Eating out

Very odd experience eating out tonight. We ate out at a restaurant tonight, and the girl behaved exquisitely. It was the best she'd behaved at a restaurant in essentially two years. Last time she did this she wasn't walking yet or eating solid food, and was spent the whole time attached to one of us in a sling.

We sat down, and she patiently put up with L and I talking adult things (business, childcare, etc) while she did a little bit of drawing. She happily ate all of her appetiser while we waited like 20 minutes for the mains to come out. Every moment I got more and more nervous she'd break down and run away. But she just sat there, occasionally asking for more water or help with the pen. When the mains finally arrived, she ate it. With a fork. A real full-sized fork. Admittedly she needed help with about 40% of the meal, and the first half of the meal I had to blow on the stuff to cool it down enough (surprisingly hot for a children's meal). But she sat there patiently thought the entire meal. Only when we left the place and were safely in the tube station on the way home did I turn to her and tell her proud of her I was for behaving so well. I felt if I even alluded to it in passing, even to L when the girl wasn't looking, I'd ruin it and she'd cause a ruckus.

I'm still a bit shocked. I have two theories as to how this happened. The first one is that we went to a museum beforehand to see Club to Catwalk at the V&A before it closed down. The girl enjoyed running about the place, climbing stairs, watching the video installations, and (outside the exhibit) pointing out the bottoms and crotches on all the statues. It's one of the very few times we've had an opportunity to get her a bit of activity in after her nap and before dinner. If this is what happens when she gets some exercise after her nap, I am damn well going to find some way to get her some bloody exercise before dinner more regularly. Even if that is my most exhausted and useless time of the day.

My other theory is more pessimistic. Every time she starts behaving well for me she gets a fever 3 or 4 days later. The only time I ever got her to fall asleep while reading to her (what I thought was a great triumph at the time) turns out to be just before she came down with a cold. Likewise the time I thought she finally got the rules of walking on city streets in her head and started to hold my hand when we were walking together, she again got sick a few days later. Dashing my hopes we'd won the behaviour battle. I really hope an incoming illness was not the cause of the good behaviour at dinner and that it was something that can be cured with a decent application of running around.

I've seen the future

One possible future. A future in which having a family doesn't mean giving up a career.

L and I recently met with a client. We have friends that work at the site, and a couple of them were willing to look after the girl while we did a demo session on our software. After we were done, we picked up the girl, had lunch and got on with the day.

This got me thinking, what if it were always like this?

Imagine childcare being ubiquitous and available on demand. You work from home and need to visit a client? Bring the child with and drop her off at the on-site day care. You need someone to look after your little ones while you're at work? Bring them in with you, leave them in day care and visit them during lunch and breaks. Spend your coffee break with your kid and your coworkers' kids in a little play and chat session.

Imagine if daycare spots weren't precious, closely-guarded resources only available to a select few at a great cost. But if they were cheap and plentiful enough you could just take advantage of it like a cloakroom. (Obviously not treating the children like coats, but the comfort you feel when you hand over a coat knowing full well it will be well looked after and safe and happy when you come back for it). Your child would be around when you were able to look after her and, when you need help, it's there for as short or long periods as you need. It's just there, easy and reliable.

I'm not going to even try to conceive of how this world could come about, let alone how the mechanics would work. It's just now I can picture what childcare in an enlightened world could look like.

And I'm jealous.

Now we are drawing

So the other day I decided to draw with the girl. She surprised me by suddenly being able to write letters. I drew a simple shape on paper and handed her the pencil. She drew an A. Then a B, then a C. And so on, with prompting, up to N. Barring some mishaps with N and J and K, they were all surprisingly recognisable. The later half of the alphabet wasn't as good. She managed reasonable attempts at O, P and Q without trouble, but the rest were mostly squiggles.

She's been tracing out letters on her blocks. I think that's been helping her on this. She has a set of tiles with a letter on one side and a picture on the other. For the past few days she's been playing with them in a new way. She'll say A is fooooooor, while tracing out the letter. Then she turns it over and says Apple. Repeat for all 20ish tiles she can find at the time.

The sad man

Three days ago she started drawing people. Recognisable as such, too. On a long bus ride home on Thursday she was was drawing people in the condensation on the window. After we got home I gave her some paper to draw on. She spent a few moments drawing and handed me sheet saying she drew a sad man. And it clearly is a sad man. At this point she'll draw better than me in a year (admittedly, I'm terrible).

Yesterday she was all about drawing faces. She's got all the parts in the right place, though she sometimes has trouble with positioning noses. We started with drawing letters and numbers, but she turned almost everything she drew into face.

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.

I like you, two

So far I'm really loving two years old. She's really turned into a proper little person. The big notable change beyond her ability to speak us now she has an imagination. I love the fact i can converse with her. It makes things so much easier now that she can tell me what she needs or wants. But mostly, it's the things she comes up with... concepts so off the wall, or strangely logical or shockingly wise for her age. It's just a delight to see what she comes up with next.

She can now remember and sing songs, or at least sing her interpretation of what she thought she heard days or weeks after hearing them. She doesn't always get the words right. Actually the times she gets the words wrong and makes up the replacements is what amuses me most (maybe more on that later).

This fall she went though a phase of asking us to Sing about x. Just picking some subject or person she knows about and asking us to sing about it. Sing about mamma, Sing about dinner, Sing about three. The weirdest one was Sing about doubt...

I don't think i can do that.
I don't think this will work.
This song won't be good enough
and I'll feel like a jerk.

I have to concede making up songs off the top of my head really kept me on my toes.

Shortly after her birthday she started making up names for her toys. So for the first time it wasn't just L and I naming toys for her. She has four rubber ducks. The big one is Mamma Duck. The blue one is Butterfly Duck. The one dressed as a pirate is Pirate Duck. And the small plain yellow one is Swings and Park.

Now she makes up names for her toys and various unnamed characters in books all. Most are sensible: Charlotte (sometimes Scarlet) the doll, Basil the dragon, Bartholomew the wraith. Some are weird, like Poad, Saddy, Floop and Queen Bee – people in a video game.

There's a bit of damage to the bathroom door from where we had to pry it from the wall to free her finger. She saw it a few months ago, pointed to it and called it dragon teeth. I have no idea where she got that from. But it does kind of look like it could be. This was the first time she came up with something so completely out of nowhere, I was very surprised when she said it.

One favourite of mine is her interpretation of the title of the book Don't Wake the Bear, Hare. She's not come across the word "hare" before, and she knows the book is about a rabbit, so she calls it Bunny, Don't Wake the Bear Here.

In retrospect I also really liked 6 months. That was realty the last time we could sling her up and take get with us and she'd stay quiet and calm the whole time. We could still go to diners and pubs without trouble and she'd yet to get us kicked out of anywhere.

Now we are back

Given how my last posted ended, it does give the impression that the au pair moved in and murdered us with an axe in our sleep. Nothing could be further from the truth. As far as I'm aware she didn't axe murder anyone during her entire time in London – certainly not any of us.

Anyway, I'm not sure if I've just been too busy or too lazy to post for the past few months. I've a spare hour so I'll try to do a small catch-up.

The replacement au pair came and went. This one was a twenty year old from Italy. She was in London already on a course, so she decided to stay with us for six weeks as an extension of her stay. This was perfect since it was an extra two weeks beyond what we needed. She and the girl got along really well. We've even Skyped after she left so the girls could talk to each other.

While she was here our basic routine was... She got up at 8 and ate and tidied the kitchen. We got up with the girl at 10ish. She'd dress the girl and get get out of the house by 1030 or 11. Then they'd stay out til 3 or 4, back in time for the girl's nap. While they were out, we'd get whatever work we could done. When she was back, once the girl was down for a nap, her time was her own. She was taking a language course while she was with us, so she studied for that, or read, or Skyped to friends. She'd usually join us for dinner. Then she'd quietly go off to her room and eventually to bed, and L and I would work til 2 or 3. Repeat til the weekend, which she'd have off.

All in all it wasn't as bad as I'd feared. The au pair, while she didn't kill anyone, did manage to rip off almost all the childproofing in the kitchen. To the point that all my attempts to replace it have not stuck and at this point we're mostly using hope and strong language to keep the girl out of trouble. I know it wasn't on purpose, but it did irk me to have the childproofing broken. Moreso than the one time she put away the dirty dishes and I had to remember what was in the dishwasher and try to find it in the cupboards.
On the plus side, we actually got along – which is great since she was living in our house. She gave us space, often going out on weekends and a few other nights per week.
She took the girl out to parks and museums and other places, and was completely trustworthy with her. She even taught the girl to say spoon instead of foon, which was a lovely surprise.

We never went thought pasta as fast as we did when she was here. Or rice. I can eat a good amount of pasta or rice in a sitting, but the au pair would match me on that. Adding the daughter's increased appetite, and we went though a lot.

While it was good to have time to get work done, we were a bit tight on space for a while. We had to move all the girl's stuff into the office and our room. She slept with us and the au pair got her room. But four in the house went surprisingly smoothly in the end. And the house did feel huge once she left.