rivka: (alex closeup)
rivka ([personal profile] rivka) wrote2007-08-08 08:50 pm

Developmental update: Alex is 2 1/3.

I thought I'd scale back a bit on the frequency of developmental updates, now that Alex is two. But the result is that I look back at the one I did in May and I can't believe how much she's changed since then.

alex_sunglasses

Physical:
Alex is tall and graceful and beautiful. She runs well and is starting to climb with more confidence. She turns somersaults, loves to be flipped, loves piggyback rides and riding on Michael's shoulders. We love to play rough-and-tumble together. She tackles us and climbs all over us. She loves to chase and be chased. She likes swinging from bars, walking along low walls and similar things, and perching on things. She really wants to be able to climb a tree.

Scissors are the big small-motor thing right now. Oh my gosh, does she love scissors. We bought her a pair of her own after she used them at nursery school and at SUUSI. For the first couple of days, Michael and I sounded like we were trying to program a particularly obtuse AI: "Your thumb goes in the little hole and your fingers go in the big hole. No, thumb and fingers from the same hand. No, don't put your fingers on the silver part - you open the scissors by moving your fingers apart. See? And then you cut by closing your hand. You don't put your fingers on the silver part. Your thumb goes in the little hole..." It takes a lot more sophisticated coordination than I realized. But now she gets it, and our living room is full of teeny tiny scraps of paper. She starts out with a piece of construction paper and cuts and cuts and cuts until there's nothing left. Just for the sheer joy of cutting. The other small-motor obsession is peeling things. Especially crayons, but she loves to stand on a chair in the kitchen and take the outer husks off a bulb of garlic, or peel hard-boiled eggs for me.

Potty training never got any more painful or difficult than it was in the beginning. She never lost interest. She's been in underpants full-time for about three weeks now, and has so thoroughly internalized the whole potty thing that when we deliberately put her in a diaper (say, for the drive to SUUSI) she won't use it. She had a few accidents at SUUSI, what with the new routine and the unexpectedly distant bathrooms, but other than that she's pretty much got it down. We've even put her in underpants at night, without a single mishap.

One of the things about potty-training so young is that she needs more help than the average kid who is training. She needs our help getting her pants down, for example, and washing her hands. And she's intimidated by normal-sized toilets, because she's still really tiny. I've noticed that modern checklists for "potty training readiness" seem to assume that you shouldn't start until your child has the physical skills to go through all the steps independently. I don't really get that. Yeah, having her go potty is more work for us than it will probably be a year from now, but we would've been working at changing her diapers anyway.

She went through a long, long phase of wanting me to rock her to sleep at night. Then there was a brief phase of wanting me to sit in the dark in her room while she fell asleep on her own in the crib. Sometime at SUUSI she switched over to being totally fine with me leaving the room, which is nice. These days I put her in bed and she says cheerfully, "Turn off the light, Mama!" ...And that's it. She rarely wakes up in the middle of the night, and she rarely wakes up before 7am. The tradeoff to all of this lovely nighttime sleep is that she doesn't nap at all at home. She almost always naps at nursery school, but on those nights she's often up until 9:30. It's the worst of both worlds, in some ways: on school days, I don't get to enjoy a restful midday break while she naps or a nice long peaceful evening such as we get on no-nap days. On the other hand, after I've been at work all day it is kind of nice to be able to play with her longer in the evening.

She still eats hardly anything. It still drives me crazy.

Mental:
The last time I wrote a developmental update, Alex was still reversing "you" and "I," and sometimes subjects and objects (for example, "Mama want to hold you" for "I want Mama to hold me"). That's completely gone now. She speaks in long fluent sentences which are usually grammatically correct. She still has some trouble with irregular verbs - this evening, I noticed, she told Michael "I bringed you your book" and then immediately corrected herself: "I brought you your book." (And then she said, "I want to read the New Yorker." But we discounted it.)

The biggest thing I'm noticing these days is the sophistication with which she negotiates with us - often, using our own language. There's nothing quite like having a sobbing two-year-old inform you, "No! Those are not options!" Or offering her a trip to the library, only to be met with a cool "You'll have to take that up with my Papa." If we try to explain that she can't have something because we just don't have one, she's likely to argue: "We need to find one." Or, "You can go to the store and buy one, right now." If we try to stop an activity, she might say, "No, I want to play with it for lots of minutes."

She's starting to have a spatial sense of our neighborhood, which is very cool. As we're leaving the house, she'll point and tell me, "Nursery school is that way and that way." (North and west.) She knows where to turn to go to the library and where to turn to go to the art museum. And she's starting to really know the shops: "This is a purple haircut place. We don't have our hair cut there. We go to the green haircut place. The green haircut place is that way."

She's interested in categories and classifications. If I correct her on a classification, she'll justify her reasoning: "It has wings, just like a pigeon." "It has a lot of leaves, just like a dandelion." (That was clover; she meant petals, not leaves.) She really enjoys one of her books in which the reader is asked to help a chipmunk pick the right alphabetized foods to feed a hippo: an automobile or an apple? Some laundry or some lemonade? "Noooo, you don't eat a jeep, a jeep is to ride in," she corrects gleefully. "Noooo, you wear a hat. She wants to eat a hot dog instead." She's got an endless appetite for this kind of categorization talk.

An odd thing she's into these days is making up words. She'll get a certain smile on her face and say, "We call this 'zho-zho,'" or "Mommy, would you like some sussah?" Or she'll hand me the magnadoodle and ask me to write "Chass." She's also started naming things. A lot. Almost always with made-up names; thus, her dolls, newly dubbed Woh-Woh and Blee-Blee. Or asking us to supply names for, for example, unidentified book characters. This reached what surely must be its apogee a couple of weeks ago, when I taught her the song "The Ants Go Marching" and she demanded, after several repetitions of "the little one stops...", "What the big ones' names are?" Okay: even the little one doesn't have a name, all right? The big ones' very existence isn't even directly stated - it's merely implied. Why would the big ones have names?! Why would I know their names?! She can't answer these questions.

Have I mentioned the making-up-stories thing? She loooooves to have us tell long stories about adventures she has with Goldilocks, Baby Bear, and various members of our extended family. At first she would just prompt us with "Alex and Baby Bear," and we would spin a story of our own devising. Now she controls a lot of the creative concept, although we're not off the hook. She'll give us a prompt: "They decided to go to the zoo." We'll tell a few lines, and she'll jump back in: "They rode on the carousel." That's our cue to describe each character mounting their carousel animal. Then Alex is providing direction again: "They decided to have some ice cream. And Alex had FAMILLA ice cream." Alex, Goldilocks, and Baby Bear have done some amazing things together, from riding on a helicopter to "they all decided to sit on their potties, and they peed and pooped." These stories can go on for a very long time.

She continues with the pre-reading stuff: memorizing books, exploring letter and sound concepts, asking me what specific words or sentences in her books say, and asking me to write things. Or she'll tell me she's writing something, and then earnestly scribble something on the Magnadoodle. She still wants to play the "Letter Searchers" game in the supermarket ("On this box, I see the letter... X! Can you find it?"), and I've introduced more sophisticated variations like "I see two letters that are also in 'Alex'" and "I see the letter that starts 'Mmmmmama.'" I don't think I'm hothousing her, but who can be sure?

Social:
She's still often shy in public, but I really see that starting to change. This morning, for example, we went for a walk and she told me that she wanted to "go say hi to the people in the haircut place." We went in, and instead of her usual behavior of smiling at people and then burying her face in my thigh, she actually had a short conversation with my hairdresser. At SUUSI, by the end of the week she actually wound up walking up to a few of her new acquaintances and hugging them. I was amazed - there are plenty of our friends who she still has never hugged. She knows all the adults at nursery school and seems to have affectionate relationships with each of them - especially her teacher, whom she idolizes.

At two, she still doesn't understand very much about how to play with other children. She likes to keep tabs on them and be around them, but she doesn't really know what to do next. At SUUSI she'd announce, "Where are our friends? Where is Anthony and Liam? We need to find them. We have to go and look for them." Then when we found them, she'd smile and sort of hang back, and not know what to do next. (Totally developmentally normal.) I am starting to see hints of interaction, though. A couple of times, she and her playgroup friends have all played in her toy kitchen together, passing toys back and forth in harmony. And through nursery school, she's developed a vocabulary for negotiating with other kids: "Let's trade - you can play with this one, and I can play with that one." Or "Can I play with that when you're done?" (Unfortunately, that second one tends to be followed by "Are you done with that now? ...Are you done now?" Of course, those are best case scenarios - she's just as likely to cry and say that she NEEDS something, wants it NOW, it's HERS. But it's interesting to watch proto-social-skills develop.

She's starting to have a much larger sense of her social world. She really likes looking at pictures of people she knows, whether it's her own photo albums, pictures of my RE class from last year, SUUSI pictures posted to Flickr, or our church photo directory. She wants to talk about who each person is and what they're doing and who their parents are. She's starting to get a handle on relationships: "Grandpa is your Dad!" she'll inform me with great satisfaction. Or "Emily is Zoe's mommy."

Emotional:
Oh my God, she's so. Very. Two.

Sometimes she's a brilliant, cheerful, fun, happy little girl who throws herself into my arms and murmurs, "I love you, Mama." Sometimes a visitor to the house spills a glass of water, and Alex runs to the kitchen saying, "I am going to get a towel and clean it up." Sometimes she spends a happy half-hour engrossed in an independent game she's playing. Sometimes.

Sometimes she is impossibly, impossibly whiny - so whiny and demanding that I want to scream at her, or worse. She won't just ask for apple juice - she'll wail for it. And she'll whimper the whole time that I'm walking to the kitchen and pouring the juice, because it's just so awful that she doesn't have it IMMEDIATELY. She routinely begs for things and then rejects them, demanding something different and possibly crying. Or throwing the first thing on the floor. She makes up imaginary problems: "I don't want a bagel, I want yogurt! This bagel is dirty, we have to throw it in the trash. I can't eat it - it's dirty." This morning, I swear to God, she cried because her juice was three feet away from her and she couldn't reach it without getting up from where she was lying on the floor.

Sometimes she throws kicking, screaming fits about not wanting to use the potty. This evening, in a particularly fine example of the genre, she insisted that she didn't have to pee, arched her back, threw herself onto the floor, and peed on the floor while she was rolling around insisting that she didn't have to go. (Yes, we offer the option of wearing a diaper if she doesn't want to use the potty. She never takes us up on it.)

Sometimes she makes a big mess just to see our reaction, and then utterly melts down when we expect her to clean it up.

This is all normal enough for two years old. We're reacting by giving her feedback ("I can't understand you very well when you're crying. I would like you to tell me what you want in a normal voice."), giving as much autonomy as is feasible ("Do you want to wash your hands in the sink, or with the pump?"), recognizing her feelings ("Having a bagel is disappointing, because you wish we had cookies for breakfast."), being flexible when it's feasible ("You really REALLY want some yogurt, huh? Okay, I think we can do that."), ignoring what we can, and sticking to limits when we're serious about them. For big tantrums, I try to be comforting yet implacable: "You really don't want to pick up those crayons. When you threw them on the floor, you didn't realize how much work it would be to clean up. You wish you could go do something else. It's time to pick them up now. Put the crayons in the crayon box, and then we can read stories. No, you need to stay here. You need to stay here until the crayons are away. Yeah, I can hear how sad that makes you feel. It's time to pick up the crayons." It's no fun at all, but at least it feels consistent with my parenting values. Tantrums that don't involve something she's supposed to be doing are easier, at least: "Oh, you're really sad about that. That's hard. I'm going to sit over here and color with markers, and you can join me if you want to,"

It's not always that way, of course. We had a particularly hard day today, probably because of the incredibly awful heat - it was 107 degrees F (41 C) this afternoon, and that's enough to make anyone cranky. So I guess the worst parts are more vivid to me right now than they might otherwise be. We have our really happy days, too. But in general? Two is definitely more of a challenge than one was. She's nowhere near as easily swayed, distracted, or convinced as she used to be. The upside of that: she's so much more of a person, with a definite personality and definite interests. That part is so fun.

Interestingly enough, she saves all of the worst stuff for us. Her teacher says that Alex has never been a discipline issue. Babysitters adore her. It's all for the people that she loves and trusts the most. Also normal enough - but infuriating.

alex_in_pool

[identity profile] kalmn.livejournal.com 2007-08-09 01:07 am (UTC)(link)
i'm hoping you did give her the new yorker when she asked for it. :)
ext_2918: (Default)

[identity profile] therealjae.livejournal.com 2007-08-09 04:15 am (UTC)(link)
That's just what I thought!

-J

[identity profile] rivka.livejournal.com 2007-08-09 04:39 am (UTC)(link)
Hell, the New Yorker is nothing. Earlier today, apparently at Alex's request, Michael was reading to her out of Alison Bechdel's Hot Throbbing Dykes to Watch Out For.

[identity profile] curiousangel.livejournal.com 2007-08-09 04:42 am (UTC)(link)
She brought it over and wanted me to read it to her -- what was I supposed to do? I was careful to pick one of the strips that's all talk (except for a dog eating some papers), and she got bored with it pretty quickly.

[identity profile] moeticae.livejournal.com 2007-08-09 10:54 am (UTC)(link)
I draw the line at singing the Moose Song to Moe v4.0, but we're luckily still at the it's-the-tone-that-matters stage of his development.

I do have to say, it's done wonders for my repertoire. I'm dredging up songs I forgot that I knew.

[identity profile] rivka.livejournal.com 2007-08-09 12:18 pm (UTC)(link)
I realized, when Alex was Spud's age, that I didn't know any soft croony ballads that weren't slit-your-wrists sad.

[identity profile] moeticae.livejournal.com 2007-08-09 12:49 pm (UTC)(link)
The trick there is to sing stuff like "And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda" or "Worms of the Earth" in a bouncy, happy sort of way.

Lepanto's not bad, either. Just as long as you recite it the way that the Beastie Boys would.

[identity profile] rivka.livejournal.com 2007-08-09 07:56 pm (UTC)(link)
The jewel of my repertoire was "Four Green Fields." I used to sing Alex to sleep with:

...There was war and death, plundering and pillage
My children starved, by mountain, valley and sea
And their wailing cries, they shook the very heavens
My four green fields ran red with their blood, said she.


In my defense, I do feel that I owe a certain amount of professional consideration to future generations of psychotherapists.

[identity profile] the-siobhan.livejournal.com 2007-08-13 04:14 am (UTC)(link)
When I think back, almost all the songs my dad sung me were about horrible things happening to people.

One in particular sticks out in my head;

Ash Wednesday, Shrove Tuesday,
When Jack went to school,
His mother made pancakes
And wasn't she a fool.
She baked them, she burnt them
And made them so black
And packed them with pepper
And poisoned poor Jack


All sung in a lilting happy tune.

[identity profile] nolly.livejournal.com 2007-08-09 06:25 pm (UTC)(link)
My mother used to sing me one about two children who get lost in the woods and freeze to death and get buried under the leaves. I would request it because it was long, and thus an acceptable way to delay going to sleep. :)

[identity profile] wcg.livejournal.com 2007-08-11 09:41 pm (UTC)(link)
I think I could sing The Chocolate Song as a soft croony ballad.

Ah, two.....

[identity profile] kcobweb.livejournal.com 2007-08-09 02:29 am (UTC)(link)
Elena's gotten really good at sharing in playgroup situations, which makes me so proud. Of course, if someone comes up and snatches a toy away from her, she's just utterly puzzled/flummoxed, like "why would they DO that???" It's fascinating to watch - as an only, she's just not used to negotiating or standing up for herself against peers.

[identity profile] thatwordgrrl.livejournal.com 2007-08-09 02:31 am (UTC)(link)
Every pic I see of her, I am always amazed at those startlingly BLUE eyes of hers.

She's such a cutie!

kate_nepveu: (con't from comment field) "that makes glass with distortions. --Audre Lorde" (International Blog Against Racism Week)

[personal profile] kate_nepveu 2007-08-09 02:46 am (UTC)(link)
I don't know if I say this often enough, but these reports fascinate me. Thanks for posting them.

[identity profile] green-knight.livejournal.com 2007-08-09 09:32 am (UTC)(link)
Wholeheartedly seconded. I'm learning so much about children through them, and I love their honesty - everything is told exactly as it is, no embellishments and playing down of the frustrations.

[identity profile] cliosfolly.livejournal.com 2007-08-09 02:01 pm (UTC)(link)
Same here--I really enjoy the analysis that grounds them.

[identity profile] nolly.livejournal.com 2007-08-09 06:27 pm (UTC)(link)
Also me -- they're really fascinating reads.

[identity profile] mactavish.livejournal.com 2007-08-09 02:48 am (UTC)(link)
There are areas where her development is decidedly in the 2-range, but mostly, she's in the 3-range. And she's leading the way.

[identity profile] rivka.livejournal.com 2007-08-09 04:06 am (UTC)(link)
Maybe that's why she's so easily frustrated, huh?

[identity profile] mactavish.livejournal.com 2007-08-09 04:10 am (UTC)(link)
Cognitive dissonance is a frustrating thing.

[identity profile] nex0s.livejournal.com 2007-08-09 11:01 am (UTC)(link)
That makes a lot of sense, actually.

I love reading these, BTW. I file them all away for when we have kids :)

I know you worry about her eating, but she's tall, active, graceful, and has great use of both her gross and fine motor skills, and an active and creative mind. She seems like she is getting what she needs. I'm not trying to downplay your worry - I can imagine that it is very upsetting. But I can see that she's very healthy across the board. It may be that she's never a huge eater. That's OK as long as she's nice and healthy :)

You guys seem like great parents. Something to aspire to!

N.

[identity profile] ewtikins.livejournal.com 2007-08-09 08:07 am (UTC)(link)
I really enjoy reading these.

ckd: (sharky tng)

[personal profile] ckd 2007-08-09 02:42 pm (UTC)(link)
I'll say it again: thank you for sharing Alex's growth with us like this. It's enjoyable and endearing and informative and interesting and more.

[identity profile] iamjw.livejournal.com 2007-08-09 04:51 pm (UTC)(link)
Oh my God, the scissors. I'd thought I'd locked that particular memory away.

Once upon a time, when I was teaching three-year-olds, I had a kid who just couldn't get the hang of them. For months. They were always upside down and twisted around and the paper was more ripped than cut and forget all about the nice follow the lines thing oh dear God and we talked and we showed and we talked and we showed and we talked and we used those fancy ones with a set of finger holes for adults as well as kids and we tried him on left-handed ones and we talked some more and...then we gave up. And went on to gluing.

That kid is in his teens now and for all I know still can't use scissors properly.

I share in the pleasure of others on your flist at reading these entries. They always make me smile. And that picture of her in the kiddy pool is just too adorable for words.

[identity profile] rivka.livejournal.com 2007-08-09 05:16 pm (UTC)(link)
Wow, I can see why you still remember that! The nice thing about doing this stuff at home is that, if she can't get it, we can just put the scissors (or whatever) away. I guess you don't have that luxury in a nursery school setting.

I felt like we really had to drill the scissors stuff because of the potential for injury. (She has blunt scissors, but they're the real metal kind, not the plastic ones with a miniscule metal cutting edge.) But in general I'm trying my best to let go of my own perfectionism and just let her explore.

We bought her a glue stick yesterday, and I got waaay too frustrated trying to show her how to use it before I stepped back and realized, "What does it matter in the grand scheme of things if she smushes glue all over her paper without rhyme or reason?" So I tried to limit my input to cutting little paper shapes so she could glue and glue and glue them.

[identity profile] mjlayman.livejournal.com 2007-08-10 12:13 am (UTC)(link)
I have small hands and I use kids' scissors in places where I want to leave them out safely. Spirit, one of my cats, likes to grab scissors by the handles in her mouth and run around with the rest dragging between her feet.

[identity profile] janetmiles.livejournal.com 2007-08-09 06:10 pm (UTC)(link)
Just so you know? I always read your Alex entries out loud to Dale, who enjoys them at least as much as I do.

His commentary, however, tends to be limited to a maniacal grin and, "They're so doomed. They're teaching her to think and be independent. Doom, doom, doomity doom." I suspect that if we were to meet Alex, Dale would absolutely adore her and I would get along with her if she was having a happy-two-year-old day (as opposed to a cranky-two-year-old day).

Me? I'm absolutely charmed by the mental image of "No! Those are not options!" and "No, I want to play with it for lots of minutes."

I remember being, um, older than Alex (maybe four?) and telling my babysitter, "I want to take a nap, let me sleep for half an hour and if I'm still tired half an hour and maybe another half an hour. But don't let me sleep more than an hour because [something I wanted to do]." The babysitter was cheerfully amused at how very wrong I was on the concept, and gave me my first lesson on fractions. Or at least the first one I remember clearly.

[identity profile] rivka.livejournal.com 2007-08-10 02:20 am (UTC)(link)
Janet, this makes my head explode. In a really, really good way. Thank you for making space in a corner of your heart for my kid, even if it's only in an LJ and/or hypothetical sort of way.

And I assure you, if we're all ever in the same place at the same time: I would know to keep her away from you if she was having tantrums. ;-)

[identity profile] janetmiles.livejournal.com 2007-08-10 03:36 pm (UTC)(link)
Um. *offers glue to put exploded head back together*

I think I'm actually getting more tolerant of children -- in large part because of your Alex posts, in which you explain *why* children are the way they are. And in part because Dale adores children and can make me see them as individuals. And possibly because I'm getting a bit more mature and less adolescent, myself.

For example: On my flight to Florida last week, there was an infant directly behind me. The infant cried a lot during takeoff and landing. I realized suddenly that I didn't feel angry or resentful, just sympathetic -- I'm sure the baby's ears hurt, even with a bottle to suck on to help clear them. Okay, and a bit frustrated, but not *at* the baby or the mama, more at anatomy and physiology.

Dale's way of dealing with tantrums is along the lines of either, "I know. It's terrible. The universe is simply not acceding to your whims," or "Nice try, kid, but you're not fooling anyone." Both are said very pleasantly, even cheerfully, and tend to lead to a small child looking at him in a puzzled fashion (but not having a tantrum).
ailbhe: (Default)

[personal profile] ailbhe 2007-08-19 08:26 pm (UTC)(link)
So, so cute.

We had a lot of luck at one stage with "I wish I could have cookies for breakfast. I wish I could have elephant cookies for breakfast. BIG elephant cookies the size of elephants," etc. Only we would have said "biscuits" and I think it was planets (my toddler scornfully informed me that one couldn't eat actual planets because they're too rocky, but that's ok). I think it's a trick I got from "How to talk so kids will listen and listen so kids will talk".

We do have a nice shape trimmed out of the tablecloth with Linnea's very own pinking shears, mind you,so we don't have many of the answers in real life.