Status Update: 2 Years, 1 Month

Another year, another doctor's visit. In the interest of continuity, here are the vitals:

Weight: ~27 pounds - 47.5%

Her exact measured weight was 27.8 lbs, but they weighed her with clothes on. I need my data accurate, people!

This represents a 5-pound gain from her 15-month weigh-in, and brings her within spitting distance of average, up to almost 48% from 35% at 15 months, and 26% at 12 months.

Height: 34 inches - 45.2%

As ever, she's wiggly. I rate the margin of error at about .25 inches.

That's 4 inches of growth in nine months, which sounds kind of crazy when you write it out. And it actually drops her percentile by a few points, from 50% to 45%, but well within the margin of error. It should also be noted that I checked these figures against three different sets of weight/height charts, and the percentile scores ranged from 42% to 52%. Clearly, it depends on the data sets you use as your baseline. 

I still contend that the numbers are open to interpretation. Since these charts compare your kid to the aggregate of all other kids, and since the obesity epidemic in the U.S. pushes younger kids' weights higher, it's not clear to me whether I'm comparing her weight against an ideal weight distribution for her age, or a modern, super-fat distribution. Help me, science! You're my only hope!

One finger prick and two shots, and this visit finished pretty quickly, according to Hollie. As I understand it, the doctor used the words "perfect" and "impressive" more than once. When the doctor first arrived in the exam room, she did so to LG pointing at one of her books saying, "It's a blue heron, Mama!" That'll do, LG. That'll do.

The trauma of the shots didn't last long, either, but then, I suppose that's the purpose of the lollipop bucket at the receptionist's desk.

Lemon? Really? Gross.

On the Mysteries of Sleep

There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Strange that I've covered more than two years of my daughter's life, and I don't think I've talked about sleep. Like most parents, we didn't get enough of it early on, and we appreciated it dearly when we did.

We would've killed someone to get her to sleep this soundly at 6 weeks old.

Sleep has been relatively easy for a while now, and LG normally gets 10-11 hours each night, depending on a number of factors. It used to be a glorious 12-hour stretch, from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., every single day. Then, a few months ago, she started talking to herself after we put her down. Bedtime stayed at 7, but she would babble for a while before falling asleep. At first, it was just a few minutes, but eventually these monologues for an audience of no one stretched an hour, sometimes more. There have been nights when she'd keep it up for two hours, passing out around 9.

(There was a brief respite from this behavior. For about two weeks in the summer, she went back to falling asleep immediately after we put her down. It was glorious.)

Most of the time, she sleeps just fine in the car. Most of the time.

I need to make it clear that 95% of the time, she's just talking to herself. She's not crying, not upset, doesn't have a dirty diaper. So we've been content to let her go. But that doesn't mean it isn't frustrating when you're cleaning the kitchen or watching TV, and you hear your daughter's hi-pitched squeal informing her stuffed mouse that she rode a pony, and the pony was white, and the pony was named Honey, and the pony went in a circle, and she likes ponies, and she likes rides, and...

In your head, or under your breath, you just keep saying "Go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep!" And the whole while she just keeps going.

All the pre-sleep talking goes out the window when we're away. Travel seems to take all the vigor right out of her.

We've got no particular solutions in mind, although we did push her bedtime to 7:30 p.m. We figured we'd tire her out for another 30 minutes at best, and at worst, we spent another half hour playing together, which is just fine by us.

There have been a few days, however, that have tested how much babbling we can endure. A couple of nights of talking 'til 9:30, one 'til 10, and we start to worry that she's not getting enough sleep.

At first, I didn't think it was travel, but rather the Pack-n-Play. An ill-fated experiment involving setting the portable crib in her room proved that the Pack-n-Play has nothing to do with it.

So now, every night that she stays up talking until 9 p.m., I go into her room and give what Hollie has taken to calling a "sleep pep talk." More specifically, I suppose it should be an "anti-pep talk" since we want her to just calm down already.

Here's a sample conversation.

Me: Hey there. Why aren't you sleeping?
LG: I go to bed. I want to sleep.
Me: Do you? Cuz it doesn't seem like you're sleeping.
LG: (Some rundown of the events of her day, or, more likely, a listing of songs she's been singing to herself for an hour.)
Me: Okay. Do you know how we go to sleep?
LG: Nooo....
Me: First, you stop talking. No more talking, just stay quiet. Then you close your eyes. When you close your eyes, then you can start dreaming. And when you're dreaming, you're asleep. Do you want to dream?
LG: Yes!
Me: Do you want to sleep?
LG: Yes!
Me: Okay, then let's do that.

Just last night, she decided she would tell me how to go to sleep. So she ran through my part of the above conversation on her own. "I sleep! I be quiet! I close my eyes! I dream! I sleeeeeeep!"

The weird thing is, it seems to work. Nine times out of 10, she's asleep (or at least blessedly quiet) within about 5 minutes of the talk. The caveat: It doesn't work if I try to do it before 9 p.m.

Work hard. Play hard. Sleep harder.

The Power of 2

Given that we've just celebrated LG's second birthday, it's probably not surprising that '2' has been on my mind a lot lately. There's significance to '2'. I see '2's everywhere.

I should not have had two pieces of cake.

It's hard to fathom that I've been a parent for two years. I can now call LG a 2-year-old, rather than refer to her age in months. Since her first birthday, there have been two gallons of milk in our fridge: a gallon of whole and a gallon of skim. For various reasons, we have two strollers, two highchairs, and two copies of Green Eggs and Ham (I'm a little unclear on how the last one happened). As we get closer to sending her to daycare, it's become more obvious that we need to have two cars, just to handle the logistics of it all.

And it brings me back to the original two, me and Hollie. We were the beginning, the dynamic duo that started this whole thing. Two was comfortable, happy and stable. Think of us as 2: the first prime integer. 2 is made of the factors 1 and 2. We were made up of two factors: we could be 2, but we could also be 1. She could exist as Hollie, and I could be Matt, or we could be Hollie and Matt. We were a single unit divisible only by ourselves and each other.

Then we chose to expand our unit to become something more, 3. Technically, still prime, but an odd prime. Rarely do we consider ourselves individuals now. I am no longer just Matt; I am Matt, father of LG. Previously, neither Hollie, nor I, expressed ourselves in terms of each other. But now, we cannot be expressed in terms apart from LG. The same isn't necessarily true for our daughter, though. As she grows, as she becomes more independent, she has begun to express herself as individual. She defines us, but we don't define her.

Nope. This smile defines her.

That's about to change, however. As the title above suggests, this post is about the power of 2. The power of two to become more.

Two to the power of 2.

2²

In other words, the two that became three are about to become four. And LG will have the chance to define herself as a big sister.

If she's half as nice to a younger sibling as she is to the dog, we'll be fine.