Developmental update: Alex is 2 1/3.
Aug. 8th, 2007 08:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivkaI 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.
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.
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.
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Date: 2007-08-09 02:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-09 04:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-09 04:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-09 11:01 am (UTC)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.