rivka

Alex at 20 months: I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me. These days it's all about being just like Mama, and Mama being just like her. Where I go: "Coming ME!" What I have: "Alex's tea mug too?" What she has: "Mama bread and butter too?" Where she goes: "Come with me!" What she does: "Mama bath too?" On the one hand, very flattering, and sometimes totally cute - like when she talked me into giving her a (wrapped) tea bag in an (empty) tea mug, carried it carefully into the living room, set it on a coaster, climbed up on the couch, and pretended to drink from it with a satisfied "aaaah." On the other hand, so annoying sometimes, when I don't really want to have a steamed carrot mashed into my mouth or a 24-pound weight on my hip while I'm trying to cook. She's even got to be "Coming ME!" when all I'm doing is walking across the room.

She's also obsessed with keeping tabs on both of us. Questions we hear a dozen times a day: "Papa doing?" "Mama go?" "Mama, are you?!" (If that doesn't make sense, it's because the 'where' is missing.) An interesting corollary to this one is that, while she loves playing hide-and-seek and asks to play it several times a day, it is very very important that everyone in the game know exactly where everyone else is at all times. If - for even one brief moment - she fears that we might actually be stumped, she pops out of her hiding place immediately.

Her play is much richer. She loves the long ritual searches when we play hide-and-seek. ("Is she under the pillow? No. Is she behind the coats? No." She loves this so much that she will actually creep out of her hiding place and suggest more places for us to look.) She loves to stand at the kitchen sink pouring water from one cup to another, pretending to mix up a batch of scrambled eggs with a saucepan and a spoon, and "washing dishes." She acts out little scenarios with her toys: a favorite one involves loading books into the dump truck and driving it to the library. Lately, everything that stands still, from Mama to a stuffed llama, has been getting a doctor exam. They used to all be well-child visits, but yesterday I overheard the llama being informed that his ears hurt.

She's got a lot of stereotypically-male interests: trains, dinosaurs, construction equipment, helicopters, tall block towers. And yet, her toys, including the dinosaurs, do an awful lot of kissing and hugging. My favorite example of this was when she made a zebra puzzle piece run away across the rug. I picked up a lion puzzle piece and chased the zebra. Alex's zebra promptly turned around, came back, and kissed the lion on the lips. (The lion was too nonplussed to attack.)

She's become much stronger, more coordinated, more graceful. She handles playground equipment well - even tricky stuff like the 45-degree-slant rope netting at the children's museum. She walks on tiptoes, runs, marches, walks backward, spins in circles. Her dancing is more sustained and more elaborate. She climbs steps sturdily. She stands on a chair at the kitchen sink and reaches for things in the drainboard, without toppling. She likes to stand on things and climb in things and walk along things. She's working on hopping and standing on one foot, with great dedication but not much success.

She speaks in sentences. Well, obviously: who is likely to forget "Uh-oh, coffee bean in nose"? But she also produces sentences like, "Mama hurt a little bit." "Alex drive truck a library." "Alex hold a medicine." "Good night, Papa, see you later - morning." She provides ongoing narration for her experiences: "Alex stack a blocks. Fall down. Try again, Alex."

She loves all the little verbal social rituals. Particularly goodbyes: we can be halfway home from playgroup, and Alex will still be saying "Bye Emily, Zoe! See you later Suzanne!" When we go for walks, she loves to greet, and then say goodbye to, everyone we pass. (It's probably a good thing that we don't live in New York. Marylanders take it well.) She routinely says "thank you" when we give her something, and when we deal with cashiers or clerks. She likes to go around the table at dinner, thanking everyone. "Thanks, Mama! Thanks, Papa!" Including herself, of course: "Thanks, Pumpkinhead! You welcome." "Please" is a long way behind "thank you," probably because it's hard to concentrate on manners when you want something. Adorably, the latest addition to her repertoire of social rituals has been a number of bedtime phrases. "Good night! Sleep well! Sweet dreams! See you morning!"

She's starting to show the beginnings of empathy. She's troubled when other children cry. If I say "Ouch!", even from another room, Alex runs to ask me, "Mama okay?" She loves to share things with us (not so much with other kids); she gave me a piece of mango once and then asked, with a shining, happy face, "Mama's mango tasty?"

She loves to chime in words in a well-known song, or complete lines in a book I'm reading.

"The driver on the bus goes..." "Move BACK!"
"His mother called him 'wild thing,' and Max said..." "Eat uh up!"

Sometimes her verbal memory is astounding. We got Mr. Brown Can Moo from the library two months after we last checked it out. On the second reading, Alex was able to produce, unprompted, every single sound that Mr. Brown can make, from "Eek eek" like a squeaky shoe to "Grum" like a hippopotamus chewing gum. (Don't ask.)

Some critical pieces of language are still missing, as is of course developmentally appropriate. Question words usually get left out of questions. She likes to ask "Papa go?" "Happened?" "Dinosaur doing?" I don't think she uses any form of the verb "to be." She has just started using "my" as a personal pronoun, and it still sounds kind of laborious - as if she's struggling to think of how the words go together. "My go upstairs in bedroom!" She doesn't ever say "you" (except in stock phrases like "see you later"), or any other pronoun.

She can count objects correctly to about five. She can rote count correctly to twelve, after which it usually goes "fourteen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, eighteen, nineteen, twenty." She still likes letters, although she's not as obsessed with them as she used to be. She loves shapes, and searches them out endlessly. A few days ago she pointed excitedly out the car window and said "Octagon!" And indeed, it turned out that across an intersection from us she could see the back of a stop sign. (The back. She didn't even have the color cues to associate "stop sign = octagon." Yeesh.)

Let's see, what else? Her eating has improved dramatically. She always ate a good range of healthy foods, but the quantities were sometimes homeopathic - especially with meat. Now it's not unusual for her to eat two or three ounces of meat at a time. I've seen her eat a dozen baby carrots in a sitting, plus meat and bread and milk. She's eaten nearly an entire five-pound crate of clementines by herself. She can eat half a pomegranate in one sitting - and will, if you're patient enough to pick the seeds apart for her. She loves the occasional piece of chocolate we give her, but she doesn't generally seem to have that much of a sweet tooth. She'll ask for a Christmas cookie, take a few nibbles, give me a bite, and then put it down and wander away.

Our biggest issues with her these days are the clinginess mentioned in the first paragraph, and her sleep. She still sleeps through the night, mercifully, but it takes a very very very long time to get her to sleep at night. She'll be heavy-lidded and rubbing her eyes on the way upstairs, but let me just try to put her in the crib and she bounces up, refreshed and ready to play. It used to be that I could put her down awake, and she would play for a little while and then fall asleep. Now, if I put her down awake she's likely to throw her pacifier out, get all wound up running laps around the crib, and then cry for the paci. We're working on it. And not looking for advice about leaving her to cry.

In all, regardless of what I say about her when I've finally gotten her to sleep, she's a pretty amazing kid and a lot of fun. We're very lucky.