rivka

Scene: walking through the park.
Alex: We don't walk on those flowers over there.
Me: Oh, are there flowers over there? I just see grass.
Alex: It's just grass. pause. I'm very tricky.

Her conversational ability keeps getting richer and richer. Increasingly, she's not limited to talking about the here and now. After she and I went hiking, for example, she came home and reported to Michael that she carried a big rock which was heavy but not too heavy. One Sunday afternoon we all went to the playground, and that evening at bathtime she wanted to talk over one of our significant experiences there: "That tricycle is not ours. I go in the little house, instead."

She's also started reporting things that are obviously imaginary, such as her insistence that a chip in our bathtub happened because "Dorian did it. Dorian bumped it." Last night at dinner she spun a whole fantasy about Becky, our Director of Religious Education: "Becky doesn't feel good. She is at church. She needs to go home. She needs to go home and get some different medicine. Then she feels better."

She is beginning to be able to talk about abstract things... at least sometimes. She burst into tears on a playground structure, and then told me, "I nervous of all the kids." (I don't know where she picked up the term "nervous.") She'll sometimes burst out with, "I have a good idea!", and then run and do something. She likes to label things as "pretty funny," or "pretty scary," or what have you.

She sings dozens of songs. She really loves to sing and recite and quote. Songs tend to just be in a sort of a generic singsong, although bits of tunes are starting to emerge. Her UK fans will be pleased to hear that her version of Pop Goes the Weasel has started to include "half a pound of treacle" and "in and out the Eagle" along with the standard American chasing monkeys and so forth.

She uses the future tense, with both "will" and "going to." She still commonly refers to herself as "you" ("You want some apple juice"), but "I" is also starting to make more of a consistent appearance. She uses it most often in set phrases (one favorite of hers is, "What's that sound, I wonder?"); "you" is more likely to be the subject of a sentence she's throwing together on the fly. But that's starting to change. She's also using irregular verb forms more frequently, and with apparent pleasure - as if it's a neat trick to answer "Yes I am!" instead of just "Yes."

She's started intermittently asking me to "show the words, Mama!" when I'm reading to her. I obligingly run my finger along the words as I read them, but I have no idea why she wants me to do it. Maybe she's just connecting the idea that the spoken words and the printed text go together? I'm sure she can't actually absorb much by watching my finger skim along at my normal reading speed.

Things she is fascinated with:

- The variety of different names that apply to Michael and I: for example, Mama, Mommy, Mom, Mother, Mamakins, Rebecca. (At the grocery store last weekend, I moved away from her to look through a case, and she called out "Rebecca! Whatcha doing?") She loves to play with different ways of addressing us.

- Contrasts. She loves to point out things like, "Some are big, and some are small." "Two of them are asleep and three of them are awake." She also likes to use comparative sentences: "Papa is bigger than Alex. Alex is smaller." At the playground today: "That boy swinging high in the air. I swinging lower." And then, at home in the kitchen: "This oil is lighter, this oil is darker." (Canola vs. olive.)

- An especial favorite contrast: differences between her and us. I heard her explaining to Michael over breakfast, "Alex like a cold bagel. Papa like his bagel toasted. A cold bagel is better. A cold bagel is better for Alex."

- The questions "what's that?" and "what is ___ doing?" (Especially, "Whatcha doing?" to us, and "Alex doing?" when she wants to draw our attention to something she's up to.)

- Counting on her fingers. She does this over, and over, and over. She also loves seeing a picture of someone holding up X fingers, and then copying them. She is especially excited now that she understands that she can answer the question "how old are you?" by holding up two fingers and saying "Two!"

- Families. She still projects papa-mama-baby relationships onto everything, including, notably, three schoolbuses parked along a curb. She loves to point out that our "whole family!" is doing something.

She's really gotten the idea of numbers, conceptually. She can recite numbers to twenty (leaving out 13, for some reason), but she can only actually count five or six things at a time. More than that, and she gets careless and skips items or counts them twice.

But she understands the theory of counting: for example, today after dinner, she handed me an extra fork that was lying around, and I put it on my plate next to my fork. "There are two!" Alex said excitedly. "One, two. Two forks." She looked down at her hand and carefully put up two fingers. "Two!" I brought in her dessert plate and put it next to her pasta bowl. She looked from one to the other, started to count, and was drawn up short: "Now I have one, t... this one's a plate and this one's a bowl." She seemed to understand that she couldn't necessarily add them together. I rescued her: "You have two dishes."

She still loves dinosaurs, and is learning to identify quite a few of them. The other day we had this conversation:
Me: pointing at a picture in a book. What's the quetzalcoatlus doing?
Alex: That's a pteranodon.
Me: It does look like a pteranodon, but it's a quetzalcoatlus.
Alex: It has wings like a pteranodon.
Me: Many different dinosaurs had wings, and this one is a quetzalcoatlus. ...Michael, do you hear her making me justify this?

I thought we'd have a little longer before she became an insufferable know-it-all, but apparently not.

She loves to "help" cook. If I so much as walk into the kitchen, she comes running: "I want to help! I want to help Mama!" Her idea of helping is standing on a chair beside me, suggesting (or, if I am not quick enough, adding) random ingredients, eating anything she can get her hands on, and occasionally performing tasks like pouring, stirring, mixing, or counting. I should really find another permanent place to keep the salt and sugar, because it's all I can do to keep them from being added several times to each dish.

Physically, she is becoming more adept. More and more, she does the hand motions with songs - even a passable imitation of an Eensy Weensy Spider. Michael and I watched with wide eyes the other night as she wandered by the table, removed the glass lid from a Corningware dish of grapes, set the lid on the table, pulled a few grapes off the stem, and replaced the lid. Her motions were fluid and assured, even though the tabletop is at her eye level. She'll also walk around carrying a bunch of dinosaurs in both hands, and then bend down and pick up another dinosaur without (usually) dropping the ones she's got.

She climbs more, and with more confidence. She loves riding on swings and going down slides. She likes ladders. She loves to walk on balance beam-like things. She loves to swing by her arms from an overhead bar. In general, though, she seems more physically timid than other kids her age. I don't know if that's something we've instilled by being overly vigilant, or if it's just her personality. Some aspects of it are nice: for example, she always, always stops at streetcorners. And she's only hit on the idea of climbing up the bookcases now that she's old enough to listen to reason about not doing it. I wouldn't want her to be heedless. But I worry a little about the timidity, because I was a scaredy-cat kid and it was not much fun. I am trying to be conscious of how, and how often, I speak to her about potential dangers.

(I guess that last paragraph is sort of a segue into the forthcoming post, "Two-year-old Alex update, part 2: Behavioral." In which Rivka and Misha meet the terrible twos.)