As David Byrne predicted, sometimes I do ask myself, "How did I get here?" The question always comes to me in his voice with a vivid image of him jerking around in a very large suit.
As she rounded the corner to 26 months old, Miss B decided it was time to take a step. Two in fact. From her cute toddler-size upholstered chair across a vast empty space to the couch. This came just in time for a certain mother who was starting to get discouraged. We've been trying so hard to get her to walk. For over a month now she has been able to do it while holding on to us with only one hand, although sometimes she resists and gives us the noodle legs. Even though it is always faster to carry her, we've made an effort to be patient and make her walk from room to room and from the car up the walkway to the front steps. When the weather has been good, I've made time before dinner to practice walking out on the sidewalk. (The neighbors like to come out and cheer her on.) Still, she has not seemed interested in letting go. Our OT hasn't offered any specific advice and has just encouraged us to keep giving her as many walking and standing opportunities as possible. Looking for more direction than that, I checked in with my gross motor skills in Down syndrome book, which suggested having her lunge toward a toy on the sofa. So, I tried that. I set her chair about a foot away from the sofa and put various desired objects (a doll, a book, and yes, I'll admit it, even a cheezy poof) on the sofa. B would stand up, fall forward into the sofa and grab her prize. Over the course of a week, I gradually moved the chair slightly further away. For several days, she would still lean forward and lunge without balancing her weight over her feet, only moving her feet after she had a secure hold on the cushion, but then one time she stood up and stayed perfectly upright, taking two little steps. (Edited to add that we hope to win these adorable shoes from Prince Vince in celebration of her major achievement!) A few days went by and then she did it again, and then another time she did it again. Then I saw her take two independent steps from the door that she had been holding onto over to the stereo speaker. There was no toy or treat on the speaker -- she did it only because that's where she wanted to go, and I was thrilled that she succeeded because unlike the sofa, it has awfully sharp corners. I have videotaped about 20 trials of the chair-to-sofa move in hopes of getting a really good clip to share with the grandparents, but I think there's some kind Heisenberg thing going on here because such attempts to capture the phenomenon seem to fundamentally alter it.
Miss B must be going through a growth spurt because her appetite is suddenly enormous. For breakfast, she gets yogurt (which she can eat with a spoon on her own, freeing me up to make my first round of espresso) and then half of a waffle. Lately she has been signing, “all done” after only a few bites of yogurt and then pointing to the freezer and saying, “Eh eh eh!” in order to speed things along to the waffle part. (You didn’t think I was actually making waffles from scratch every morning, did you?) She loves waffles so much that she now points to the freezer and says, “Eh eh eh!” with every meal. We couldn’t find a sign for waffle, so we taught her the sign for pancake. She picked it up immediately. For lunch and dinner, she’ll eat whatever is handy: sliced turkey and cheese (she prefers muenster to swiss and she spits out reduced fat cheddar while looking disgusted), peanut butter and jelly, any kind of pasta that I can drum up, beans, eggs, or take-out pad thai with tofu. The daycare tells me that she is eating everything they give her and is taking food from the other kids. I was momentarily concerned about this behavior, but I’ve decided to just let it go for now as there isn’t much I can do about it anyway. I think I said, lamely, “Oh. Uhm. Don’t let her do that?” For now, I’m using her interest in food as a way to teach her new words. She just learned to say “chee” (cheese). She has also learned to say “ah”, which in context clearly means “hot.” While I am very careful to cool off hot food before I give it to her, T hands her a waffle right out of the toaster and says, “Careful, it’s hot.” She now touches all of her food to determine whether or not it is ah and if it is, she says, “ah” for awhile while pointing at the food, until it eventually cools down and then she eats it.
People always ask me how she feels about having a little sister. It’s hard to tell. She smiles at Mojo Jojo and likes to pat her, and sometimes she’ll try to stick a pacifier in her mouth and when it doesn’t stay in, she’ll put it in her own mouth instead. She doesn’t scowl at her, and doesn’t seem to get upset when I pick her up. She’s playing with her doll more these days, which gives me a little insight into how she sees babies. For a while now, she has been giving the doll a bottle and patting its back. I had demonstrated this for her, so it wasn’t clear to me if she was really pretending that the doll was a baby or if she was just copying what she’d seen me do with the doll. Copying is great -- we’re always trying to get B to imitate more -- but pretending is a more creative and sophisticated sort of play and I want to encourage it. Lately she’s been adding cute little slurping sounds to the bottle routine, and now she’s sticking her doll in Mojo Jojo’s car seat and rocking it.
We have also had some important musical advances around here. For some time now, Itsy Bitsy Spider has been in heavy rotation. It is a magic spell that can suddenly lull this willful toddler into compliance at any moment. Hair brushing is no problem as long as you’re ready to sing Itsy Bitsy Spider. She has most of the choreography now and likes to say, “Down” when we get to the rain part. In the past few weeks, I’ve noticed her waving her hands around at random moments and it seemed like she was signing something but I couldn’t figure out what it was. Then one day I got bored of Itsy Bitsy Spider and decided to sing Wheels on the Bus instead, and she immediately started doing that same hand waving thing. So all this time she had been trying to submit a song request. She knows about half of the choreography for Wheels and likes to say “All” with us. She was probably bored with that damn spider too.
