Adios, 2008!

It's been a great year with this baby -- lot of changes, lot of discovery, lot of fun. She's spent the last few days playing with Christmas presents (the phone, the blocks, the shopping cart) and gaining vocabulary, and running around like a maniac; it's been awesome for both R. and I to have so much time at home with her. We're spending tonight at our friends M&H's house with them and K&K and their baby Sky, which is a great plan -- no one's driving, nobody has to be out on Amateur Nite, and we get to celebrate the new year with good friends. We hope you all have a safe & happy NYE, and we'll have lots to talk about in 2009!

Ho ho ho!

To all the readers of this blog to whom I am related: Christmas Eve gift!

We established that texting was no fair, but nobody said anything about blogs. :-)

Holiday baby!

Well, I finally got our Christmas cards from Shutterfly -- featuring Annika, of course, and my brain-fried choice of black text on a brown background (ehhh, I was typing it into what I thought was a white text box ... whatever, it's readable even if it doesn't pop!) -- and sent a bunch of them off yesterday. The photo is so cute, and the cards turned out really nice. Gone are the days when I had time to handwrite a note on all of them ... eesh. 

Anyhoo, Annika's Grandpa & Grandma M. are in town for awhile, and they have all three been enjoying each other's company hugely. And meanwhile, the pace of discovery keeps charging ahead: 

--She's saying "Thank you!" now ("dak-koo!"), and seems to like handing people stuff so they'll say it, and taking it back so she can say it. "Please" is next, of course -- heh. 

--Not that she doesn't love knocking over stacks of things -- because she does, she's like Godzilla in Tokyo! -- but she's now discovered the fun of stacking them in the first place. She makes towers of the blocks our friends I&K gave her for her birthday, and piles of pretty much anything else; she spent a good half hour stacking, unstacking and restacking a bunch of her board books tonight, every once in awhile applauding herself for a particularly fetching arrangement. 

--She's taken to standing around with one or both hands on her hips, deciding what mayhem to get into next -- it is beyond hilarious what that looks like! I think she may have gotten it from me (I do spend a fair amount of time looking for my own mind, after all ...), but who knows with this here baby!

--The greatest thing lately, though, just happened today: She asked specifically for the food she wanted! At lunch, I asked if she wanted more sweet potatoes, and held up the Tupperware I was getting the little cubes from; she looked at it, thought for a second, and said "apple?" with a searching look toward the kitchen countertop. I said, "You want apple?" and she repeated "apple!", clearly psyched that I got her meaning. So I got her some apple bits (she had LOVED them at breakfast), and she ate those till she couldn't eat anymore, and then -- proving it wasn't just a fluke -- she said "teess?" R. and I were like, "Teess? That doesn't sound like 'done' or 'down,'" (which she says when she's finished eating). She said it again, with that one-hand-clapping gesture and a look toward the fridge, and I said "Could she be saying cheese?" Her enthusiastic reaction to that was the confirmation -- she wanted a pack of string cheese! Wow! So she did the same type of thing again at dinner (and ate half a can of green beans, pretty much the only green thing she's really liked) -- awesome new development! It's just so much fun seeing the way her mind puts things together, and to watch how fast it's happening. Yay baby!

PS: She doesn't really get that it's Christmas time, but she loves the lights and the obviously different schedule around here, and she was almost as thrilled as I was by the outdoor decor of our neighbors' house one street over toward the ocean -- she loved the moving lighted deer shapes, and I just about died laughing at the leg lamp in the window. FRA-GEE-LAY -- that must be Italian! :-) 

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