Mark's Musings

When last we met, Zoe and I had established a morning routine. The routine has not changed, although her vocabulary has. We still go down to the living room for a cup of milk. We still rest for a few minutes whilst the older two kids get themselves ready. We still wrap the blanket around her.

For a while, she used to say “my toes are warm”, which meant that the blanket was not wrapped around her toes well enough. I never figured out whether she meant “my toes aren’t warm” or “my toes are cold” until one day she decided to start saying the latter.

I am especially proud of the way she handles multisyllabic words effortlessly, the way she speaks in complete sentences (sometimes with subordinate clauses), and the way expresses herself. If she tells you something, and you ask “why”, she will give a reason and not just say “because” or “I want to”.

She’ll be “graduating” in about a month from the toddlers room at daycare to the preschool room. They’re starting to let her play in there for a little bit each day, to acclimate her.

She doesn’t like people doing things for her — she much prefers to do everything on her own whenever she can. She’s growin’ up and it’s all happening too fast.

Two days to go.

As there were no leap years between now and her birth, it means she’s got two days left to remain in her single-digits. In binary.

We’ve gotten into a nice morning routine, now. I go into her room and wake her. She stands up, and I lift her out of the crib. She points to her blanket and says “wrap around”, so I grab the blanket and place it over her as she snuggles her head into my shoulder. Although both Alec and Samantha liked to keep their arms free, Zoe prefers to tuck them between her tummy and my chest. We go downstairs, where I’ve got a sippy cup full of milk for her. We sit on the sofa in the living room and she drinks from the cup as I cradle her in my arms. Once she’s done, she gives me the cup and says “why down” (lie down). I lean back on the sofa and get comfortable, and she lies on top of me and waits for her siblings to come downstairs to get dressed. Occasionally she’ll fall asleep, and I’ll close my eyes too.

Then, unfortunately, it’s time to change (diapers and clothes), and bundle her off to daycare. It’s nice to have a few moments together, however brief, and I intend to fully enjoy them while they last.

A milestone.

I’ve been doing this for a while, now, haven’t I. 100 weeks is a nice round number, and I feel I ought to have some significant thing to report. But the day passed much like any other day, with Zoe getting a little smarter, and knowing a bit more, and getting a little fussier.

One good thing has been that she’s less likely to cry to get something, and more likely to try to ask for it in words. In the morning, when she’s just woken up, she still will cry to let us know she’s awake and demanding attention. But once she sees one of us, she’ll switch to words with only the slightest bit of encouragement.

She loves flipping through books. She’ll sit happily for seconds on end with a book in her lap, turning pages back and forth. There are some books she likes (she got a copy of a Frosty the Snowman board book for Christmas, and if I didn’t know every last word of the song before, I certainly know it with excruciating accuracy now), and she’ll ask you to read them again and again. Frequently, though, once she’s bored, she’ll stop partway through a reading and push the book away rather than wait patiently for the end.

She also likes Dora (she’ll say “Swiper no swiping”, and “oh, man!”), Diego, and Maisy. If there’s something that needs my full attention, I can reliably get about 15-20 minutes if I put her in front of one of those shows.

Her second birthday (third, if you’re being pedantic) is coming up soon. We’ll have to take her someplace fun to play.

Wants and desires.

During the course of caring for a baby, you start to get a feel for what it wants. You can generally sense, through body languge and pre-speech vocalizations, what the baby wants. Over time, the babies wants become more complex. It starts off with “feed me” and “change me” but as it grows it wants more. The baby figures out how to make simple words, and that probably coincides with the need to be more expressive about wants.

But babies are as lazy as any other human, so their default way of expressing a want is to cry. After all, it’s worked this long – why not just take the easy way out?

As a parent, I’m a bit of a jerk. Most of the time I know perfectly well what Zoe wants, but I make her use her words as much as possible. If I acted that way to adults (“I know what you’re asking for, but I’m going to wait until you’ve articulated it unambiguosly”), my nose would probably be a bit more misshapen. However, Zoe’s language is getting better and better. We’re just about past the stage where she makes baby babble. Almost everything she says is a real English word. It might be slurry, it might be drooly, but if we take the time we can almost always figure it out.

More sentences.

Every time Zoe comes up with something new to say, it’s amazing. We’ve been through it twice before, of course, but the process is absolutely fascinating. From the first time she said ‘wau kah way’ (‘walk away’), we’ve been impressed with her abilities.

Her current cute verbal quirks:
‘bantha’ for ‘Samantha’
‘es’ for ‘yes’
‘rappa round’ for ‘wrap this blanket around me’
‘walk walk’ for ‘come follow me’ (whilst pulling your hand)
‘door a boots’ for ‘Dora and Boots’
‘buff-fy’ for ‘butterfly’
‘so-man-fying’ for ‘the snowman was flying’

For that last one, she hasn’t really gotten the tune ‘Walking in the Air’ yet, but she does love singing (and hearing) the Frosty the Snowman song. She gets as far as ‘frosty so-man (beat) happy so’ and then demands that we sing it or play the CD to her.

Much of her speech remains baby babble, though. She knows what she’s saying, but the rest of us don’t.

Oops.

No update for 88 weeks, save the picture. I blame the holidays.

Sentences.

Back in the heyday of December ’03, we had videotaped part of the tree-decorating with the kids. In those halcyon days, Samantha was the age Zoe is now, and when I re-watched the video a couple of months ago, I was impressed by how well Samantha was talking. Two and three word sentences, even, and Zoe was only (a couple of months ago) in the single-words-and-grunts phase.

But recently she’s been starting to pick up the basics of grammar. We were watching football this past Sunday, and each of us had our own bowl of popcorn. Zoe was wandering about instead of being dutifully engrossed in the game, and she came across my bowl. Sitting right next to hers. Looking up at me slyly, she started reaching for it. “No, Zoe,” I said. “That’s daddy’s bowl.” Without missing a beat, she pointed at her own bowl and said “Zoe’s bowl!”

Phonemes.

Zoe’s speech gets better every day. She’s much more adept at mimicing sounds than she was, say, four weeks ago. And she’ll mimic you even when you don’t say “Zoe, say” first. One morning, I was yelling upstairs to Alec to come down “right now”, and Zoe shouted “now!” up at him.

One of the sounds that Alec had problems with, the L sound, is showing up in Zoe too. Alec used to call himself “akik”, or say “yeddo” instead of “yellow”. Occasionally, I will call him “akik” jokingly, and had in the past explained to him where it came from. I’m not sure he really believed me, but when I heard Zoe say it too, I called Alec over and said “Zoe, say Alec”. “Akik!” she said. Alec’s eyes opened wide, and he made a half-laughing half-surprised sound. “That’s what I used to say,” he finally agreed.

Animal sounds.

Zoe’s talking is advancing rapidly and, of course, her comprehension is even better than that. You can ask her to perform simple tasks (“put the cup on the table”, “give this to Alec”) and she understands. Somtimes she’ll just say “no!”, but she understands. Her “no” is nearly perfectly pronounced now.

But her new trick is animal sounds. She can make, on request, the sound of a horse, dog, cat, and duck. She can’t quite get all of the What Do You Say? animals, and my efforts to teach her the last item in that book have thus far failed, but it’s only a matter of time.

Words, words, words.

Zoe has been talking a lot more recently. She can get Alec out (“Aaa-ih”) and her “please” and “more” are taking shape, although she still signs them at the same time. Additionally, she loves to babble. She’ll look at you with a very serious expression on her face and say “ma-na-da-dee-va-mo-meh?” I’m sure she feels as if she’s talking, and we’ll of course answer back (but, alas, in English).

She gets along fairly well with her older siblings. Occasionally they’ll be playing with a toy that she wants (and naturally she wants it just because they’re playing with it), and the screaming starts. But mostly they get along just fine. Samantha goes out of her way to make Zoe feel part of the play group, and Alec loves to hug her. And pick her up, but we discourage that.

Lately, Zoe’s been fascinated by our kids’ computer. We got a mac mini for them a while ago, and the kids have all sorts of educational/entertaining software. Zoe toddles over to the computer to watch them play, and will climb up onto the desk to get a closer look. Taking her off the table at first used to cause her to go into a screaming fit, but now she just waits until you put her down to start climbing right back up again.

The most recent thing she learned how to do is kiss, by making slight vacuum in her mouth and then popping open her lips, so we’ve incorporated it into her going-to-bed routine. Kiss mama, Zoe. Give Alec a kiss too! Where’s Samantha? There she is! (giggle) Give Samantha a kiss! Night-night!