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.

Holiday from EC

For some reason, for the past fortnight the girl has regressed in her toilet habits to where she was 6 months ago. A month ago she was wetting maybe 4 nappies a week – half of those in her sleep. Now she's going through that many in a day. She's no longer giving us any signals, and will deny that she has to go even when she actually does.

It's perfectly natural for an ECd baby to slip for a while. It's supposed to happen when they level up in other things, or when sick, or various other causes. She's done this before to a degree, but never so markedly.

The weird thing is she's really only missed at home. Well, she missed once at a friend's place and once at a pub yesterday, but for the most part, she's only missing at home. Admittedly she's home more often than she's out and about, but if she'd wet 4 nappies at home over the same period where she wet just one outside, clearly there's something there.

So I've had to regress along with her. Really watching her for any sign of change in behaviour, or interrupting whatever we're doing to take her too the loo. We've even stopped calling it the "loo" or "toilet" in favour of "bathroom" which is made up of sounds I know she can say – just in case she decides to tell us she has to go instead of her usual gesture.

Watching for subtle changes in her behaviour is hard. By the time it's clear that she's gone from normal play to uncomfortably-full-bladder mode, she's actually moved on to unhappy-pants mode, and it's too late. The problem is amplified by (my suspicion that) she's actively trying to hide the fact she needs to go. Today I asked her if she needed the loo (she was still dry). She babbled a bit and handed me a book, demanding I read it to her. Despite the abridgement where the little train could quite easily without much effort, she was freshly wet by the time I finished.

So I can only hope this phase ends soon enough and we get back to normal. In the meanwhile I just have to try hiding my disappointment and making her experience on the toilet as fun as possible, so she doesn't start making negative associations.

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.

Not appropriate for all viewers

The other day the wife and I were watching a video while the girl was puttering around the room. It was nothing of the sort the girl hadn't watched dozens of times before. At one point a mildly scary scene came on and the girl turned to us and started bawling.

The wife tried to calm her down telling her it's just a story. I tried figuring out how we'd be able to watch the rest of the show if the girl was going to react so badly. But mostly I was trying to figure out when this switched on in her. She didn't react this way to the 6,000 spy and cop shows we saw on TV in the US (mostly Law and Order marathons). She didn't react this way before we went on holiday to the US – she was perfectly happy watching Daleks be all kinds of menacing without once making a move toward the safety of the back of the sofa. Perhaps it was the fact that we spent so much time in the States with the people she normally Skypes with. Since we Skype using the same display we watch videos on, maybe she thinks all the people she sees there are real, just they often (usually during dinner) just ignore her and talk amongst themselves.

Perhaps I'm wrong to expect some degree of reason in her actions. I just know I'm going to need to be even more careful in what media we expose her to. We've already had to cut Game of Thrones and other more edgy material out of our dinnertime video routine. At some point we'll have to even drop The Daily Show – and then we'll never know what's going on in the news.

Eat the menu

The lass has reached a new milestone in eating. We've ordered her food from the children's menu. Mixed blessing. We can now bring her to restaurants without bringing food with us, but it also means she's no longer free to feed when going out.

Actually, that's not entirely true. We do still need to take her food when going out since it's hard to know in advance what's on the children's menu and how much they're willing to tweak it to match our paranoid parental dietary restrictions. There's also no way to know if she'll actually eat the stuff we buy for her. And after seeing the negotiation game I've seen my friends play with their kids, I'm concerned.

Just finish what you've got and you can go play…. No? Okay, just eat your greens and you can go…. No? Really, you have to finish your meal….. No? Okay, just one more green bean….. No? Okay, just have one bite of a green bean and you can go play – but you have to swallow it….. No? Okay, fine. Go play.

But none of this has happened to me yet. We've ordered for her 5 times so far. The restaurants have been kind enough to adjust the meal to our liking (not that Pasta, with tomato sauce on the side or Two eggs, scrambled, no salt are such hard requests to fulfil). And the girl usually ate most of her meal – though she never actually ate the leftovers we took away in a doggy bag for later (all of these meals were in the States). On the plus side her leftovers have given me something to pick at while waiting for the coffee and dessert to show up after the meal.

Rocking along

My parents got out some of my old toys from when I was a tiny tot. The little girl really likes the rocking horse. She got quite good at shifting her weight to make it rock back and forth – something she never managed to do with swings. Every time she rides the horse she makes a car engine sound: Rrrrrrrrrrrr. I thought about explaining that horses don't make that noise, but I actually prefer her point of view on the matter.

Green eyed monster

On saturday the girl met her first first cousin. He's my brother's tiny little 10-week-old son. She rarely sees children younger than herself and I don't think she's been around infants since she was one. So she didn't really know what to make of him.

We're currently visiting my parents, and my brother and family were also up for a couple of days. When we showed up we got to meet my nephew for the first time. The girl didn't quite know what to make of him. There was clearly a bit of jealousy when the wife or I held him. She did a bit of acting up and making disappointed ooooo noises with a scrunched up face. She's normally got a good disposition and has never been bothered by us holding other children before. So this was a bit unusual.

The girl tried being gentle to her cousin, but didn't seem to be entirely sure how. The poking in the eye and squeezing the head was not meant maliciously – as far as we could tell. I mean, she was about as gentle with him as she is with me when she tries to stroke the side of my face – i.e. not very. It usually ends up as slapping or scratching. Fortunately with a bit of supervision, she wasn't able to do any damage to her cousin.

She did kind of get used to him after a while. But she kept acting a bit strange the entire time – something that mostly stopped after they left.

Of course some of this could be attributed to being the 4^th time she had to change house during the trip, and the chaos was starting to get to her. I can imagine her thinking Wait… do we live here now? Do I have to live with him? Is this my brother? Is that how it happens? Can I still drink milk? What's going on?

We did try to explain everything to her, and we know she can understand much of what we tell her, but there's no way to know how much of the abstract We're going to visit my parents and your cousin will be there she can possibly understand. At least she's not freaking out when we leave her alone with people for a few hours. I suppose we've done this travel thing enough that she gets that we're not sizing her up for adoption, but just showing her off to new people.