to any statement.

8. She has a canny understanding of how useful inflection can be. She doesn't just ask for a cookie -- her eyes grow wide, she half-smiles and her voice lifts into a hopeful question to which she can't help but provide her own answer: "Cookie? Cookie? Okay."

9. While she understands that the Magic Word is "please," (as in, "Cookie?" "Sadie, what's the magic word?" "PEASE."), we still have to remind her every time she asks for something that it helps to tack a "please" onto the end. The exception are the two commands "up" and "help," which have been corrupted into "uppease" and "heppease."

10. She celebrates when we pull into our driveway with "we're home!" and when we walk in the door she greets the dogs with "Hi, guys." She calls each dog by name with love and affection in her voice. Right before initiating a one-sided wrestling match with whoever is closest.

One Year Minus 11 Days

Our bizarre little eleven-and-a-half-month old is less than two weeks away from her birthday. What an odd duck she is. There are many things she can't do, things that a typical baby her age can. But there's so much more she does that just kind of stuns me.

I'm about 95% sure she's said her first word, although "word" is really a very generous way of describing it. To be honest, I don't understand how any parent can tell what their child's first word is. She's been yammering away since she was a few months old; about six weeks ago she picked up mimicry, and since then it's just been a steady chug towards full sentences.

If you were wondering what the word was, it's "doggie."

It's the result of me ceaselessly pointing at the dogs, petting the dogs, letting the dogs lick her face, all the while inanely repeating, "Nice doggies! See the doggies? Love the doggies! Kiss the doggies! No, don't pull on the doggie. The doggie doesn't like that. Please let go of the doggie, you're hurting her."

I suffered and the dogs suffered (and Sadie suffered, going into hysterics every time I prevented her from ripping Pepper's beard out of her head. Luckily, Pepper is very stupid and interprets pain as affection, so she really doesn't mind), but it finally paid off last week when we walked in the door after day care. Sadie saw the dogs and screamed "DA DA DA DA" at the top of her lungs and I was like, "DONE! IT COUNTS!"

By the way, as I type this, Sadie is sitting next to me in the Jumparoo making a sound that I can only approximate as this:

"RRRRNNNNGH. Hic Hic Hic ARRRRRRNGH."

This means she's concentrating on laying a giant turd. And, okay, not to hijack my own blog with poop stories, but about two hours ago she made this sound and then started crying incredibly pathetically. I took her over to the changing table and saw why: there was the saddest little poop sitting in her diaper, looking all lonely and friendless.

I'm used to a softer poop, so I was a little hasty in pulling her diaper off. As I balled it up, the piece of poop flew off the diaper, sailed through the air and landed softly on the surface of her dresser, moulding to its shape like a piece of Silly Putty.

Because there wasn't anything better to do in that moment, I screamed, "EW."

Sadie looked at me and said, "Ew!"

So I guess technically, she can say two words.

Yelly McYellerson

Sadie yelling 16 weeks

It still blows me away that two weeks ago, Sadie wasn't a particularly noisy baby. And now she does this.

Baby Talk

Around three days ago, it was like a switch flipped in Sadie and she started vocalizing. It started with her discovery of the shriek/squeal, which I mentioned a few entries ago. She was apparently very proud of her newfound ability to make a sound other than crying, because she has since begun a torrent of baby talk that doesn't stop.

"Talk" is probably not the right word -- it's more a long sequences of "aaaaaahs" and "ow-wooooahs," but the interesting thing is that she does it in a way that mimics adult speech. She only "talks" when she's looking at you, and is much more likely to make her noises when you're responding to them -- making the conversation two-sided, as it were, rather than a random string of vocalizations that she's making just because she can.

Baby Sadie speaks 15 weeks