Alex: Seventeen months.
Sep. 14th, 2006 08:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivka It's interesting to watch her internalize our house rules and routines. "Are you ready to eat?" we ask her, and she responds with "lunchtime!" (regardless of time of day) and runs for her highchair. She lifts her arms to be put in the seat, and then directs us through the steps that follow, in order: "Tray!" "Bib!" "Milk!" When she's finished, she'll announce, "Bib off, a down." But a counter-offer of dessert will have her asking for the bib again - a necessary prerequisite, in our family, for eating more. She even knows where people sit at the table - she identifies "Papa chair" and "Mama chair," and sometimes points to Bill's habitual spot and says his name.
Part of knowing the rules and routines is not wanting to be excepted from them. She wants to have her food on a plate, and she wants to eat it with a fork. Her plastic cup of milk is okay, but she'd prefer to drink from one of our big heavy drinking glasses. She'd like to carry her own PJs up the stairs at night, even if she does need to hold on to me with one hand and the bannister with the other.
On our walks, she stops at the corners, announces "street!" and holds up her arms to be carried across. (No, we don't count on that.) She waits until we reach the far curb before trying to slide out of our arms ("A walk, a walk.") But internalizing the rules doesn't necessarily imply following them. She'll run her finger along a book cover in a scribbling motion and say, "No, no crayon." "That's right," I'll say. "No crayons on books." "No crayon," Alex will agree, picking up a crayon and bringing it to the book jacket. If I don't notice in time, later on she'll bring the book to me, pointing at the crayon marks and saying, "No, no. No crayon," in a sorrowful, disapproving tone - as if the damage was done by someone else entirely. And then she'll dive for the diaper bag and bring me the package of baby wipes. "Wipes! Clean, clean." As I wipe the book clean, Alex sums up the moral of the story: "No, no crayon."
(This is where I'm glad to have a good understanding of developmental psychology. I can really see how some parents arrive at the conclusion that their young toddler is "deliberately being bad.")
Slang has struck. She's taken to saying goodbye with a breezy "See you!", and expressing approval with "O! Kay!" Sometimes she'll clap and say "Yay!" for no apparent reason - just happy, I guess. After months of swallowing the ends of her words, she has discovered terminal consonants with a vengeance. The tasty orange vegetables formerly known as "car'" are now "carrotttttssssss." Her name is especially good for this: "Alekkkkkssssss."
She's freakishly interested in the alphabet. Obsessed with it, actually. Riding in the car or stroller, she calls out the names of letters she sees on signs. Several times a day, she brings me a pen and paper and asks, "A? B?" If I agree to write letters, she dictates joyfully: "A B B Y Z X D K J J J again more J." She points out letters on the covers of our books; once she even looked at my computer while I was writing an e-mail and exclaimed "X!" - pointing at the "delete" button. All told, she recognizes about two-thirds of the upper-case letters when she sees them out of order. She struggles a bit with orientation - she just doesn't see why I think N and Z are different letters, or why a lower-case d isn't a P.
She can more or less count from one to ten, although she doesn't yet understand that there should be a one-to-one correspondence between numbers and objects counted. If there are only five of something, and you like the number six, why can't you just call the last item five and six? Also, if you can count faster than you can climb stairs, why shouldn't you be on the number seven by the time you hit the third step?
Yesterday, on our way to the library, Alex stopped at a mailbox. "Drum," she said, and pounded the flats of her hands against the front panel. Then she came back and did a circuit around me, patting my pockets. "Keys?" I handed her my key ring, curious about what she had in mind, and then watched in awe as she spent the next five minutes patiently trying to fit one key after another into the lock on the front of the mailbox. (She had the best luck with my cashbox key from work, which actually went in. Didn't turn, though.)
She still loves to go out. "Outside?" she'll whine, pulling at the door. "A walk, a walk!" Once outside, she goes down the block from one beloved ritual activity to the next: touching the flowers in the treewell and naming their colors, checking to see if the neighbors' dogs are at their gate, touching a gryphon-headed bootscraper and misidentifying it as a dog, reaching as far as possible up a lamppost ("Tall!"), slapping her hands against newel posts, sitting briefly on stoops ("Seat!"), picking up leaves, climbing slanted cellar doors and being swung down. She can walk five or six blocks without the stroller. She likes to announce what she's doing: "Run run run!" as she pelts down the sidewalk. Sometimes she'll stop in the middle of the sidewalk to turn circles: "Row, a row, pock', all down!" (That would be "Ring around the rosy.") And, always, she stops what she's doing to greet passersby with a "Hi!" and a dazzling smile.
"Dance!" she says, and suddenly she's stamping her feet wild and fast, waving her arms. Then the dance is over and we go on with whatever we were just doing.
She is taller, stronger, more agile. She climbs on the furniture - nothing makes her happier than sitting at the table in a grownup chair. She inverts herself into a tripod as if she's about to do a somersault. She runs up and down ramps. She scoots a riding toy along with her feet. She loves to sit on things and climb into things. Laundry baskets are a constant temptation, and source of head bumps. She loves to rough-house. I swing her through the air, tackle her, turn her upside down. She pushes against my chest when I'm sitting on the floor, and I "fall" over backward, hauling her with me.
Or else she brings me a book and says, "A lap?" And we cuddle together with my cheek nestled on her soft, fine, sweet-smelling baby hair, and read. "Ga-gain? Ga-gain?" Of course, again. Because I don't want it to end either.
Part of knowing the rules and routines is not wanting to be excepted from them. She wants to have her food on a plate, and she wants to eat it with a fork. Her plastic cup of milk is okay, but she'd prefer to drink from one of our big heavy drinking glasses. She'd like to carry her own PJs up the stairs at night, even if she does need to hold on to me with one hand and the bannister with the other.
On our walks, she stops at the corners, announces "street!" and holds up her arms to be carried across. (No, we don't count on that.) She waits until we reach the far curb before trying to slide out of our arms ("A walk, a walk.") But internalizing the rules doesn't necessarily imply following them. She'll run her finger along a book cover in a scribbling motion and say, "No, no crayon." "That's right," I'll say. "No crayons on books." "No crayon," Alex will agree, picking up a crayon and bringing it to the book jacket. If I don't notice in time, later on she'll bring the book to me, pointing at the crayon marks and saying, "No, no. No crayon," in a sorrowful, disapproving tone - as if the damage was done by someone else entirely. And then she'll dive for the diaper bag and bring me the package of baby wipes. "Wipes! Clean, clean." As I wipe the book clean, Alex sums up the moral of the story: "No, no crayon."
(This is where I'm glad to have a good understanding of developmental psychology. I can really see how some parents arrive at the conclusion that their young toddler is "deliberately being bad.")
Slang has struck. She's taken to saying goodbye with a breezy "See you!", and expressing approval with "O! Kay!" Sometimes she'll clap and say "Yay!" for no apparent reason - just happy, I guess. After months of swallowing the ends of her words, she has discovered terminal consonants with a vengeance. The tasty orange vegetables formerly known as "car'" are now "carrotttttssssss." Her name is especially good for this: "Alekkkkkssssss."
She's freakishly interested in the alphabet. Obsessed with it, actually. Riding in the car or stroller, she calls out the names of letters she sees on signs. Several times a day, she brings me a pen and paper and asks, "A? B?" If I agree to write letters, she dictates joyfully: "A B B Y Z X D K J J J again more J." She points out letters on the covers of our books; once she even looked at my computer while I was writing an e-mail and exclaimed "X!" - pointing at the "delete" button. All told, she recognizes about two-thirds of the upper-case letters when she sees them out of order. She struggles a bit with orientation - she just doesn't see why I think N and Z are different letters, or why a lower-case d isn't a P.
She can more or less count from one to ten, although she doesn't yet understand that there should be a one-to-one correspondence between numbers and objects counted. If there are only five of something, and you like the number six, why can't you just call the last item five and six? Also, if you can count faster than you can climb stairs, why shouldn't you be on the number seven by the time you hit the third step?
Yesterday, on our way to the library, Alex stopped at a mailbox. "Drum," she said, and pounded the flats of her hands against the front panel. Then she came back and did a circuit around me, patting my pockets. "Keys?" I handed her my key ring, curious about what she had in mind, and then watched in awe as she spent the next five minutes patiently trying to fit one key after another into the lock on the front of the mailbox. (She had the best luck with my cashbox key from work, which actually went in. Didn't turn, though.)
She still loves to go out. "Outside?" she'll whine, pulling at the door. "A walk, a walk!" Once outside, she goes down the block from one beloved ritual activity to the next: touching the flowers in the treewell and naming their colors, checking to see if the neighbors' dogs are at their gate, touching a gryphon-headed bootscraper and misidentifying it as a dog, reaching as far as possible up a lamppost ("Tall!"), slapping her hands against newel posts, sitting briefly on stoops ("Seat!"), picking up leaves, climbing slanted cellar doors and being swung down. She can walk five or six blocks without the stroller. She likes to announce what she's doing: "Run run run!" as she pelts down the sidewalk. Sometimes she'll stop in the middle of the sidewalk to turn circles: "Row, a row, pock', all down!" (That would be "Ring around the rosy.") And, always, she stops what she's doing to greet passersby with a "Hi!" and a dazzling smile.
"Dance!" she says, and suddenly she's stamping her feet wild and fast, waving her arms. Then the dance is over and we go on with whatever we were just doing.
She is taller, stronger, more agile. She climbs on the furniture - nothing makes her happier than sitting at the table in a grownup chair. She inverts herself into a tripod as if she's about to do a somersault. She runs up and down ramps. She scoots a riding toy along with her feet. She loves to sit on things and climb into things. Laundry baskets are a constant temptation, and source of head bumps. She loves to rough-house. I swing her through the air, tackle her, turn her upside down. She pushes against my chest when I'm sitting on the floor, and I "fall" over backward, hauling her with me.
Or else she brings me a book and says, "A lap?" And we cuddle together with my cheek nestled on her soft, fine, sweet-smelling baby hair, and read. "Ga-gain? Ga-gain?" Of course, again. Because I don't want it to end either.
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Date: 2006-09-15 01:04 am (UTC)