Developmental update: Halfway to five.

[rivka]

Alex is two and a half, going on six. Or maybe sixteen. It's a roller coaster, these days. Lots of rapid development going on.

Verbal/Cognitive:
There's still some toddlerese to Alex's grammar; for example, she often regularizes irregular verbs ("I singed a song"). But at this point, her grammatical mistakes are mostly notable for their rarity. She produces long, complex sentences that wouldn't be out of place from an adult. Arranging a toy on the bottom step before going to bed: "I'm going to put this right here, so I can find it in the morning." Holding up some refrigerator magnets: "Mama, are you aware of these?" Correcting my assignment of gender to a toy: "That dinosaur is actually a girl." Engaging in social negotiation: "You can't have that one because it's mine. You can have this one, though." Pretending: "Mom, I'm going outside. Can I do anything for you before I go?"

I love that she can have real discussions now, in which she's able to show us how she reasons about the world. "Is it cold outside, Mom? ...Is it cold enough for milk in the stroller? When it's hot, milk outside is sour." Or she'll wrestle out loud with the conundrum that green is my favorite color, but I don't like to eat green M&Ms. (After all, Papa likes blue and he likes blue M&Ms. She likes yellow and she likes yellow M&Ms. "...Do you like them a little bit, Mom?") Sometimes the things our conversations reveal are fascinating - for example, her complete lack of a theory of mind. We had a mutually frustrating conversation after school one day, when it became apparent that Alex had no ability to understand that Michael and I didn't know which songs she sang at music class - even after we reminded her that we weren't there.

She's going through something interesting with the words she/he and her/his. When those words are used in books, she'll frequently stop me to ask a clarifying question about who, exactly, is meant. "Who said that?" "Which one did he give it to?" She never used to ask; I don't know if she just didn't mind the ambiguity before, or if the meaning of the text was actually clearer before she started trying to work out all the ways these words are used. She's started making more mistakes with them, too, and her voice is often hesitant when she's trying to pick one. ("He gived it to... she?")

She's experimenting, a lot, with the power of words to justify and excuse behavior. This drives me crazy. She's like a two-year-old Bart Simpson. For example:

Me: Alex, don't throw your food.
Alex: (throws it again, accompanied by one or more of the following responses.) I'm just going to throw it one time. I just tossed it a little. It was an accident. I'm just going to throw it a little bit. I can throw it if I want to. Papa says I'm allowed to throw it. It's just a funny joke. I'm teasing you, Mama.

She's got an endless series of excuses for things she doesn't want to do. Our nightly battle with toothbrushing has been a great outlet for Alex's creativity. "We don't have to brush my teeth because I'm sick." "I'm too sleepy to brush teeth." And my personal favorite: "I can't brush my teeth because they're too grumpy." (That one actually ended well. I said, "You have grumpy teeth? Oh no! I'm going to tickle them with the toothbrush until they cheer up. Tickle tickle tickle!")

Brand new in the repertoire, just in the last couple of weeks: "Why." Why can't we go to the playground on our way home from the grocery store? Why would the food spoil? Why we don't want the food to spoil? I know this turns into the bane of preschool parents' existence, but right now I'm having fun with it.

Her imaginary play is growing richer and richer. She'll spend half an hour at a time playing some involved game with her little farm figurines, talking to them and making them talk to each other. On Sunday morning, she had a whole imaginary play date with three kids from school. She called them up on her toy phone and played with them when they came over. Periodically she'd ask me questions about them: "Are the friends still here? What is Edward doing?" But mostly she provided the script herself. At dinner last night, she announced that her cousin, Baby Jesse, is coming soon "to my different house where no one goes but me." (tammylc, I immediately thought of Liam.) I love hearing her pretend.

She sings constantly - usually at the top of her lungs. She's memorized a lot of songs, with particular attention to the musical ouevre of the Walt Disney corporation. (We have a lot of Disney Sing-along videos.) It's hilarious to hear her belting out "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" and "Never Smile at a Crocodile." She also sings children's songs and some folk songs - I love to hear her sing, "And the ocean waves do roll, and the stormy winds do blo-o-ow, while we poor sailors go running to the tops and the landlubbers lie down below, below, below..." Sometimes everything stops if we join in, and she reproves us: "No, that's my song." Other times we are encouraged: "Sing along, Mama! Sing along, Papa!"

We are reading and reading. Longer picture books, now, with plots - Beatrix Potter, fairy tales (although it's hard to find ones that aren't too scary or creepy), books in the "Lets Read and Find Out Science" series. We have a much higher ratio now of books which are actually enjoyable for an adult to read. She loves to dispense advice to book characters. For example, during a recent reading of "Hop on Pop" she suggested, "They should hop right there on the ground, next to Pop. They should hop by him."

The pre-reading stuff continues. She's figured out most letter sounds - if you give her a phonetically spelled word, she can isolate the first sound and tell you what letter the word starts with. She really enjoys this. One of her lift-the-flap books has a page with 26 presents, one for each letter of the alphabet. Alex can spend a long time going through the names of everyone she knows and figuring out which present they get. She's just beginning to pay attention to sounds that occur in other places in a word - so she'll mention the N in "Dorian." She pretends to read and write: she'll point to words and say "that says ___" (it doesn't), or she'll scribble with a pen and say, "I'm writing ___" (she isn't).

She did startle me the other day by coming very close to making an actual word with her magnetic letters. "Where's the K?" she said, searching through the box. Then she found one. "I'm writing 'Nick.' She put the K up by an N she'd already picked out. "What makes the /i/ sound in the middle of 'Nick'?" I asked her. She hesitated. I repeated the sound a couple of times. She reached down for the box, pulled out an I, and put it between the N and the K. In retrospect, I kind of wish I had just shut up and seen what she would've done with the word on her own. It's hard not to teach.

She's counting a lot. She likes to count things just for the hell of it. If whatever she's counting is arrayed in a row, she can count up to 12 items or so without making mistakes. If they're in a clump, she doesn't have good strategies for keeping track of what's already been counted, so the same item may be counted three times. I think that's an organizational problem, not a counting problem. She seems to have a good understanding of what numbers actually represent. "That house has five steps, just like our house." "I have two, and one more is three." So it's not just rote number recitation.

Physical:
Finally, at long last, she's eating more. She still has a pretty restricted diet, and often arbitrary decides that she doesn't like something she's eaten dozens of times. She eats very few vegetables these days - not even the ones she used to love, like peas and corn. But she does usually eat most of her school lunch, and perhaps three times a week she'll eat a large supper at home: a whole chicken thigh and some rice, for example, or a bowl of pasta with six medium-sized shrimp. She'll reliably eat whole wheat bread and butter, yogurt, rice, milk, bagels and cream cheese, pasta, spring rolls, dark meat chicken, ham, shrimp, mangoes, raw carrots and sugar snap peas, unthawed frozen vegetables. I'm honestly less worried about vitamins right now than I am about calories and protein, so I am feeling much more relaxed at mealtimes these days.

She's sleeping well. Usually 11 hours or a bit more at night, with no daytime nap unless she's sick. We went through a phase where she'd seem sleepy at bedtime and go right into the crib with no problems, but then she'd spend the next 45 minutes calling me back for one thing after another. She came up with her own solution to this problem - "I need a book to read in my crib!" I was hesitant, but I shouldn't have been. Ever since we introduced the "crib book" (separate from the bedtime books read by a parent), bedtime has been smooth and trouble-free. She gets in the crib, "reads" for a little while by the light of her nightlight, and goes peacefully to sleep. Unless she's sick, she almost never wakes up in the middle of the night. She'll sleep through until 7 or 7:30am, or even later sometimes. I never imagined that the time would come that I would have to wake her up. It's nice.

She loves to climb - she can even get four feet or so up the "rockclimbing wall" at the playground. She loves swinging. She likes to hang from things. She's much less certain about sliding down than she is about climbing up. She has good balance. She's growing like a little weed. Three feet tall, and starting to fill out a bit - although I still think she's not going to hit 30 pounds until she's 3. Her hair is long and smooth and fine and silky, with streaks of light and darker blonde, and it falls to her mid-back.

Emotional and Social:
The cataclysmic tantrums have wound down quite a bit, although she does still tend to throw them when she's tired or hungry. Food and rest are primary components of our disciplinary toolbox. They've been replaced by more provocative, deliberate limit testing, as described in the "verbal" section. It drives me Up. The. Wall.

For example: The other day I was washing dishes when I heard a little voice from the living room calling, "Mama, am I allowed to do this?" I ran in there (I'm no fool) to discover that she was using her scissors to cut the cover of one of her paperback books. In other words, she knew damn well that she wasn't allowed to do it, and she asked about it specifically to call my attention to the fact that she was doing something wrong.

I responded sternly: "Alex Wald, no! You know that we don't cut books. We only cut paper. Now this book is ruined - we have to put it away. I am angry. You are all done with the scissors." I stomped away. A few moments later, she was lying on the floor, lip quivering. "I'm sleepy. I need to have a paci rest." (i.e., a rest in her crib with her pacifier.) I came back into the room. "I don't think you're really sleepy," I said. "I think you're feeling sad because Mama's angry, and you want the paci to help you feel better. Is that right?" Alex: "Yeah." So I picked her up and and held her. "Even when I'm angry, I still love you very much. I will always love you, even when you do something you shouldn't do. Cutting the book was not okay, but you're still my little girl." We cuddled for a few moments and read a (different) book, and then everything was fine again.

But that's the pattern: she'll relentlessly test and test in as provocative a fashion as possible, and then she'll be freaked out and need reassurance. It's rough on us. I think it's salutary for her to experience our anger, as long as we express it fairly - for example, "I'm very angry!" rather than "You're a rotten kid!" Other people's unpleasant emotional reactions are a natural consequence of certain behaviors. She gets plenty of positive attention at other times. But it's just hard to see her push herself out of what, for lack of a better term, I'll call "right relationship" with us.

Socially, we've been seeing a lot of changes. At the playground last week, I watched her hit it off beautifully with a child we hadn't seen in a year. They ran around together, using the equipment side by side. Alex made plenty of social overtures, ranging from making eye contact and smiling while doing the same activity, to asking "Can I play too?" when the other little girl found a ball somewhere. We left the park at the same time, and the two kids held hands all the way back to the car. None of this would have happened with a stranger, and precious little of it with a playgroup friend, even six months ago. Reportedly, Alex has always been friendly and socially confident at nursery school - at our fall parent-teacher conference, we said that our goal was for her to be more comfortable interacting with other children, and her teacher looked at us as if we were crazy.

She has brief flashes of generosity - she loves sharing her Halloween candy with Michael and me, for example - but for the most part, when it comes to sharing she's still a two-year-old. Sometimes she plays well with her playgroup friends, but other times she follows them around bursting into tears and shouting "That's mine!" every time they pick up a toy. Even if it's not our house. I don't know how sharing goes at school. Presumably better, given that they've never commented on it.

She's still shy around adults, especially those she doesn't know very well. Of my LJ readers we see in real life, I predict that only wcg will be unsurprised by my account of her verbal skills. Other adults tend to get just a "yes" or "no," from her, or very short sentences. (Uncle Bill, on the other hand, gets long speeches. As she uses him as a jungle gym.) But she is starting to interact a bit more. She'll often answer direct questions, even from strangers, and occasionally she'll be excited enough about something to tell a random passer-by on the street about it. But mostly she wants Michael and me to be her interface with the larger world.

So that's Alex, at two and a half. Who knows where it'll go from here?

Comments

[therealjae.livejournal.com]

Conventional wisdom between the three of us adults has been that I have a trained voice and they don't, so that must be the reason (which is why they're insulted). But they actually both have perfectly nice singing voices, so I think it was more about their parental role. Or maybe the novelty of my voice. I don't know. She doesn't do this anymore, anyway, so there's hope for Alex. :-)

-J