Year 2 in Review: The Pictures

The 2nd Annual Solving for G Year in Review focuses less on how different LG looks, and more on the ways in which she has developed. At 12 months, she could stand, take a few steps unassisted, pass a baby doll several dozen yards, and say a small pile of words (most of which were animal noises). Now, she runs practically everywhere she goes, has a vertical leap of an inch or two, and her vocabulary has increased beyond my ability to count accurately (several hundred words at least, a few of which are still animal noises, and some of which are Muppets).

Without further ado, here's the 2nd Year in Review, with commentary as necessary. As with last year, each of these photos was taken on or near the 12th of each month.

September 12, 2011

Here's where we left off last year, the morning of her 1st birthday in Ocean City. As happy as my daughter is most of the time, this pensive look is pretty typical, even a year later. You can always see the wheels turning, like she is going to figure out whatever is in front of her.

October 14, 2011

Favorite pastime at 13 months: piling rocks on things. Sometimes benches, sometimes the rear bumper of the car. One day I pulled into the driveway after running a bunch of errands and when I went to open the rear hatch of the Cruiser, I realized there were three rocks on the bumper. This is either a testament to the stickiness of the rocks in my driveway, or the smoothness and stability of my driving.

November 14, 2011

At 14 months, she didn't like couscous. She still doesn't, although I've never been able to figure out why. It's so good! However, she had discovered how to look at me with eyes that said, "Seriously Dad. Not gonna eat this couscous."

December 16, 2011

It feels like she's been holding markers, brushes and pencils her entire life, but maybe it's just me. She will grab any writing implement and scribble on any available surface. You may remember how that turned out with paint around this time in December.

January 12, 2012

It's also kind of amazing how many places she's found to hide in our small house. Behind the rocking chair in the living room was one of the first.

February 12, 2012

On her second trip to the Philadelphia Zoo, LG got up close and personal with a baby orangutan. The picture doesn't do it justice. It was awesome, and she still talks about the orangutan. Side note: How awesome is that she knows how to say "orangutan"? She also know what an aye-aye is. Just sayin'.

March 11, 2012

We bought this sand and water table before LG was born. Cuz we're those people, and it was on sale. I don't remember if this was the first day we had it out, but she liked it from Day 1.

April 8, 2012

On Easter this year, we could've hid just three eggs over and over again. She was primarily interested in breaking the plastic eggs open before dumping them in the basket.

May 14, 2012

By 20 months, we definitely had her helping in the kitchen, although I can't remember what the heck she's eating here. Sweet potato? Squash? Tomato sauce? She's pleased with herself, whatever it is.

June 13, 2012

In Hollie's ever-expanding attempt to make the most absurd kind of mess possible, she bought a can of Barbasol and some food coloring gel and let LG go to town. And there you go.

July 7, 2012

This was our first visit to the Please Touch Museum. It can be fun, but man it crowds up fast. This was in the blessed first 15 minutes of relative quiet.

August 13, 2012

Another favorite game of the last year: running around the front yard like a crazy person, making the neighbors look at us funny. Specifically, she says she is "a lion in the jungle," and "daddy is a dinosaur." Let it never be said she doesn't have a healthy sense of imagination.

And because the more things change, the more they stay the same, here's a shot of her on the beach this year, compared with the trip last year.

September 11, 2011 - September 12, 2012

It's been a year, but she still really wants that umbrella.

But for the honest-to-god, real-deal, Year-1-to-Year-2 comparison, here are shots from her birthday, 2011 and 2012.

September 12, 2011 - September 12, 2012

Oh man. Where did the baby fat go?

Kids' Music: The Good, The Bad & The Danceable

Turns out, it's pretty much all danceable when you're a toddler.

Those are some serious jazz hands in the lower left.
And in the lower right she practices her rhythmic gymnastics routine.

Let's back up.

There's been a suspicious lack of discussion in this blog regarding my efforts to expose LG to a wide range of music. There are two very good reasons for this.

1. Once you have a kid who is running around doing things, it's hard to spend considerable effort on something like the "perfect playlist."

2. It turns out that once kids age to a certain point, they start to have preferences about stuff.

Back when I wrote about making playlists to dance to when LG was a few months old, she couldn't tell me what she didn't like. She didn't try to steal my phone out of my pocket so she could play with it. She also couldn't tell me to play The Wiggles, Hi-5, or Wee Sing, over and over and over and over again. In general, though, I think we've been through these stages.

Stage 1 - We Sing
If I had to guess, I'd say her conscious relationship with music began sometime around 6 months old. Around that time, she was awful in the car. She cried for most trips longer than 5 minutes or so, and we were at a loss for what to do about it. We sang a lot in those months. Mary Had a Little Lamb, The ABCs, B-I-N-G-O, whatever we could remember. It's sort of weird how hard it is to remember kids' songs and nursery rhymes when there's a screaming kid in the back seat. My inability to remember the words led me to sing bizarrely long versions of Old MacDonald where I would name animals according to the alphabet, then start over again with a different set. You don't know the line separately sanity from insanity until you've tried to come up with multiple animal names and sounds for the letter 'Q.'

Stage 2 - Wee Sing
At 10 months or so, we we started playing Wee Sing for her. Something about those awful, off key children's voices really did it for her, and she'd calm down. But then a funny thing happened.

She learned the word "No."

When a song came on that she didn't like, she'd say "No." And if we didn't change it, she'd say it again. And again. And again. So we did. This process went on for a while, until there were only about 4 songs she'd tolerate for any length of time. Then I discovered more children's music. The slightly more on key Countdown Kids, for example. At first, she liked most of that music, too. Then "No"reared its ugly head once more, and we whittled those songs down to about 4 that she liked. For those keeping score, we now had about 8 songs that were played on an infinite loop in the car. And woe unto me if I somehow deleted that playlist from my phone and had to skip through 20 songs to find the ones she wanted.

Stage 3 - The Muppets Sing
This process repeated for a while, but the very best thing that happened is our discovery of the vast library of music produced by The Muppets. At first, not surprisingly, she only like Elmo songs (Specifically, "Elmo's Song"). Then, gradually, she started to like Grover* ("Fuzzy & Blue" is awesome).

(*While I fully recognize that none of us are immune to commerce and the ever-present nature of licensed characters, I get a ridiculous amount of satisfaction out of the fact that my daughter's first exposure to Sesame Street was aural. It's sort of funny to me that she knew who Grover was, what he sounds like, and that he was blue well before she had ever actually seen him.)

After that, it was only a matter of time before Kermit, Miss Piggy, and Fozzie worked their way into circulation. I cannot express how happy and relieved I am that I can now listen to the soundtrack to The Muppets or The Muppet Movie rather than the umpteenth version of "Itsy Bitsy Spider."

And there is nothing better than a toddler singing "Mahna Mahna."

Still, I couldn't help but think there was a way to get her to listen to non-kids music, at least some of the time. Like many things, an answer came accidentally.

Stage 4 - BJ, Dionne and Dusty Sing*
Hollie and I needed to go shopping for something or another, and whatever the need, we had to go together, which meant taking LG with us. At some point on this trip, it started to rain, and on the walk back to the car, I started absentmindedly singing "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head."

To put it bluntly, LG thought this was amazing.

I make up a lot of songs on the fly, and I think she may have thought that's what I was doing; the big difference being that this was actually a good song. Every time it has rained since then, she goes "Raindrops keep falling on my head, Daddy!", which is occasionally just a statement and occasionally a singsongy request. Either way, it finally occurred to me to play BJ Thomas' version of the song for her.

Breakthrough!

That was just the beginning. On the album of Bacharach songs I have on my phone, "Raindrops" is followed by "Do You Know the Way to San Jose?", the high-pitched "whoa whoa whoa" chorus for which seems tailor made for little kids. And despite the regressive gender stereotypes implicit in the song, "Wishin' & Hopin'" also seems to push all the right buttons for LG.

In case you think I'm making this up, get a load of a recent dance she did to some Bacharach.


You'd think it was a remix based on these sweet moves.

*Much credit to Burt Bacharach and the recently departed Hal Davis. You don't realize how many of their songs you like, let alone how many of them were sung by Dionne Warwick, until you start looking at their output online.

Stage 5 - ???
It's ongoing process, for sure. Hopefully, I'll be able to sneak even more music into the rotation. Current plan of attack: Show tunes, followed by punk covers of show tunes. All the hours I've wasted on Me First & The Gimme Gimmes albums are finally going to pay off, I can feel it.

Bonus:
Sometimes just singing isn't enough. You need an instrument to express yourself fully.