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.

Confused identities

I went to a gig the other day. I ran into someone I knew and started talking. He was trying to place where he knew me from and asked:

Are you the one whose house we went to that time where we all were drunk and ended up at an after party at yours?

Was there a small baby there? If not, I'm pretty sure you're thinking of someone else with the same name.

Perhaps that statement could have been true if it were more like Did we go to your house when we were all tuckered out after the playground and we ended up at yours drinking tea while the kids napped?
Someone else pointed out we'd met at a vegetarian restaurant and I was the one spending the whole time trying to feed and contain my daughter.

Also slightly related, I've discovered I still have the new parent stand-and-sway. Which does not come across as remotely inappropriate when watching a band play.

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.

Back again

I spent a fortnight without the family last month. L took the girl off to the States to help L's sister give birth. I stayed at home putting in exceptionally long days trying to get work done. All the while I learned a number of things.

• Wow. Sleep is nice. But when you're alone in bed, it's really quite slow to warm up. I took to sitting on the duvet an hour before bedtime so that I'd not have to sleep with a jumper on.
• Without anyone else here, I never spend any time in the kitchen/dining room beyond actually making food. With the family here, I spend good chunks of my day here (where I'm writing this now), eating meals, playing with the girl, etc, etc. Then maybe I didn't spend as much time here because L took the laptop with her.
• Cooking for myself is easy. I can use as much spice and salt as I want. Though I have lots of trouble judging what a portion size for one is. I think I overate alot.
• I gravitate to later hours. By the time the family came back, I was keeping EDT time rather than BST. Dinner at 11pm, bed by 5am. Which meant we were all jet lagged when they returned.
  We'd Skype once or twice a day, which is what led me switch time zones. Chatting with L after she ate dinner was usually around 3am or so my time. And chatting in the morning so I could see the girl was around 7am or so her time (on a good day when the girl didn't wake her at 6am when the sun came up in their curtainless room).

While they were away I was able to make the flat slightly more liveable. I replaced another 3 bulbs (we have lots of those GU10 halogen bulbs, most of which have blown out. We're slowly replacing them all with much more expensive LED ones. It seems that the only place I can find with decent bulbs is ordering then online on Amazon, but 1 in 5 are dodgy and have to be sent back. Sigh. So we're just lacking now on the dimmable bulbs, which are really expensive and often have a rather dodgy definition of what "dimmable" means) – I bought 4, but one was bad. But we've now got one more room which use tens of Watts instead of hundreds of Watts.

I tried to do some DIY, but I just did not have it in me to drill holes in our nice walls and counters. So I left that for L and just settled on cleaning the stuffs with all those noxious chemicals I don't like to use when the girl is around. That said, I didn't manage to clean and seal all the floors since, 1) no one likes a neighbour who hoovers at 10pm, and 2) to really clean all the floors, I'd have to move an awful a lot of very heavy furniture.

I even got to work on my physio – something I just can't seem to do with the girl around. My right arm has been some degree of dodgy for several months now. At least now it's not debilitating, but it's clear I've lot lost a lot of flexibility and buggered my posture a bit (I bend down a lot). At least my extensors pollicis longus have had a chance to heal. They take the brunt of the weight when I lift up the girl, and have been getting ouchier and ouchier over time.

When L and the girl came back, they flew into Heathrow. I took the tube down to meet them. Their plane was delayed a bit, and it took what felt like ages for them to get their luggage and come out. It was a surprisingly teary reunion. Well... on my part. The girl was just a bit confused and clung to her mum, and didn't really pay much attention to me. Not as exciting as I'd hoped, but I was far more choked up by the whole thing than I expected to be.

Since then the girl has been really clingy to her mum. It's harder to settle her, and I can barely put her to sleep at all. We've not had a single night where she's slept by herself the whole time. I think she's still getting over all the chaos of the past month, with all the new things she's been doing and places she's been staying. Well, we have a month at home before going anywhere else. Hopefully she'll get used to hanging out with me again. We've already had a few pleasant days out, and I've planned a few more. So, even if things are not the same, it'll still be fun.

By the way, their trip to the US was successful and I have a new niece (that I've only seen over Skype).

Holding hands

We spent a long weekend away on holiday, doing a good deal of travel by car. For the first time, the girl has been comfortable holding my hand. I don't mean sort of holding like grabbing onto a finger, or guiding while walking down a street, but actual hand holding – the idle sort you do when you're just being comfortable with someone's presence.

When in the car, I usually sat next to her in the back seat, with her in the car seat. Not always, but often enough the girl would sit quietly and hold my hand. It was the first time she'd done that. It was really sweet.

It was also the first time in ages I'd had time to just sit down and watch TV with L. We were staying with L's cousin. A few times after we'd put the girl to bed we'd plop down in the comfy chairs and watch something. The weird thing was holding L's hand. I didn't recognise it. It still fit, fingers interwoven, like it has for ages. It just somehow it didn't feel familiar. I mean, we must have held hands at some point since the girl was born. I'm fairly sure, at least. Maybe her hand has changed... I know mine are much drier these days – all the extra handwashing has taken a bit of a toll. Maybe that's what feels unusual. It's hard to tell. But regardless, it was nice to have those moments to just sit together.

L has taken the lass with her to visit the family in the States. I'm back here in London getting, what I hope will be, a lot of work done. And, with luck, give the house a decent tidy – the first real opportunity to clean it without the girl being around. Time to break out the noxiously fumed floor cleaners.

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.

Random chatting fathers

The other day I was taking the train home with the girl. She didn't want to be in the sling much that day, so she did most of her own walking and, on the train, she sat in her own seat, opposite me. Despite, or because, it being the two of us in a pair of bench seats for 5, no one sat in the other 3 seats, even though it was rush hour.

At the first stop, a man carrying an 18 month old boy in a sling got on the train, and immediately decided that this would be a good place to sit. We quickly got to talking, mostly because the girl started saying Bæ bæ bæ over and over as soon as she saw the baby in his arms.

It was nice finding a kindred spirit to share the ride home. He'd spent his afternoon with his son at the Museum of Childhood. I'd spent the afternoon with the girl at the Museum of London. He extracted his lad from his sling and plunked him down next to the girl. Despite being practically the same age (she's 19 months old), there was a marked difference between them. He was bigger than her, but quite shy. She was quite interested and babbling to him, with the occasional pointing or poking. He sat there looking a bit tired and droopey eyed barely registering her, while we exchanged stories about what each museum does well and what other good places we've taken our kids lately.

I'd never done that before – meeting a fellow father and just gabbing away about fun things to do with children. I mean, I do that with friends all the time, but it's the total stranger part that's new to me. Usually with complete strangers it's What a cute baby or other suchness about the child. I suppose what I liked about this is it was about parenting. Not how the baby looks or what they do, but here's some fun things you can do while being a part of their life.

Earlier that day, in the museum, I spent the bulk of my time just following the girl around as she walked from exhibit to exhibit, looking under the tables, walking circles around models in glass cases, taking guides and handing them to bemused staff and pointing to a taxidermied rabbit and saying Cat!

One of my favourite parts was in the 18^th century section where they have artefacts about half a foot under the floor covered clear glass, so you can look down and see various bits and pieces of daily life from back then. It's sturdy glass, so you can walk over it too.

So I did. I, in clear view of the girl, walked on this glass, at a slow pace so she'd see what I was doing, but without breaking my stride. I always walk on glass bridges whenever I can, because it feels so wrong and so mundane at the same time. The girl followed, but with very hesitant steps. The first step onto the glass was in complete disbelief that it was possible to do this. Each subsequent step clearly said It feels solid, but all my instincts say that can't be. She never quite got comfortable walking on the glass, but at least she started getting use to the fact that it was evidently possible to do so. Every step was measured and slow, and stepping back onto opaque land was as hesitant as stepping onto the glass had been.

I consider this one of my jobs as parent. To dash her world view. To show her how her instincts can be plain wrong. I'm kind of hoping it will just give her a better class of instincts when she's older.