Saturday, October 31, 2009

Mae at two years



Mae invented a game we call "My say 'no'". Months ago when she was saying 'no' a lot, I started saying 'yes' back to her and we'd volley for a few rounds. Then one morning when the girls woke up, we heard Adi saying "no!" and then Mae started saying "yes!" in response. A little while later at the breakfast table, Mae instructed Adi: "My say yes, Adi say no." To which Adi promptly responded "Yes!" and Mae said "No" and they were off. Now they play it a lot, telling each other or one of us what to say.

Her language skills have really taken off. She speaks in sentences now and it's so amusing to hear what she's thinking. She is quite concerned with propriety, one time telling me to "watch out" and "move" when someone was walking past (I really wasn't in the way!). One morning Dave casually asked if I'd seen his coffee cup and Mae said "Right there, Daddy" and pointed to it on the bookcase. Once when we were playing with her tea set, I was handing out the saucers and couldn't remember the word for them- she jumped right in with it.


As most kids this age seem to be, she's concerned about her 'owies' and will point to them: "Owie on my knee. Sidewalk. Owie on my other knee. Healing."

She seems to know almost the entire ABC song. Our favorite part is her pronunciation of the last line: "Nes-time won-cha sing-wih ME!!!" She can sing a lot of the 'Itsy Bitsy Spider' although she loops around to previous parts from some key words. I also realized that, when she picks up the plastic maracas, she sings "Hurrah! Hurrah" (The only marching song I can come up with is 'The ants go marching one by one...').











She's been climbing a lot and amazes me with what she can get on to at the playground (read: gives me heart attacks). So far she's staying in her crib, except at playtime when she's climbed over the end to play with Adi three times. On the neighbor's trampoline, she learned to do somersaults (front rolls) and can now do them on the floor or outside on the grass. They are a great skill for her to show off to friends or strangers; she really enjoys the attention. She's not very careful about what she's going to run into, though! Mae continues to be quite tough-- she'll cry if she really gets hurt but even then is quick to move on from her injury.



Even though she likes testing herself physically, she isn't obsessed with doing things herself. She wants our help getting her shoes off, pulling up her pants, etc. And on the playground, if I'm 'spotting' her as she climbs high, she'll often want me to help her down. I try to make her do it herself but she knows that I'll catch her if she lets go. One exception to this is that she wants to turn on the water whenever she washes her hands and gets quite upset when we do it for her.

One of the funniest verbal exchanges we had was a month or so before her birthday. Someone asked her how old she was and she said "twenty-eight." We were amazed, having never heard her say a number larger than ten. Finally someone figured out that she'd picked up on the *date* of her birthday. Now, when asked her age, she tends to say "September".


Mae is mostly agreeable-- our favorite phrase of her is a simple "okay." When she gets upset, she winds up to it with escalating "no. No. No! NO!" and flails around physically as if expressing her emotions with her body. She went through a few weeks where she was hitting or pushing Adi, often unprovoked, before running away, but she hasn't been doing that as much lately. When we tell her to go to her room or sit on the time-out chair in the living room, she'll stay until we come to get her and usually apologizes to Adi with minimal prompting. She seems to realize that it is easy to get a rise out of Adi and, although she's often affectionate with her, it does seem to amuse her to push Adi's buttons.



Her tastes in food have become pickier. I think she still eats more than a lot of kids, but she's started to say 'no thank you' to things and has occasionally asked for a specific food that wasn't served. Her absolute favorites are cake & ice cream-- about 50% of her play seems to revolve around pretending things are cake, and for her birthday all she said she wanted was an "ice cream cone" (which she got-- and purple to boot!) She likes all fruits, grains and most dairy products. When I asked her what her favorite food was she said "breakfast" (pronounced breck-sis) which is pretty much true: fruit, cereal and yogurt. But so far she's often amenable to the 'take one more bite of your [usually vegetables] and you'll get some more [usually fruit]' cajoling. She will also eat as much tofu as you put in front of her and likes noodles, beans, eggs and even some spicy food so I really can't complain.

One of the most endearing developments is that Mae has started to spontaneously thank us for cooking. The first was "Thank you Daddy making pancakes" (another favorite food) but often when you give her something now she'll say "thank you." I can't explain why it is so nice to hear that! She is also very good at sharing. She does take toys away and doesn't want to give them back but when I set the timer to beep at the end of someone's turn, she spontaneously gives the toy away without complaining.

This is just one of the ways that she is very resilient and easy-going for a toddler. She generally doesn't let things upset her and I feel like I could learn a lot about being happy with what I have instead of focusing on what I don't have.



Another one of her skills seems to be a good sense of direction. If I take a route different from the usual to the playground, she reminds me where to go. One day, I stopped at a few intersections on the way home and asked the girls which way was home; she knew right away at every one. When we leave our house, we usually go the same way to one major intersection and there turn left or right, depending on our destination. Sometimes Mae is concerned that we're going the wrong way; I don't know if she's remembering from our last trip or where she wants to go (Grandma & Grandpa's house) or what. And she also points out the building I work in whenever we go to Boulder, from the spot where I first showed it to her.

The one thing that seems to bother her right now is unexplained motion. I let her ride the 'penny ponies' at the grocery store (still just a penny, isn't that great?) and as soon as it started moving, Mae started crying. The same thing with a mechanized jeep at the local children's museum. When we're going downhill and she's in the bike trailer, she'll ask me to go "not fast", and just this week she's started telling me to slow down when driving. I'm not going over the speed limit, but that explanation seems to be lost on her: "too fast, Mama. That's enough" [speed, presumably].

She seems to be getting the idea that pictures of things are just pictures, not the things themselves. Although we had one funny episode when Dave drew a tree with a swing on it, then she sat on the swing.


But it does seem that she understands now but just likes to play the game.

Bedtime is when we have the most trouble with Mae. Instead of going to sleep, she likes to have a drink of water, her nose wiped, or Annie (her lion doll) covered up with the blanket. Now that she is potty-trained, she has realized that she can get us to take her to the potty, too. Even though she wears pull-up diapers at night, we want to encourage her to use the potty and so we let her go. It isn't unusual for her to say she has to go and then be unable to (even during the day) so she might repeat this three times or so. As I write this, she is going to bed and sleeping well through the night, but it seems that she just has bad stages with it. Dave thinks she's afraid of the dark so maybe that contributes, too.

There are a few 'baby' things she really wants to hold on to. As an infant, she really liked her pacifier-- we finally took it away in the early months when she started waking up at night when it fell out of her mouth. I'm sure that she would be addicted to it now if we gave her the chance-- whenever she sees one she wants it and I finally threw away all the spares that I had stashed around the house when she was a baby. I've noticed that she'll be content in the bike trailer or on a walk if she has a part of her coat, or a strap of the seat belt, in her mouth and I assume this is part of the same phenomenon. She also loves high chairs, booster seats and other kids' sippy cups.

Now that she can run well, she runs everywhere she can. Tonight she ran the three feet to clean up toys, announcing "I run to clean up!" In the house, she will run around a short wall, saying "Go, Mae, go!" as we've coached her to cheer for one of us in bike or running races. She loves to do races, toeing a line and saying "ready, set, go!" One day I heard her doing this with another child in the rec center child care before I came in the door. I've noticed that she often gets other kids to play with her-- perhaps they gravitate toward her because she is agreeable with what they want to do, or her enthusiasm for most activities in infectious. She tends to hang on to groups of older kids, too, and certainly isn't intimidated (or even aware of) the age difference.



Thursday, October 15, 2009

Adi at two years


We took a parent-tot gymnastics class at the rec center this summer and Adi loved the mini-trampoline. She would spend several minutes standing on it, trying to jump with both feet. Over the summer, we've had a lot of trampoline time thanks to our neighbors and friends and she really learned to jump there. Now she hops around the house, saying "Mommy, watch! Daddy, watch! Mae, watch!" She can hop, both feet off the floor, several times in a row and has a great time doing it. It is very portable entertainment! We call her our little 'jumping bean.'

While staying in a hotel room together, we learned that Adi talks in her sleep. The most common phrase seems to be, "No, Mine!" It seems that is the dynamic of their early-morning waking up: Adi talks in her sleep, waking Mae up and then Mae talks and Adi wakes up too.


Adi's is talking in 6+ word sentences and likes trying to tell Mae what to do. Several times I've been alerted to a misbehavior by Adi saying, "Mae, don't! No Mae, don't!" As Mae was climbing up the little slide at my parents house, Adi was trying to correct her: "Up stairs, Mae. Go up stairs." At lunch, she'll get upset, saying, "Use spoon, Mae." (It is pronounced 'ooze foon').

At the playground, she'll stand at the bottom of a slide and say, "I catch Mae!" She also likes to say "Adi turn!" before attempting to take a toy and "Adi do it too!" is a common sentence. She parrots just about anything we say-- even the other day when Dave and I were talking about it and he said that they repeat 'it exactly', she started repeating 'it exactly, it exactly, it exactly' as a case in point.

Her focus is strongly on Mae ("What Mae doing? Where Mae go to? Where Mae is? Me touch Mae? Me touch Mae's eye? Mae's eyes pretty.") and she often will lose interest in a toy once it is her turn because she wants to play with whatever Mae picked up instead. Her phrasing alternates between "I" and "me/my," the latter which sounds just like "Mae" so we are always asking if she means herself or Mae. Prepositions are being explored right now, with 'on' and 'in' being used a lot (not always correctly). She likes to imitate us helping Mae-- the other day, Adi washed Mae's face after a meal, and I've seen her trying to help Mae put her pants on.


She has become much more relaxed in strange places, still shy at the beginning but opening up in about half an hour to play with other kids, toys and even sometimes pet a dog. She is quite interested in animals, "Pet the doggie! Adi pet the doggie!" but occasionally can't overcome her fear until the dog leaves. Then she gets upset that she didn't get to pet the dog! Along those lines, we're definitely seeing the classic toddler indecision/regret when she has to choose between two things: she chooses one, then the other, then immediately cries that she wants the first thing again. It is so frustrating to deal with but also fascinating to see how hard it is for all of us to deal with the exclusive-ors in life.




With her advancing language, Adi is able to tell us when she is tired and wants to take a nap or go to sleep, which she'll readily do. It's no surprise, really- as an infant she had clear transitions between happy wake-time and fussiness which could only be solved by going to sleep. Her affinity for peek-a-boo hasn't decreased either; around a year ago, you could get her to stop crying most of the time by putting a blanket or box over her head and asking, "Where's Adi?" (This looked mean until you saw it work). She *still* loves peek-a-boo, whereas a lot of toddlers I know have grown out of it. She'll put her hands over her eyes and sit quietly for a rather long time until we notice, or she'll ask us "Where Adi go?". Then she flings her hands from her face and says "peek-a-boo!". (Repeat about 20 times).


We do a lot of counting around the house because I count down from 10 to warn them of a transition (e.g. "In ten seconds, you have to give the toy to Mae. 10... 9... ") When both girls started to repeat numbers backwards, we started counting upwards, too. But we rarely go past ten so we were surprised a few weeks ago when Adi counted all the way from one to eleven! She also knows some of the alphabet song (which she calls "a b c d next time won't you" and will prompt me to recite "humpy dumpy" or "hickory dock", neither of which I've been saying to her much. She's been singing tunes and just yesterday asked me to sing 'a b c d' and then sang some (unrelated) tones while I sang. It seemed like she really wanted to do a duet!

One of the biggest changes lately has been that Adi's allegiance switches between me and Dave. Starting as an infant, she was quite attached to me-- crying when I left the room or when she didn't get put to bed by me. Occasionally she'll revert to that but now she often wants Daddy to do everything. I'm pretty happy to say, "Okay, Daddy can lift you up/wash you off/carry you/play with you" or whatever the request and so far Dave is accommodating, too.


We're definitely seeing more obstinate behavior and a striving for independence. Sometimes I feel like I spend all day manipulating her into doing what I want her to do, in the following way:
Mom: Do you want me to do it for you or do you want to do it yourself?
Adi: No!
Mom: Okay, you want me to do it? [Make motion to do it]
Adi: No, myself
[Repeat for each tiny step of the process].
It is tedious but predictable and so far quite effective.

That said, there is a lot she can do herself. She's been able to put her shoes and even boots on and take them off since August. And this month she started getting her own socks on! (This might not seem that amazing if you don't have to put socks on kids, I myself find it challenging). She can pull her pants up by herself, climb into her high chair, climb into her car seat and buckle some simple buckles. We rarely attach the booster seat buckles but she often does it herself. One day I realized she was getting all the (simple) puzzle pieces into their holes, which had looked so difficult six months ago when we got the puzzles.

One more thing that I don't think I've mentioned yet-- we're pretty sure Adi is left-handed. She has used her left hand for eating utensils and often draws with it. They say this can change up to age three or so but it seems pretty well established to me.