Update potpourri

Gosh, it’s been awhile since I had time to write an update – funny how that happens with an active, curious and handsy baby around! So while she’s napping, I’ll try to get it all down here.

Texas Thanksgiving
The Original Traveling Baby made her fourth round-trip flight, for Thanksgiving week, to spend the holiday with her grandmother, great-grandparents, Aunt L. and Uncle J. The flights were among the worst we’ve had – they involved bouts of screaming, a great deal of squirming, and very little sleep. But whaddya gonna do … and anyway, we got there and back. It was great to see everyone, and Annika had SO much new territory to explore! She managed fine on the hardwoods and bricks of her grandmother’s house, and developed a fascination with the magnets on the refrigerator and a little Magna-Doodle she found (which came home with us) – it took her about a day, off and on, to figure out how to use the little writing tool, but once she did, it was awesome. Mom, Lesley and R. and I hosted Thanksgiving at Mamalah’s house (which is what we’re teaching her to call my mom), with R. cooking the turkey, and everyone pitching in; my grandparents came, as well as my Uncle R. and Aunt E., plus my brother and his girlfriend, J. It was awesome! Annika sat down to dinner with us in the new high chair Mamalah bought her, eating bits of the meal and joining in the conversation – so cute! On Friday, my old friends S. and A. and their respective husbands and babies and A.'s sister T. came over and we all hung around for a couple of hours talking & holding each other's kids. It's funny -- we're pretty much the last people in our high school class to have kids, heh! Anyway, as always, it was really hard to leave – a week just doesn’t feel like enough – but we packed a lot of happiness into the days we had. So, till next time!

Toys
The Magna-Doodle isn’t the only new toy Annika’s been playing with – she also brought home a little plastic drum Mamalah bought her that plays music and has lights on the drum head that change with the song (and when you smack it), and the little tunes it plays are now on permanent loop in our brains. She LOVES this thing! She’s also very into her half-dozen or so new books (lots of touch-and-feel animals, monsters, that kind of stuff), and as ever, her beloved boxes (“bak-chess!”).

Hey-yoh!
We don’t know where she picked this up – maybe at baby school? – but Annika’s fave rave right now is pretending to talk on the phone. A pretend phone, that is – anything from the plastic drum, to baby-food tops, to shoes, to her own hand; she seems amazed, delighted, but confounded when it’s a real phone and there’s a voice coming out of it. Several dozen times a day, she’ll put something up to her ear and sing out, “Hey-yoh!” Sometimes she’ll vary it with “Hi!” and/or “bye-bye!” But most of the time, it’s good old “Hey-yohh!” And it just keeps getting funnier – totally adorable.

Culinary progress
We are completely done with bottles – she’s 100% on the straw-sippy cup, from which she drinks organic whole milk only, and she knows we keep the full one in the fridge – so when she wants some, she’ll go to the fridge and pat it or try to open the door herself (so far, no success on that). She can say “milk” (sounds like “mih!”), which is cool, cause now we know whether she wants a drink or something else. When she wants bread or Cheerios, she pats one of the coffee tables and says “More!” (“moah!”), and when she wants an actual meal, she goes to her high chair and grabs the leg or the tray. She is loving all the new things I’m making for her – squash or zucchini (cut up, nuked with olive oil, salt and pepper), hard boiled eggs, string cheese, apples and pears (cut up & nuked w/cinnamon), all this frozen organic fruit (best way to get variety without things going bad), bananas, peas, all kinds of stuff. And since she’s eating so healthy, we find ourselves eating healthier stuff too – a nice side benefit.

Sick baby
One bummer of the last month has been her first real cold. She developed a runny nose and cough and a couple of days of low fever the week we got back from Texas, and then last Friday, she was feeling worse. It was a hairy weekend – multiple night wakings (which is a BEATING when you’re used to a kid sleeping 12 hours a night), coughing, clinginess, the works. Tylenol and ibuprofen worked for awhile, but she just wasn’t getting better, so R. stayed home with her on Monday, I was home working on Tuesday, I took off to stay with her on Wednesday, R. stayed home again Thursday, and yesterday I was home working again as usual; we finally went to the doctor on Wednesday, where we discovered that there was nothing they could do about the cold, but hey, they could give us antibiotics for the ear infection that had developed because of the cold! Once we started the meds, we saw immediate improvement, and now she’s back to her old self again – what a relief!

Grasping of concepts
I swear, it’s discovery every day – from little things, like trying to push her own sleeves up when I put her in her high chair (since I always do that, to avoid the mess) or dragging around any bag-like item and saying bye-bye (since when we leave the house, it’s almost always with a bag), to bigger ideas, like recognizing the moon in an illustration as the same thing she sees outside at night (and in various phases, no less – sliver, half, full, she’s totally got the whole “moon” thing, plus the word for it!). In the last week or so, she’s totally grokked “nap” and “diaper” – you ask if she needs a diaper, and if she does, she says “dippah” and heads for her room, where the changing table is. Same thing with the nap – ask her if she needs a nap or wants to go to Sleepytown, and if she does (we usually only ask when we think it’s about time), she’ll march right to her room and start smacking the door. A quick read of Dr. Seuss’s The Foot Book, and down she goes. Amazing!

Lights, Action, Coffee
We’re getting her more and more involved in helping or learning how to do stuff; she’s keen on turning lights on and off (fascinated by lights, this one) and handing us stuff when we ask for it, that sort of thing. She’s particularly in love with helping me make coffee. On my work-from-home days, we start the morning with “You wanna help Mommy make coffee?” Hell yes, is the answer to that! I hold her with my left arm, talking her through the process: lift out the basket, remove the old filter (I let her touch it), toss that, rinse the basket, put it back; take the pot, pour out the old coffee, rinse the pot, refill it, pour it in the tank; get a new filter (she can do this if I separate it a little), put it in the basket; grind the beans (her FAVORITE part – she smacks the button and jerks backward with total glee as it starts up); scoop the grounds, add cinnamon (pause to sniff it); turn on the machine (another favorite part, because it lights up). So much fun, and hey, my left bicep is getting buff.

Words
A list of what she says and knows now, but probably incomplete – she’s adding at a furious rate! Her pronunciations are approximated in parentheses.

Words she can say:
Mama
Daddy
Baby (behbeh, or behbehbeh)
Mamalah (mamama)
No
Down
Kitty
Dog (DAH!)
Moon
More
Apple (appullll)
Milk (mih)
Boxes (bakchess)
Bird (buh)
Yeah
Hello (hey-yoh!)
Diaper
Light

Bye-bye

Hi

Words she knows the meaning of but doesn’t say yet:
Up
Cow (mooooo)
Sheep (baaaa)
Coffee
Music
Bath
Shoes
Jacket
Medicine
Pig
Horse
Duck
Bread
Cheerios

Hungry

Breakfast

Lunch 

Dinner

Nap

Sleepytown

Outing