My daughter is a weirdo (and other Muppets as assigned)

A lot of development has happened in the two months since I last wrote here. LG has gone from one-word declarations to two-, three-, and four-word statements and sort-of questions. Individual words have become more complex, with two-syllable words very common, and the occasional three-syllable word popping up without warning. She can distinguish and name about 15 capital letters of the alphabet. (I'm not entirely certain how this happened. It could be her alphabet stickers, or working with her Grammy.)

Her memory of past events continues to surprise me; without any prompting, she'll walk up to you and say, "Chewie bone!" referring to friends' dog that we haven't seen in five weeks and the fact that they played with a Nylabone together. (Yes, my daughter played with a slimy Nylabone. She's gnawed on worse.)

Not pictured: Nylabone

But the biggest change in the last few weeks is that LG has gotten weird.

Exhibit A: At the aforementioned visit with Chewie & Co. (in Connecticut), we went out for dinner to a nice tapas restaurant in New Haven. Our three-hour car ride up the previous evening was horrible with a capital H, so it was with some trepidation that we brought LG to a nice dining establishment. She'd done well in restaurants before, but she had been low on sleep for the previous 24 hours. We were nervous.

Turns out, everything was fine, and she ate very well. (Sidebar: She loved chorizo and dates. She hated razor clams.) But the whole experience took a turn for the strange when she turned her gaze to a fixed point on the ceiling, waved as if to a good friend, and said "Hi!" This continued for some time. She'd eat for a few minutes, then tip back to look at the same area of the ceiling, wave, say hi, and occasionally engage the invisible ceiling person in more meaningful discussion (at least, it sounded meaningful. It was certainly emphatic.). I can't put my finger on why, exactly, but as the meal wore on, this behavior started to feel really creepy. Maybe it was the fact that there weren't many people in the restaurant. Maybe it was because it was dimly lit. Maybe it was because her exclamations were increasingly fervent, as if she was warning us about something.

Maybe this says more about me than it does my daughter.

Exhibit B: As noted, LG still isn't wild about the car. Most short trips are okay, but if an outing will involve strapping her into the car seat more than twice, you know you're gearing up for a fight.

Which is why it's so strange that this happens any time the car seat is in the house:

LG to self: I hate this seat SO much.

Every time. Seriously, child, what is your deal?

Exhibit C:

I admit it. This isn't that weird. I just like the picture.

Exhibit D: We're out to breakfast the other day (yes, another story about going out to eat). The Station House is a nice little diner with a good menu that doesn't get terribly crowded on weekend mornings. The flipside of no crowds is that there's just one server.

The food was taking its sweet time getting to our table, so we busied ourselves pointing at the country craft decor, and asking LG if she could identify the various animals featured. Yes, that's a duck. What sound does it make... yadda yadda yadda. This progressed until we got to pig.

Hollie: "What sound does a piggy make, sweetie?"
LG: "Hiiii-ya! Aahhhhhh!"

Hollie: Yes, that's what sound Miss Piggy makes. Good job.

See? Total weirdo. I love it.

Fish Tales, plus an unrelated bonus picture

Let me be clear. I do not care for fish. Let me be clearer. I will eat fish, and in fact, I love to eat fish. I even like visiting aquariums, quite a lot. But as pets? Not a fan. They are boring, with a high maintenance to enjoyment ratio.

BUT! I love my wife and daughter. So after something like three years of cajoling on Hollie's behalf, last week I agreed to get fish. She made the point, accurately, that LG would love feeding, looking at, shouting at, and otherwise talking about the fish. We know this because in recent weeks we've been taking her to Petsmart as a fun outing. She runs around, talks to the birds, rats, hamsters and cats, and occasionally runs off with a dog toy. The highlight of any given trip, though, is the giant wall of fish.

So went to Petsmart as a family, found a tank appropriate for the space we have, and invited LG to pick out decorations for her tank. Of all the decorations to be found at the store--the mermaids, skulls, treasure chests, divers, caves, ruins and other assorted flotsam--she chose a soccer ball and a unicorn. We didn't really care what she chose, but no matter what else we put in front of her, she turned it down cold. The mind of a toddler is a strange thing. She also wanted a blue plant, although the one she originally chose was way more expensive than I was willing to spend on a lump of extruded plastic, so we got a three-pack of assorted plants, one of which was blue.

The unicorn and blue plant didn't lend themselves to many gravel colors, so we went with day-glo. After letting the tank run for 24 hours, LG and I went back to the store to pick up the goldfish. I think the tank, decorations and water treatment was about $50; the two fish were $0.13 each. Boring as they are, at least fish are cheap.

The result?

Meet our two small comet goldfish, Pelé and Lancelot. Or rather, meet Pelé, because Lancelot is always hiding. You can sort of see him through the foliage in the center. He looks like Pelé, but he's white/translucent. (sidebar: there are no good unicorn-inspired names. Charlie? Amalthea? Unico? Someone needs to write a better unicorn story.)

And her reaction?

Trust me, she's excited. She runs into the living room right after she wakes up in the morning so she can feed them. She takes anyone who comes into the house over to the tank to show off the fish. And she makes us drag a chair over to the tank several times a day so she can poke at the tank (yeah, yeah, don't tap the tank. They're $0.13 fish. I'll enforce no tapping when we spend more than a buck.)

I still don't like fish. But I love that they make her happy.

On a completely unrelated note, I must share the following picture. This is definitely my favorite picture of the last three months, and possibly my favorite picture ever.

I had been lamenting the fact that Matt Smith might only do one more season of Doctor Who, but I think I'm over it. Meet your next Doctor! She's got everything you need. A sonic screwdriver, a nerdy outfit, a fun fashion accessory (she wears a fleece hat indoors. it's fine, fleece hats are cool.), and I like to think she's saving a tiny swirly red planet from some horrible fate.

All in all, she's living up to her moniker. Little Geek, indeed.

Milestone check: weight, words, and woofs

As I noted a few months ago, I'm not as big into tracking the milestones as I once was. But for the sake of continuity, here's an update from LG's 15-month doctor's visit (performed much closer to the 16-month mark). Her height is a bit over 30 inches, right around the 50th percentile, which they had a tough time measuring because LG didn't want to lay still. Weighing in was easier, since she apparently didn't mind sitting naked on the scale. She clocked in at 22.8 lbs, enough for 35th percently, up 10 points from her 12-month visit.

For me, though, more interesting than height or weight these these days is cognitive development. In an effort to provide the most accurate, least boastful accounting, I set forward the following challenge to Hollie on her most recent day home with LG. Keep track of all the full words that LG uses consistently without prompting. To meet my criteria for a full word, it had to be something that LG spoke clearly and completely, and used in the appropriate context without any encouragement from either Hollie or myself. I kept the list going until I finished this post, so we've tracked roughly over 36 hours.

What follows is the list of 25 words that LG has used repeatedly and properly in the last 36 hours.

Ball (first alphabetically, and probably the first word she ever used to specifically reference another object)
Blue (used to identify blue things, such as blueberries, a blue dish towel, and a bottle of blue water that she plays with from time to time)
bowl
boy
brush (she even knows there are different kinds of brushes. she knows that she uses a different brush for her teeth and hair.)
burp(while I'd love her to say excuse me, shouting BURP! after she's burped is at least an acknowledgement that she's done something.)
bye-bye
cheese
Daddy
duck (this is significant because every other animal she knows is identified by the sound it makes, not its name)
egg
hat
help
hi
Mama
me (this is a new development in the last day or so, and is her response when she sees her reflection in a mirror)
milk
more
no (what's hilarious is that she often puts "no" and "more" together, primarily when she wants you to sing "Five Little Monkeys", but also when she's done eating.)
please
poop (gross, yes. But also helpful.)
shoes (this was probably her second word after "ball"
teeth (saddest thing in the world is when her mouth hurts, and she looks up at you, points at her mouth, and mournfully says "teeth")
toes
up

This list does not include the partial words or sounds that Hollie and I recognize as referring to an object, but aren't entirely words... yet. An abbreviated list of those words looks something like this:

bana (banana)
ba (bottle)
boog (booger or boogie. We can thank her cousin Alissa [or 'Lis'] for that one.)
cook (cookie or cracker)
broc (broccoli, which she loves, for the moment)
has (house)
gu (girl)
peesh (peas)

There are many more words on the partial list, but we didn't do as good a job at tracking those. And when you add in the litany of animals sounds (baa, woof, meow, sssss, neigh, quack, tweet, gobble, honk, hoo, moo, ooh ooh, boo & Ho Ho Ho [shut up, ghosts and Santa count as animals]) she still makes on a regular basis, her communications skills are really impressive. At least, they're impressive to me. But I'm her dad, so I'm probably a little more easily impressed.

Also, she loves to shout "CONK!" when she's smacked her head, or when singing "Five Little Monkeys." If you have any suggestions on where to categorize that, I'm open to ideas.

This is a phone she got for Christmas. It will come in handy with all the talking she does now.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Baby

Happy New Year!  LG's Mama here filling in for a very busy Daddy.

2011?  Let me 'splain.  No, there is too much.  Let me sum up.  LG started the year an adorable little blob with zero neck control, few preferences, and no vocabulary.  She ended the year an adorable little girl who runs through the house at full speed with no regard for sharp edges or slippery floors, has a new favorite book, food, shirt, toy, and animal every few hours, and just this weekend started using her rapidly progressing speech to manipulate her Mama into giving her anything she wants by saying "please" in the cutest toddler voice ever released into the air.

I had been planning a a big ol' end of the year wrap up, but honestly, there was too much to write about. She's been pretty darn cool this year, and as evidence I offer the following picture:

Alright, so to most people this maybe not seem that cool, (In fact, I think it makes Matt a little queasy...) but painting is the most fun LG and I have together.  In a day that involves the systematic moving of toys from one end of the house to the other and reading the same board books over and over, it's one of the only activities she really enjoys that I also really enjoy.  We started small.  Some finger paints while she was strapped into her highchair.  By the end of 2011, we were painting once a week, making huge paintings like the above which became wrapping paper for her Christmas gifts to family, and even using a paintbrush.  She even has dedicated "paint clothes." Sure we make a mess.  Sure we sometimes eat a little paint.  But that's why God (via Crayola) created washable, nontoxic paint. 

She loves mixing colors and experimenting with ways to get the paint from the bottle to the paper.  I love watching her swirl all the paint together and discovering that sensation of paint squishing between her fingers.  I like noticing the patterns in her finished pieces of art, and she likes the messy hand prints on the bathtub before the requisite post-creative-process bath.  Most of all, we both love it when she paints her feet. 

She does this a lot.

I like to think that I'm helping her on her way to being a creative child and eventual adult.  I like to think that I'm providing the groundwork for years of art creation and appreciation.  I like to think that she'll follow in my footsteps and love everything from coloring books to modern art.  Mostly, I'm just enjoying the time we spend together making really big messes.

Christmas Time is Near

Earlier this month, in much the same manner as last year, we took LG to G-Boys Garden & Christmas center to visit Santa. Every year, the good people of G-Boys build an animatronic Christmas village-y thing. It's fun, in a slapdash, trademark-infringing kind of way. What am I talking about?

Behold!

 Yes. One significant scene in this Christmas village is a recreation of a McDonald's drive-thru staffed by a mouse. No. I have no idea why.

 And then, of course, we have non-licensed Winnie the Pooh and Rabbit.

Finally, we have Batman. Or rather, a mannequin in a Batman halloween costume circa 1995. What does any of this have to do with Christmas? Well, we go see it in December. I guess that's close enough.

At the end of all these shenanigans, you get to meet and have your picture taken with Santa Claus.

Things that worked in our favor this year:

1. LG is way cuter this year than last year. If you recall, she was kind of a lump.
2. Cute outfit. We had a tough time finding an outfit we liked this year, but in the end, I'm proud of it.
3. This year's Santa was a Real Bearded Santa.

Things working against us.

1. LG has been very hesitant about meeting strangers of late. And the bearded fellow with the bright red suit? Very strange.
2. The photographer was dead set on getting a picture of LG's happy face, and WOULD NOT start snapping until we got her smiling. It lent itself to more hysterics, rather than less. Eventually we got him to take a picture while she wasn't wailing. The picture below is the result of that compromise.
3. Four hours later, we realized LG had a fever, so the earlier fussiness could also be blamed on that.

Without further ado, here's the Santa picture we managed to get.

 

Sure, it's the whole family, which was not our original intention, but I like it.

Makes me laugh every time I see her little face.

Paternity Leave: And then we came to the end

Today is my final day of paternity leave. Technically, it should've ended around LG's first birthday, because FMLA only covers that sort of thing for 12 months after a life-changing event. But for one reason or another, I had to go to work on a few paternity days over the past year, and so I worked it out with my boss that I'd take those extra days after my term was officially done. Frankly, since I didn't start taking the days until LG was three months old, I don't feel at all bad about stretching it out. I only wish we could make it last longer.

It's a cliche, but a lot has changed in the last 10 months. To be honest, when I first started taking these days off with LG by myself, I wasn't exactly sure what I was doing. Sure, I had watched her on my own for a few hours here and there while Hollie worked part of a weekend, or went out the occasional evening. But by and large, it hadn't just been me and the baby for a whole day, 1-2 days a week.

It wasn't as though I was worried about it, per se, but it's fair to say that you don't feel like a parent--I mean, really, like a parent--until you've taken care of your kid from the moment they wake up in the morning until you lay them down for the night. Naps, feedings, just doing stuff all day long, all while trying to keep after the house, and feed yourself from time to time. It's big. To all those out there doing this every day, I raise a glass in salute.*

* By no means does my experience, by the way, compare to Hollie's. She did it for three months, during the hardest part, and suffered from pneumonia for the bulk of that time.

However I felt at the beginning, whatever trepidation I may have had then, I'm comfortable now. I think I do most of the things I'm supposed to do. I watch her, but I don't hover. I protect her, but I don't live in constant fear of the unknown. We play, but I let her choose how (most of the time. I can only play "take everything out of the toybox" so many times in one day).

When I started this, she had no teeth. Now she has nine. Then, she couldn't talk. Now, she can say "Dada" when she feels like it, has a litany of animals noises at her disposal, and will proudly point out every shoe in the house. She certainly couldn't walk then; I'm not even sure she could push herself up on her arms. Now, in bare feet, socks or shoes, she runs.

When I started this, she barely smiled, and I'm pretty sure it was just mimicry most of the time. Now, when she smiles, I know she's happy. I know I am.

III IIII II IIII I IIII IIIII II (Translated from sparrow, "Happy Halloween!")

Been a bit busy around but these parts of late, but that doesn't mean we haven't been celebrating the season. As I think I made clear last year, I'm a huge fan of Halloween, and having a kid means I get to celebrate that much more.

We got the outdoor decorations up over the course of a few days, and LG's been enamored of them this year, now that she's actually big enough to investigate on her own.


As big as she's gotten, it's kind of funny to me that these things are still bigger than her. I suppose it won't be too long until the reverse is true.

As noted last year, we ran through several ideas before we came up with the Tribble for LG's Halloween costume. It was more or less my idea, so this year, Hollie got to pick. I'm pretty sure we've only got maybe one more year before LG starts picking her own costumes, so we're trying to make the most of it. Next year's effort may have to be collaborative. I'm thinking maybe a family costume, since we'll probably take her trick-or-treating. Any ideas?

But I'm getting ahead of myself. As I said, Hollie picked this year's costume (and my mom put it together), and if you know Hollie at all, then the costume should be pretty easy to guess.

 
Come on, you can do it!

Yellow comb... a fan tail....

Got it?

Alright, here's a big hint.

Yes, that is a beagle. Although I'm betting there's not a biscuit in the world that would've gotten him to perch on that house naturally.

If you notice that the costume looks a little similar to last year's, it's because the body is basically the same as the Tribble. It turns out that a lot of baby costumes are just big ol' fat suits. Who knew?

Also, I seem to have started a Halloween tradition of awkwardly Photoshopped costume pictures. I am okay with this. And since the cartoon picture above made Hollie laugh out loud when she saw it, I think I'll keep it up!