Now we argue

T is generally quite agreeable. He's new to language, so it helps that he accepts that things are called what we tell him they're called. However on one case he seems quite obstinate.

The other day we were sitting together and he heard a birdsong from outside.

Dogs!

No. It's a bird.

Dogs!

That's a bird singing.

Dogs!

Bird.

Dogs!

B-ir-d.

Dogs!

Bird.

Dogs!

Bird!

Dogs!

Biiiiirrrd.

Dogs!

Ok. Nevermind.

The next day we're sitting again and he hears some construction noise from down the street.

Bird!

sigh No. That's just a noise.

Bird!

Shortly after that a bird calls in the distance.

Dogs!

Tell you what – we'll pick this up later.

Now we have words

One advantage of having children is that it gives some geography to lockdown. The baby who was just starting to eat solid foods at the start of it all is now on the verge of talking. The little girl is now somehow creating poetry and music that is actually pretty good. If not for them, every day would be some unidentifiable variant of work, food and mild entertainment.

T is starting to talk. He's been making progress for some time. He's been mastering repeating words said to him. He's recently reached the point of being able to recognise words and use some in the right context. He's still missing out on certain letters. B replaces many letters at the start of words (Bup instead of Cup). He still can't manage G and K sounds.

• duch instead of duck
• meeeb instead of milk
• dodds instead of dogs
• beeboo instead of peekaboo
• dood instead of good – though he does get the G right on rare occasions
• beeejuu which is his version of pleasure to meet you which he says when someone shakes his hand

I'm impressed that one of his first words was Please (beeeze). Addmittedly, it's used in the "gimmie" sense of the word. But I'm determined to appreciate it anyway. More recently he's added sorry, usually alongside hurt, given how easy it is for an aging adult to injury themselves doing toddler-related things like lifting and carrying.

Just so I have a record for later, his most common words are mostly body related Eye, ear, nose, boop (the noise of poking someone on the nose), bebby (belly), bum, feet, arm. Plus a bunch of normal nouns like loo , ball, sit and shirt.

He's picked up a lot of other mimicry. He's not bad at baby sign language. Probably better at remembering those gestures than I am. 2 days ago he started the blow-a-kiss gesture, which is rather sweet, especially when used alongside hi and bye. Yesterday he today he grabbed a tissue and wiped his nose. I've no idea if he actually needed to or was just copying.

He'll also put a flat duplo or block or suchlike against his ear and say Hello.... ummm..... I feel that he's trying to say that I say um a lot on the phone.

Like his sister, he'll point at a picture of himself and say, You! The other day he poked me in the chest with his index finger and said, meeee.

Speaking of R, she had a whinge at me yesterday about how the world is all screwed up and everyone is expecting her generation to fix it. I did, first off, apologise for Gen X for never having gotten sorted out enough to either really fix anything (or really break anything, for that matter). Then I said that maybe the millennials might fix some things so there's less burden on her. That did not help.

Yes, I still exist

Having two children leaves me with very little time for the pondering and writing I need to maintain this blog. Actually, there's a lot of things I've not really had time to do since the son was born. I've hardly had any time to work on the daughter's spaceport beyond simple repairs. Spare time seems to go to cleaning and reorganising rooms and just trying to have enough space in this home for 4 humans.

R is 9 now. As she gets older I'm less comfortable putting details about her life out there. Part of it is that it's not my story to tell. On the other hand it's my life too. So I generally keep details here to a point where she won't hate me for this later. That said, she's a proper human now. She's grown. Her legs are only 10cm or so shorter than mine. And she seems to know more about cellular biology than I ever did (Thanks lockdown). She also can fall alseep on her own now without being tricked, but I do still read to her from a book every other night because we both like it and, TBH, it's the only recreational reading I ever do these days.

The boy, T, is 15 months now. I've skipped a lot of his life on this blog. He's very different from R, even though they look really similar, especially in the first few months. They both got teeth really early (like at 3 months). They both started walking early (he started at 8 months, but slowly built up to it over the course of 2 months when he could walk around the room just fine. she started at 10 months, but just decided I walk now and in the space of 3 days was a pro). I don't think many of the differences between them are boy vs girl. They're just different people with brains and bodies that work differently. Plus he's grown up more than half his life in some form of isolation or lockdown, so he's not had much physical socialisation. No idea if that's had a big impact on him or not, tho.

Some interesting things about T:

• He never got into crawling. He bear walks – back legs slightly bent, knees nowhere near the floor.
• Until quite recently he's had no sense of stairs. To go downstairs he'd just walk straight off the step and just expect someone to catch him. Needless to say, the stairs have been babygated off.
• His favourite book is We're Going on a Bear Hunt. When he was young, he didn't like any other books. The only way to keep his attention in another book was to start a page with We're going on a bear hunt. We're going to catch a big one. followed by the book's actaual text.
• bear was his first word. He has a very easy time with words that begin with B, to the point that he inserts a B to make words he can't otherwise pronouce. He says up as bup.
• He's picked up some baby sign language and will actually make signs. "Hurt", "Done" and "More" are the 3 he uses most. The last of which make sense since he eats amazing amounts of food.
• When he wants me to sit next to him, he pats the surface he's sitting on with his hand. I always dutifully join him there. Whenever I pat the seat next to me to get him to join me, he ignores me and acts as if I did nothing.
• He learned to say no pretty early on. Not in a terrible 2s kind of way, but more in a helpful way to answer questions. Do you need the loo? no.. He may have said yes once or twice, but I can't really tell. He certainly never says yes when we ask if he wants something. He laughs uncomfortably and manaically, which is a good sign. But no words.

I could go, and at some point I'll go into more details about things. When I have the time.

Plague diary: day 31 (really, 31?)

Now that the pneumonia is gone, one day seems to be much like another. I did push it a bit too hard on Tuesday, and needed a long rest. The rest of this week has been more or less the same. I'm ok as long as I'm not doing something. But once I do I just get winded and lose all my energy. I can hang up laundry just fine. Then 3 minutes later I realise, no, it wasn't fine. I can't figure out my limits because the goal posts keep changing all the time for no obvious reason.

A couple of the doctors I've spoke to have said that they're finding The Virus can linger as long as 6 weeks. I'm only just past week 4, so I'm not surprised it's still having an impact. I am worrying that this is what life is like now. Perhaps the lung damage is permanent and I'll just have no energy to speak of from here on out. I mean, with chicken pox, I've gotten scarred for life in a number of places on my skin, so it'd not be shocking that covid-19 might do some irreparable harm. No one knows. It's all new to everyone. Like those Samsung phones with exploding batteries. They were just phones. They're expected to just either work, or to break. Nobody expected them to blow up. Perhaps The Virus just smashes things up before it leaves like a renter who lost their deposit.

In other news, the son is getting consonants. M and D and H, mostly. He says Da like his sister did, but not as often, and with more variety of other things. I suppose by the time we next leave the house he'll be walking and speaking at least a few small words. He's eating too. Anything we put in front of him. Blueberries, cucumbers, avocado, tomatoes, squash, asparagus, mushrooms, lemons, brussels sprouts. Anything. This is so very different from what we got used to with his sister, who in retrospect, was a picky eater. I always thought she was just the sort to just eat a bit, and was ok with only eating a bit. Now I know, she was really thinking Ok, I'll eat this one thing, but the rest, I'll just move around and hope they never try it again. I like milk. Can I just stick to milk?.

Of course I'm not doing the food prep. I'm sure I would have passed on The Virus by now if they didn't have it already, but I'm still a little wary, since no one really knows how this things can spread. I'll feed him, but with chopsticks so I stay far away from touching the food or touching him myself. It's odd, and awkward and unpleasant. He has changed quite a bit in the last month, and it bugs me to be missing it from so up close.

I've spent a huge amount more time with R than I did while we both had school and work. I'm still sleeping in her room, but I don't really count that as quality time together. I've stopped reading her bedtime stories. I've run out of books from our queue and have struggled to find age appropriate stuff. I read Neverwhere on a few good breathing days in there, but that and the short story sequel are done. I need to get back in to the habit of reading before it's broken entirely.

Also, R is now pretty big. She's still smaller than us, but she's not a little girl. She's a small person, but a proper person. Still very headstrong. We are still facing many challenges. I'm trying to get a bit of learning in there, but all she wants to do is use the iPad or sometimes play with toys (which I'm happy to join on, when I have the energy for it, but her room is so cramped with the extra bed, we can't both use the spaceport at the same time). I've been trying to teach her useful stuff based on things that come up in conversation. Monday I explained how FM and AM radio (frequency vs amplitude modulation) works. Today I explained triangulation (how do we know where a lion is when it roars). On a practical level, to get her away from the iPad, I hid it today, and taught her card games. Poker and solitaire. She seems to like them both and the latter I'm finding less boring. This seemed to get her happily away from technology for the whole day.

The Sims

The little girl's been playing The Sims on her iPad since a few months after she turned 2, and is still at it several months later. I was a bit dubious about introducing her to it, but I'm pretty sure now I chose well. I picked the Sims because it's just a dollhouse game, and well, she has a dollhouse, so why not? There's no danger or skills required or violence or anything really out her understanding. And it's turned out to be helpful in some ways.

For starters, her ability to interact with the UI is as good as anyone's. There's an in-game task of catching ghosts where she has to tap on a randomly moving ghost. She gets it pretty often.

When she first started playing she'd sometimes start hunting for ghosts in our house. It was cute. She'd walks around with a stick or some kind, pointing in random directions, saying I'm hunting ghosts. Occasionally I'd hold up a toy or something and say It's a ghost! quick! tap it and she'd tap it with her finger repeatedly until she declared Yey! I got it

Anyway, back on topic. You can make the people in the game do things like eat, go the loo, etc. We've instilled in her that the people must must must wash their hands after going to the loo. If one of them walks away before washing their hands we make a very big deal of it oh no! He's got to wash his hands. Get him back. To the point that not only will we occasionally hear her yell at the box no! Wash your hands!, but she's usually very clear that she needs to wash her hands after using the loo.

Same thing with pets. When a person plays with a dog or cat I tell her they need to wash their hands. If the girl touches me after touching an animal, I'm allergic enough it will really do me in. So having a place for her to practice it is helpful.

She did point out recently that they have toothbrushes on their sinks, and was very confused when I told her she couldn't make them brush their teeth.

The sims can be dressed in many outfits. I advise her on what outfits work and what looks terrible. More a case of me instilling my tastes on her, I know. But at least we talk about what she likes vs what I like. And in a place where the people wearing those clothes won't be offended by our fashion policing.

I do have to turn the sound off whenever she plays. The music is a little grating after a while, but the main reason is the sims speak a made up language that sounds like English. This I found, to my horror, was interfering with her learning to talk. When she started playing she was only just starting to beat words into sentences. When I found her randomly peppering her speech with sim-words, I immediately went into the settings and turned off taking forever. As complaints against the game goes, it's pretty minor, considering the designers didn't have the impact on learning to speak in mind when they added the fake words.

We do get into arguments about some things. She has to go to work. No she doesn't. No really the game said it was time. No. She has to take a bath now! This never ends well. You see, the game has quests and other things you need to do to keep the fake little people alive and happy. But the girl can't read so she thinks all these things I say we need to do after there's a popup are just my whimsey.

She also likes to buy things using the in-game money ("simoleons"). Sometimes I'd be saving up to buy some rather expensive things like a cat or house. You see, after she goes to sleep, I set the sims on the tasks of making simoleons or "life points". Which takes a while, but it means we can do more fun things when she next plays the game. But, not infrequently, she'll, when my back is turned for a few seconds, spend some huge amount it took me weeks to acquire. Often on something meaningless like a chair.

That leads to arguments.

Sometimes L has to intervene and take the game away from both of us. Until we can show we can play nicely together.

I think these cases are more learning points for me. Get me used to how she treats limited resources and how to convince her to use them wisely. Or at least to understand what is a frivolous purchase and what would actually make her happy to have.

We're not there yet

All in all, the game seems to be doing her some good. Kind of like an interactive What Do People Do all Day but without the anthropomorphisation. I'd recommend it if you have a non-fragile device you feel safe leaving your kid alone with.

Things she says, part 1

Adventures in what happens when a new person starts to be able to make their thoughts known to the people around them.

Here's some highlights of things she's said to me, offered without (much) further comment...

Going to high tea?

No. We're not going to high tea now.

Going to high coffee?

What are you doing?

I'm making cous cous.

Ha ha ha ha. Funny.

No. Really. Cous cous is a real thing.

Let me see this goose goose.

About a month and half ago we were on the tube. At one stop the doors opened and she saw a poster on the wall advertising a book. Suddenly she says I see her. I see her! I watch her on the Daily Show!

It took me few moments to realise the ad was for I am Malala by Malala Yousafzai who we saw on the Daily Show couple of weeks previously. Clearly she's taking in far more than I expected.

Careful, the water might be to hot for you. Your skin's a bit delicate.

I am not delicate, I am a little girl. Little girls are not delicate. Little girls are LITTLE GIRLS.

I found poo in the bed.

What!?

Pooh. I found Pooh in the bed. He's here.

to wife From now on we're only ever calling him Pooh Bear.

What should we do with your leftover pasta? Should we save it?

No.

What should we do with it?

Feed it to monkeys

...

It makes sense

I found that

where did you find that?

In your pocket.

jokingly, to me Stop it! Bad Monkey!

indignant You're not a bad monkey! You're a good good good good good good good good man.

holds up a big sea shell
do you know what this is?

Yes

What is it?

uuuuuuuh. A hedgehog

What says "meow"?

A cat!

What else says "meow"?

Three cats!

If you eat all your grapes on time, I will go out and buy you some lychees.

And come back?

While watching a montage in a move where the heroes are learning new skills
Do you want to learn to play piano?

I do.

Do you want to learn to fence?

I DO!

Don't do that. It's dangerous.

She continues doing it

Wait... Do you know what dangerous means?

Yes

what does it mean?

I'm doing something

Language

This first batch of posts after my long hiatus are generally going to be all about changes to the girl that have happened in the past few months. There's a lot of them. It's impressive how fast these things come in. She just changes suddenly and it's just now a part of who she is. Then she changes again. Layer upon layer, turning into a person.

At 2½ she talks quite clearly now. She even occasionally uses such elaborate tenses as I would like to have... or multi syllable words like I'm frustrated or interesting turns of phrases I don't care for stones (said when eating lychees). On the other hand she still doesn't entirely understand how to structure sentences – she'll surround the subject with verbs rather just inverting the subject and verb: What is that is?

The best way I can try to illustrate how she's developed in just the past few months in how she refers to pictures of herself. We have a screensaver that loops through randomly all the photos we've ever taken of her. When we watch it with her, we'd point to her and say That's you.
Needless to say, when she started talking, and even up until this summer, she'd point to a picture of herself and say That's you!

I tried explaining it to her how it works, but it's really hard. No, I say that's you, because it's you. But you have to say that's me. I kept telling her that for ages. It didn't sink in.

About a month ago got through her head that saying That's you was somehow wrong, so she started using her own name instead. Dropping the pronoun entirely: That's [name]!

Just a few days ago, she pointed and said That's me!, which she's been saying ever since.

One thing that's really cute is how she pauses to think of the right word to say. She'll be talking, then stop and look up and slightly to the left or right, maybe saying aaah then she'll look back at you, say the word and continue.

Reading to her has gotten interesting since she's quite good at remembering the text. For a number of the simpler stories, all I have to do is turn the pages and she'll recite the right part of the story to me. She misses some words here or there, and does her own interpretation of the meaning sometimes. There's one book which she got for her birthday which she would recite one page as Sometimes good. Sometimes bad... Last week she picked it up again and included the full text, rather than just the meaning: Sometimes you're good. Sometimes you're bad... It's like she always knew the words, it's just that then she decided that the "you're" was significant.

The girl is doing surprisingly well on her long path towards reading. She starting to kind of get the idea that the letter a word starts with is important, but she's not quite sure how. Fortunately we have some games to work with, like this set of cards with a picture the name of the thing spelled out. Like a picture of an umbrella that says "umbrella" underneath.

If left to my own devices, I would most likely get too tempted to start with the annoying parts of English, S is for 'see', C is for 'cue', Y is for you, D is for 'Double you', A is for 'are', E is for 'eye' and so on.

But instead, we've found a practical way to try to teach her about letters. So she can now recognise upper case letters and has got her head around most lower case ones as well – "l" and "i", "u" and "n", "d" and "a" are the trickiest. A couple of days ago I convinced her "ll" was two els instead of an H with a hard-to-see bar. So now when she sees "ll" instead of double-el or el-el she says els.

She also had lots of trouble with going through the letters of "cat". She kept saying c-d-t.

That's not a D, it's a lowercase A. They look similar, but the line on top of the A is much smaller.

c-d-t.

It's an A sweetie.

c-d-a-t.

Close enough.

We have more work ahead of us.

Bunny X

On our street is house with what appears to be like some kind of vent on the side. The girl has decided to call it "Bunny X" because it looks like bunny ears and it's in the shape of an X.

She is right. And since she says Bunny X every time we pass the house, I'm always reminded of her ... facsinating insight into the world.

Near names and far names

Apparently L and I both have a pairs of names, according to the little girl. When we are near she calls us dada and mama. When we are far away she calls us by our first names.

A perfect example of this was the other day when L made me a coffee. She asked the girl to call downstairs to me and tell me the coffee was ready. The girl came over to the top of the stairs and called out Bob! Toffee. Bob! When I came in view she said Dada!

I can only guess this is because L and I, tend to only use each other's first names when calling to each other across the flat. Regardless, it's led to a rather cute side-effect.

More explosions in talking

The girl is now almost on complete sentences. She's gotten a hand on using nouns and verbs and articles and the occasional adjective and preposition. She'll repeat back pretty much any new word you say to her, with varying levels of accuracy.

She's even realised her name is her name. The side effect of this is she now refers to herself in the third person, and quite a lot – R sad, R happy and so on. Which is odd, but much better than her old habit of referring to herself in the 2nd person (when she'd see a picture of herself she'd say it's you! because that's what we'd say when we'd show her a picture of herself).

In the time since I last posted about her putting two words together, she's now able to explain what she did the day before (Yesterday. Park. Slides!), where she wants to go ( That way (pointing), up the stairs), what she likes (Do you like it? Good. Like the flavour), etc etc.

I gave her a dog puppet my grandmother made me when I was a child. She recently has taken to constantly carrying it all over the house in a mesh bag which she refers to as her doggy bag.

On the other hand, her recent levelling up has been matched by a downgrade in her sleeping. It's driving me a little batty. She's taken to skipping her afternoon nap. Which kind of kills a couple of hours in the afternoon trying to get her to sleep (usually L doing the trying). When I try to get her to sleep, she usually ends up wide awake, and me so tired I'm barely able to stand. And cranky. And not the good kind of cranky where other people might be sympathetic.

She'll either fall asleep later, right when we need to leave the house for some engagement, or stay up till 11 or 12 and be completely loopy. I'm trying rather hard to be patient with this. It could be worse… it could be a potty reversion. I mean, beyond the loopy bits at night, the problem is just me not being in control. So it's really up to me to deal with it. But… that's easy enough to say, it's hard to feel.

Train of why

Last Friday L and I managed to get our first series of Why? questions from the little girl. We were taking a train and L was explaining where we were going and what we would do when we got there. The girl innocuously asked why? I don't think this is the first time she's asked why, but she certainly hasn't done it much. Without giving it much thought, L responded with a simple answer. So the girl asked why? again. And again, and again, I think 4 times total before L and I realised we hit a new milestone! So, we just stopped answering her and got on with transferring trains.

She's not really done this since then – possibly since we caught on to her. I've noticed her asking Why? once since then, but without the trailing refinement queries. But I do expect more and more of this as she get more comfortable with language.

Trapped hand

Today the girl got her hand trapped between the bathroom door and the doorframe. I'm not sure how she did it, as it I was looking away the exact moment it happened. But she managed to find the one spot where she could get her fingers through, but opening the door more would crush them more and closing it would also crush them more.

She calls me out of my distraction by crying Help!. She's got four of the fingers of her left hand stuck past the first knuckle. Her pinky is small enough to be free to move, but the other three won't go past the knuckle. I'm pretty sure they'd started to swell a little. A bit of wiggling the door just makes her scream louder. I call for L to help and we just take turns, one of us holding the girl and the other trying the door, trying to push the fingers back through, or covering them with oil, soap, water or whatever else which'll make them more slippery (I'm pretty sure the oil and soap cancelled each other out).

Nothing works, and the doors won't unscrew from the wall without opening fully. L goes to see if the neighbours have a crowbar while I consider calling 999. The downstairs neighbours add some more consolation and distraction for the girl. L, while one of the neighbour's is fetching tools, gets some tin snips. I think there's nothing those will cut through, but she just sticks them in the space between the door and frame and twists, just enough to bend the wood and free the girl's hand. Just in time for the neighbour's toolbox to arrive.

She comes out, right into my arms and I hold her till L gives her a consoling breast feed. I feel her hand in case anything is broken, but she does not seem to feel any pain. L asks her to make zero and five, that is making a fist and extending her fingers. Which she does without complaint. So it seems she came out unscathed.
For the next hour she would repeat Hand stuck. Door. quite a bit. And any time she got her hand near a doorframe, L and I would lunge at her and grab her away.

Another scary childhood milestone. This one without permanent damage, though I do hope it means she won't do it again.

Upgraded girl

The girl came back from her time away not quite a completely new girl. But she's certainly much more chatty. When we left, she had a few words, but was gaining about 5 new words a day. When we stayed with L's cousin he spent a while showing her various youtube videos of cats. She combined her first two words for him when she later pointed at his computer from the hallway and said Watch cats.

That was just the start of it. Now that she's back, she'll at least try to repeat back any word you say to her. At least a couple of syllables of it. She's started on the alphabet and numbers, though she really only remembers a few of them at this point (5 and Q seem to be her favourites, though G and 6 are a close second).

Taking her to the loo is much easier, since she tells us when she needs to go. And she's only missed a few times in the past month. The downside is she's learned that if she tells us she needs to go, we'll stop what we're doing (often driving on the motorway) and take her to the loo. It seems 3 times out of 4 she just wants a change of scenery. This meant a 6 hour drive up north took over 8 hours, with us stopping every 15 minutes at one point.

We went to a music festival a in April. One of the bands had a little girl a couple of months younger, but about as developed verbally. While they were doing their sound check, the two girls played with each other. It was the cutest thing. Their girl kept shyly handing mine a stuffed tiger, which mine would play with and hand back. This was a really weird experience for me, since I've been a big fan of this band since I was a teenager listening to them on the radio on my way to school. And here I was giving them tips on ear defenders while our children played together.

They then had a little game. Their girl was wearing a shirt with cats all over it. So my girl would poke her on a cat and say cat, and the other girl would poke back and say shirt. This went back and forth for ages. Until my girl got a little pushy with her poking, and knocked the other girl over, making her cry.

I'm at least consoled by the fact that my girl expressed concern when the other girl was upset. Part concern and part confusion. I'm not sure she entirely made the connection that her rough playing caused the problem. It's something I really need to watch out for. She does sometimes slap or hit us with things – which we're very stern about telling her off for doing. But it's much worse when she does it to another, younger, baby – which rarely happens, but mostly through lack of opportunity than anything else. I'm trying to find ways to get her to, if not actually have empathy, at least behave as if she does.

Exercise in enunciation

While the girl was easing breakfast, she decided to say pəpaaɺ. I decided it was good time to teach her the difference between words to she's clear on what she wants.

I held up a piece of paper, saying paper clearly enunciating the A. Then I held up a pepper grinder, saying peper, making the E clear. Then I pointed to the browser on the computer saying PayPal, trying to make the difference between R and L more obvious.

She did repeat each one back at me, barring PayPal, which she just said Pal. Of course, once I stopped, she reverted to the ambiguous pəpaaɺ. And, of course, once I finally gave her a piece of paper and crayon to play with, she grabbed the squeegee and ran to the stairs to clean them with it

She's also started a habit of adding -ee to words. sockie for socks. Doggie for dog. Bucky for bucket. Duckie for ducks. Pocky for pockets. She also started using panties for pants, which actually does mean what she means, so that's ok.

Walking off a cliff of verbage

Around a month ago L and I started to be concerned about the girl's language development. Mostly it was that she could only say a few words, used them erratically and pretty much with only one syllable. It wasn't any red flag or anything, but better to be safe than sorry. I mean, she could certainly understand us – that's been clear for quite some time. It's just she would not say anything to make her needs known. So we decide to take her to the monthly Talking Walk In to have her checked out by a professional.

The next session was 3 weeks away.

About a week after we made that decision she started adding a new word roughly every day. Plus she started being able to make new sounds like L and K. Not only did she have new words and sounds, but she started to be able to use them in useful way. Stuff like

• help
• please
• book – give me that book to read or read me that book
• cup – I want water
• shower I want to bathe
• back – take this away or I want to be someplace I was earlier or just give me that thing I had earlier
• sock / boot – as in,give me the... or take this ... off me
• panda – she carries around this tiny stuffed panda everywhere. She says this over and over if she can see it and she wants it. It came with a small book, and occasionally she calls the book panda too
• tissue – please wipe my nose
• bag
• bed
• cot
• bees – she has this bee mobile she's fond of
• oh – that's surprising
• teeth
• wet – Oops. I've missed.
• seat / sit – Usually with tapping next to her please sit next to me, though sometimes it's I want to sit there.
• talk – Oooh Skype. I want to talk.
• watch – Is that Youtube/iPlayer? Can I see?
• walk – I want to go outside
• up – lift me up, she also says this when walking up the stairs
• down – She repeats this when walking down stairs
• dark – I notice you just turned out the lights
• light – please hand me / turn on the light
• bucket – she has a toy pail she likes to play with
• and occasionally she says what sounds like bog when she needs the loo.

On top of that, hello, water, dog are now quite distinct. She even has fun repeating duck and dog over and over making sure the words are sufficiently different. Same thing with keys and cheese, though less often (she really likes cheese, but she also really likes playing with keys – I'm not sure which she likes more)
She can say cat, but recently has tended not to in favour a sad, plaintive mewing noise she obviously picked up from her time spent with friends' cats.

Anyway, back to the point of this post… Over that three week period she started saying more and more. To the point that when she babbles, we can catch some sense in there as often as not. Two days before we were due to take her in, on a whim I decided to recite the alphabet to her:

A — ay
B — beeeeee
C — ceee
D — dee
E — əə
F — eh
G — Jee
H — ay
…and so on, for the full alphabet. We got to the end and she'd managed all but a few letters. L looked at me and asked Do we really need to take her to be checked out?
At which point we decided that if she wasn't on track, she was coming along nicely. It's weird how it seems to have exploded from almost nothing to almost practical in such a short period of time. Brains are fascinating.

Talking about talking

So the nappytastic mess seems to have calmed down a bit. Her miss to hit ratio has dropped down to a more acceptable level – she managed a 96 hour stretch without missing earlier this week. It seems that reversions like this are common during growth spurts or when levelling up. And she seems to be doing both right now. Her final baby molars have started coming in – which means lots of her poking around her mouth and making that hurts faces. Though so far she's refused all but one attempts to put Bonjela on it. I don't blame her – that stuff smells foul in a fake-candy kind of way.

She's kind of sort of starting to talk. She's definitely understanding most things as long as we don't start using new synonyms or other unfamiliar words. She can now say and mean a few words, the clarity of which seems to grow day by day.

No is the most obvious. She says it quite clearly, but we thought she was a bit confused at how it's used at first. But I now think it's how we ask the question.

Me: Do you need to go to the bathroom?
Her: (thinking) Need? Not really. I'm, having fun now. I'm sure I'll be fine
Her: No

She's got a wee vocabulary of words she uses like bo (elbow), bowl, ball, hello, baby, bye bye, vaaa (water), dog, duck, bats and cats (bats and cats are never singular). Plus there's ちょうだい and
どうぞ which we convinced her to use because they sound more polite than "gimmie".

She can also say her friend Will's name. As in We're going to the park with Will she'll smile and say something between Wee and Wei. I think it's cute how she's excited to see her friend and recognises when we talk about him.

Now we understand

The girl made her first real attempt to have what she said be understood. Specifically, she said a word, and I repeated it back to her, then she repeated it back to me, over and over until I finally said what she believed she was saying.

It went something a bit like this:

bɨts

bits?

bɨts

please?

bɨts

peas?

bɨts

base?

bɨts

pans?

bɨts

bitch?

bɨts

bats?

(smiles) bɨts!

bats

(smiles more) bɨts!!!

bats

(smug) bɨts

Oh, "bats"… You means these? (I point to the monkeys on her dinner tray)

bɨts

I'd pointed to her tray which has a picture of monkeys hanging upside-down from a branch. She's clearly decided that these are bats since her only experience with hanging animals comes from Stellaluna.

Walking backwards

The girl has been walking for 6 months now. She stared at a slow stumble which has grown into a fairly confident toddle. She'll even run – when she thinks she's been caught doing something wrong. The past few days have seen her pick up a couple of new skills I wasn't expecting to see anytime soon.

The first is walking backwards. I didn't even know toddlers could do that. She started by backing slowly away from things, but once she realised what she could do, she started walking backward down hallways every chance she gets. Of course she does not realise yet that she really has got to look behind herself when doing it. Which is a bit scary. She's already stepped backwards into a stairwell, which fortunately was only two stairs high. A small, but reasonable amount of crying ensued.

The other new skill is walking on tiptoes. I've only caught her doing this once. Something was clearly amiss with the way she was stepping, and I had to look quite closely to see what was up. When I pointed it out, the wife said she'd seen the girl do that once before, and, at first, thought her shoes were fitting her badly, making her walk funny. But, no. She's intentionally walking tiptoed. Not that it was helping her reach higher places (at the time), but I suspect that's all in her plan.

On a separate note, she's saying full sentences now. No idea what words are in those sentences, but once we can get that translated we'll be nicely on our way.

Levelelling up

The girl appears to have levelled up again. In the past week or so she's added a whole bunch of new skills to her repertoire.

• New consonant – The letter L. Today she just started saying la la la la la over and over for ages this morning.
• New service – Kisses on request. You ask her Can I have a kiss and point to your cheek, she'll smile, walk over and plant a kiss on your cheek. Sometimes twice.
• New dance move – Spinning. Sometimes when she likes a song, she'll start spinning. Only occasionally will she fall down afterwards.
• New skill – Get up on sofa. She can now get up on the taller sofa. It takes her a while. Well, she couldn't do it 2 days ago. Only managed it a few times yesterday, and will much effort. Today she can almost always manage to get up. And occasionally fall over on her back getting off. Done that 3 times today, which kind of dampens the excitement on the new skill.
• Enhanced grabbing range – she can now reach more than 50% of the stuff on top of my dresser. And open the drawers.
• Forthcoming skill – blowing her nose. For now, she just holds a tissue in front of her face and makes a raspberry noise. But she’s close.

It's weird how a whole slew of new skills all come at once.

Now we are different

This is not the same girl went on holiday with two weeks ago.

We came back a few days ago. Over the period we were gone the wee one has levelled up quite a bit.

She's now producing a stream of babble. Before she could say a few syllables, sometimes in combination. Now I'm pretty sure she's saying what she thinks are words. Every now and then she'll repeat something back someone says to her. That's the best part – not necessarily her understanding, but her clearly interacting.

She's learned to point. Finally my point vs poke training has come to fruition. She'll point at something of note and say Dat!, which I can only assume means What is that?So I always answer her with That's a painting or That's a mirror or That's toilet paper.

She gotten lots of other hand movements. She was waving before we left. She's regressed a bit on that, but she's started waving again a couple of days ago. She also enjoys shaking hands. At least she'll stick out her and and let you shake it. She'll also put her hands on her hips. I can't tell if it it's intentional, but she often has a bit of a stern look about her when she does it.

Stairs. She can go up and down stairs now. All the shallower carpeted stairs at her grandparents' and my uncle's places really helped. She's since been able to go up an entire flight of steep wooden stairs at our place. She's much slower and hesitant in going downstairs. It's basically, sit on the stair facing out, dangling her feet over the edge until she's practically standing on the step below. Then she stands on the stairs below, holding on to the bannister.

She's not quite standing. Well, she doesn't think she can stand. She can stand holding on to things, or leaning against something. But she'll only stand unsupported for a few seconds before she realises and sits down. But a controlled sit, which is good.

She still can't walk on her own, but she walks quite well when holding hands. Or using a walker. Or box. Or anything draggable that's big enough to lean against. She's far more comfortable with it than when I walked her through her first queue at the start of the holiday.

All this progress seems to have come at a price. She's sleeping very lightly now. It seems like any movement near her will wake her up. She will wake up without crying, sometimes, which is nice. But she's still awake and really hard to get back to sleep.

She's also not eating much. she'll breastfeed like a champ, but she's hardly eating any solid food we put before her. Even roast mushrooms, her heretofore favourite, are summarily tossed on the floor.

I'm hoping that goes away soon and we can get her to bed and stay asleep without too much effort. I've been a bit dozy in the brain the past couple of days at work.

In other news, I found an article online which explains the whole "fine with just one child" thing far better than I did the other day. Must be something in the air to cause both of us to post the same thought at the same time.