25 months

Last week we flew to Florida for a few days, to visit Adriana's great-grandfather, and the trip certainly demonstrated the highlights and challenges of this age.  Adriana cooperated well at the airport, provided that we gave her plenty of warning for things. I told her as we got in the car to head up to SFO that when we got to the airport I was going to put her in the carrier until we'd gone through security, so instead of fighting me as she often does when it comes to carriers and strollers these days, she happily let me swing her around onto my back. We warned her that her monkey and shoes would have to go through the X-ray separately, and so she didn't object when Weed was tucked into Brian's bag and I placed her shoes in the plastic bin with mine. She does well with quiet play these days, even independent play, so the flights to and from Florida were uneventful. She drew with crayons, played with her doll and her monkey, looked at pictures of dogs and cats in the Sky Mall catalog, and then had some milk and slept for at least an hour. Flight attendants and other passengers stopped to tell me what a good girl she was. Once we were in Florida, she did surprisingly well with being in an apartment that was not exactly child-friendly. She had her crayons and her legos, and there was a piano to play on. For the most part she didn't show too much interest in the fragile knick-knacks that were down at her level (a couple of ceramic cats were an exception to that). 

But we also witnessed a couple of full-scale tantrums that surprised us. She was out of her normal routines and not getting quite as much freedom to run as she is accustomed to, and it was frustrating for her. We thought we knew what tantrums were a year ago, but now she's really gotten the hang of them: every now and then when she is upset or overtired or overstimulated, we witness the wrath of the two-year-old, as she hurls her body to the floor, kicks, screams, and throws things. I've found it's best to let her  blow off steam for a minute or two without interfering (although we do have to make sure there's nothing in her way that she might accidentally hurt herself on), and then she is willing to be soothed, usually by nursing, but sometimes with some other distraction. And so we faced this twice in Florida, both times in our hotel room when she was feeling cooped up and frustrated. But for the most part we were able to head off the worst of her tantrums. Several meals were eaten at shifts, so that Adriana could get outside to play. Of course, in some ways that aggravated the problems more, because it meant that she wasn't eating well. Adriana has always been a bit of a quirky eater, and eating when there are distractions is nearly impossible for her--and restaurants are full of distractions. We took food back to our room after breakfast, picked up snacks at the supermarket, and sometimes just nursed a bit more often than we normally do at home. It was good to see her eat a good meal the night we got home, gobbling up a bowl full of vegetable barley soup, rather than the diet of French bread, string cheese, grapes, and Cheerios she'd been subsisting on while we traveled. She has been such a good eater lately--eating a real breakfast in the morning, two light lunches most days (one before her nap, one after), and a decent dinner--and it was hard to watch her intake of "real food" decline throughout our trip. 

Adriana's language explosion continues. I kept a careful list of the words she said and how she pronounced them, up until she reached 100 words. Then I couldn't keep up with her and going to the computer every time there was something new, and I stopped. She combines words now into little sentences. "Mom read book," she commands me many times a day, bringing me a story to read. "Ana get ball," she exclaimed over and over at the Children's Discovery Museum earlier this month. And her spoken language lets her demonstrate the other things she is learning. She can identify colors and likes to label things--blue cars, purple balls, brown shoes. She sorts things constantly: I leave her alone to play while I shower and come back to discover that she has stacked all the red legos in one tower, the green in another, the blue in a third and is working on the yellow ones.  She sometimes builds with her alphabet blocks, but she nearly as often just divides them up by letter, as she is recognizing and naming some letters. She surprised us the first time, pointing to a capital letter A and telling us, "A, Ana," since I always say her name when we are looking at alphabet books. She also now identifies B for baby, M for mom, D for dad, and S for Sam. She tries to fit other letters and numbers into these categories: V gets matched with A; W, N, and 3 are all M to Adriana; 5 might as well be S; and O is a D, according to her. Going through the airports on our trip, she spotted the double A of the American Airlines logo and shouted, "Two! A! Ana!" with great glee. She describes her games and gives me instructions as I play with her, in a mix of spoken and signed language. During a tea party, she signs cookie and places an imaginary one on my saucer beside my cup. As I pick it up to take a bite, she tells me, "No, dip," and demonstrates dipping her cookie into her tea before tasting it (and I have no idea where she learned that). She signs panda and then says "eat pie," as she serves her toy panda a pie made of legos. She uses her made-up sign for "where?" as she speaks the word of what she's looking for. 

I am thrilled right now with the joy that Adriana takes in things. We've had a great deal of fun this past month taking her to places we thought she'd like: the Monterey Bay Aquarium, the Oakland Zoo, and Butterfly World and a park with a carousel in Florida. At the aquarium she ran eagerly from tank to tank, signing fish, demanding to be picked up for a better view, and then demanding to get down so she could run to the next tank on her own. She watched with great excitement as river otters played and wrestled in the water (although she backed way nervously as their game took them close to the glass where she was standing). She gazed in awe at sharks circling before her in a room that looked into a great tank. At the zoo, she leaned away from us when she was in our arms, trying to find some way to get closer to the monkeys and lions and elephants. She talked about that trip for days afterward, telling us about the monkey that was jumping in the trees, the monkey that was sleeping, and the elephant that pooped. At Butterfly World, it was hard to get her past the initial walkway into the garden as she pointed to flowers and butterflies, exclaiming over the colors. While the carousel in Florida wasn't the first she's been on, it was the first time she seemed old enough to really enjoy the experience, and after two rides she still was begging for more: "Mo' neigh! Mo' neigh! Mo' neigh, pwee!" Everything is amazing to her and it's so much fun to get to witness her joy. 

Okay, sorry. That last one was too lame even for me. Let me make it up to you with a couple of pictures of a small girl on her trike:

Enough shmoopiness, I'm going to babble about my hair now

My friend Lynn cut off her hair for her 30th birthday. When she told me she was going to, I couldn't believe it. I mean, I've seen her with short hair plenty of times in the nearly 20 years I've known her, but her long, straight, thick hair was just gorgeous. And then she cut it off and it seemed so cute and perfect when we went to see her, and I decided I wanted to cut my hair off too. Except then I saw a picture that Lynn took and I decided that, in spite of the frizz and tangles, I liked my long hair. 

Maybe part of it was being afraid that if I cut off my hair it would mean I was 30 and a mom. But actually it turns out that being alive for 30 years and having a kid is actually what means I'm 30 and a mom (I know!) and my hair had little to do with it. And, I remembered how nice it had felt to cut off a lot of hair about five years ago, and I kept talking about doing it, and after all that talking it would have been pretty lame to come home from the salon with just a little trim, you know? 

Tuesday didn't work out quite as planned. I had forgotten to go get my TB skin test read on Monday, so I went by Kaiser on Tuesday before Adriana's gymnastics class. It was too late to have it read, I was told, but they couldn't redo the test yet due to a risk of a false positive. So Adriana and I headed to gymnastics, only to discover that the teacher was sick and class had been canceled--which we would have known in advance if I hadn't been at Kaiser in the morning when they called to tell me. Frustrated, I took Adriana over the park nearby to play for a while. And then I had a brilliant idea: we were very near Ikea, and we could go there to pick out a little table and chairs set for Adriana's room. I didn't have a stroller, a baby carrier, or a sippy cup with me, and it was approaching naptime, but it would be fine, right?

The funny thing is, it was fine. I tried putting Adriana in one of the carts there, but the belts weren't snug at all, so she kept standing up. I let her walk along and help me push the cart through the showroom. We found the kids' stuff, and she sat in all the different chairs while I chose which ones we would buy. She ate lunch with me in the cafe there, gobbling up macaroni and cheese and a plateful of veggies, and drinking carefully from a "big kid cup" into which I poured water just one or two sips at a time. She climbed onto the front of the cart as I pushed it through the "Market Place" downstairs, and then ran gleefully ahead of me through wide aisles of the warehouse area when I went to pick up our tables. And on the way home she fell asleep in the car. 

That night after her bath she helped me put together her new furniture. I keep saying that Adriana is becoming more and more of a kid rather than a baby. And it seemed very true on Tuesday.

My two favorite people

Today I was away from Adriana for perhaps the most I ever have been in one day. In the afternoon, I went to get a facial and pedicure--my treat to myself every year for my birthday. And this evening, after coming home to play a bit and change my clothes, I went to a baby shower for two of the moms in our play group. This afternoon I was fabulously relaxed after the spa treatments, and tonight I came home happy and even more relaxed from a nice time out with friends. But it was weird being away from Adriana. She's cut way back on her nursing in the past week, mostly only asking for milk when she first wakes up and when she's going to sleep, but I was so happy to pick her up and snuggle her and have her ask to nurse in between my outings. And while I was glad that Brian was about to get her down to sleep for the night with cuddles and stories, it also made me (selfishly) sad because it meant she didn't need me as much as she used to.

But it is good for me to get away sometimes, and wonderful for my two favorite people to have some one-on-one time.

Happy Friday

22 months

Every evening when Adriana is in the bathtub or I am putting her in her pajamas, I talk to her about her day, reminding her of all the things she did and who she saw. Without spoken language, it's hard for me to know what she remembers, but I'm pretty sure everything is just being saved up in her head. And she does let me know that she remembers things that happen. A couple of nights ago, Brian was in the room as I was changing Adriana into her pajamas. She pointed at the nearly healed scrape on her right knee, from a tumble she took when we were in Southern California for Halloween, and then signed "cat." "Yes, you had a Hello Kitty band-aid on there," I told her. She nodded and signed "monkey." "And before that you had a monkey band-aid." "Grandma," she signed. "Grandma gave you the monkey band-aid." She nodded again, and I loved that she remembered all that and was telling me about it. Brian laughed and said that he thought I was the only one who would have understood why she was signing all of those things. He's right. But it's still fantastic to know that she is narrating things to me like that, and to see how much she remembers.

I think she is starting to talk more. Do I say that every month? But it does seem that she is babbling to herself more as I carry her through the farmers' market on my back, when she is riding in her carseat, and when we are playing together, although she still is very quiet when she plays by herself. Her newest word is "boom," which she says as she drops something or knocks something over, either on purpose or accidentally. But if she says "boom" (or anything, really) she wants it said back to her. So she says "boom" and we echo her, and she giggles. The other night the game happened over and over, with Adriana giggling every time we said "boom" to her.

I think the frequency of tantrums has decreased, which is nice. I mean, they still happen, and there are days when they happen a lot, but overall, I think she's doing better. I also think she's doing better because I am doing better--I am remembering to pay attention to when she needs me to focus wholly on her and figuring out more about what she likes to eat and when, now that she is becoming a better eater.

I am impressed sometimes by how well Adriana eats lately. There are still days, especially when she's not feeling well, when she really prefers to nurse, and because she nurses upon waking in the morning, she usually doesn't want to eat breakfast. But she is starting to cut out some feedings, most noticeably the ones between her nap and bedtime. She always nurses down for her nap, and usually nurses when she wakes up, but most days now she doesn't nurse again after that until bedtime. I know she's not ready to wean yet, and I'm not really ready either, but it is nice to see that she is starting to ease up a bit on her own. We are also very lucky that Adriana really seems to like healthy food, gobbling up chard sauteed with onions, steamed carrots and green beans, black bean soup, yogurt, raisins, and bananas. Not that she doesn't like sweets: at a party on election night, she picked up a cookied from the table, gave me a sly little smile and took a bite. Instantly the smile became a squinty-eyed grin and she scampered her feet, she was so pleased with the treat. And how can I deny her treats when they clearly make her so happy?

She is very interested in babies. Real live babies at the park or the store always catch her attention, but dolls definitely do the trick too. She was given a new doll recently, and that doll has gone everywhere with her since. It was a doll that came with a change of clothes, a couple of rattles, and a sippy cup, and she usually wants those to come with us too (I limit her to just bringing the sippy cup). She still needs help changing the doll's clothes, and she'll bring me a blanket to help her swaddle the baby in. She wants to feed and nurse the baby, and when we read stories, the baby is right there with us. I am a little surprised by the doll play. I wonder if it comes naturally because she is a girl, if it's something we've taught her because she's a girl, or if it's just part of her personality. I suppose it's a bit of all three: most (not all) of the little girls we know more interested in dolls than (most of) the little boys we know; we think it's cute that she takes good care of her baby, so we've encouraged it; and even though she also has other toys, it has always been dolls that she picks to play with.

She does also play with other toys. She likes to throw and kick a ball around, and she is getting interested in blocks. She makes towers seven or eight blocks high, and then pushes them over, telling me "boom." Over the weekend she spent a long time playing with a set of Duplos, putting a stack of them together, taking them apart, and then putting them together again. Her grandmother bought her a tricycle, and while she is still working out how to pedal, she spent most days that we were visiting Grandma and Grandpa riding that trike or dragging it around, and signing for bike whenever she wanted it and it wasn't right there.

As much fun as I have playing with her, bedtime is still my favorite time of day (well, the successful ones, where she goes to sleep without a fight at a respectable hours, anyhow). After she is bathed and in her pajamas, we snuggle up in her bed and read stories (favorites these days are Stellaluna, The Runaway Bunny, and Papa, Please Get The Moon for Me). Then I turn out the light and she nurses, while I stroke her hair and she rubs my arm, and she dozes off. After being busy all day and realizing how much she is a little girl instead of a baby now, I love that chance to relax with her and have her still be my little baby.

Halloween report, 2008

For the third year in a row we're down at Brian's parents' house in South Pasadena for their crazy Halloween. We broke last year's record for trick-or-treaters: this year we ended up with 1,961 little beggars. At one point, we were getting about 24 per minute. Please see Tables 1 and 2:

Table 1: 12 Years of Trick-or-Treaters


Table 2: 2008 Breakdown


We spent some time yesterday afternoon working on our jack-o'-lanterns. I'm not quite as pleased with my owl (especially for the amount of time it took) as I was with the witch I did last year, but Brian's grim reaper came out pretty well, I think:






Adriana had a fantastic time. We took her around to a few houses to check out the decorations and get mama some candy, but she really enjoyed being at the door, watching the other kids in their costume and "helping" hand out candy and water. And also looking cute: she picked out her own costume this year. I was leaning toward a dragon costume, but once she caught sight of the shiny pink wings on the butterfly costume further down the rack, I didn't stand a chance. I mean, she pulled it down and was dragging it around Old Navy. Clearly those wings were meant for her.

21 months

A couple of weeks ago, Brian and I looked at Adriana as she climbed onto a chair and looked over at us and we both had the same thought: she is such a child now. And a couple of nights ago as we put away the pouches that Lynn had returned to us now that her baby is getting bigger, we reminisced about the days when we would bounce Adriana to sleep in them, and Brian said, "It's like that was a completely different kid." I told him that the difference was that that was a baby and now she is a playful little kid.

Adriana loves to be chased now. She takes off on her way out of the park, running, hoping I'll chase her, turning back to grin at me and make sure I am. Peek-a-boo is starting to turn into something more like hide-and-seek. She is getting better at climbing ladders and she is starting to figure out that she can jump off of things (as opposed to just jumping in place). She puts together her puzzles with ease. Her baby and her monkey are still her favorite toys--she feeds them, diapers them, nurses them (she even puts a hand into the neck of her shirt, mimicking my action as I unhook my nursing bra before I nurse her), and dances with them. She wants to take them everywhere, and it can be a bit of a pain to try to keep track of this entourage, so one day last week I persuaded her to tuck her baby into bed and leave the monkey to take care of the baby when I was trying to get us out of the house for our play group.

These days, she is fascinated with drawing. In the past I had let her scribble with crayons in restaurants or at the church nursery where we go for La Leche League meetings. But her grandmother was drawing for her and letting her draw with a ball point pen on post-its the last time we had the grandparents here for a visit. Now Adriana grabs for pens whenever she can find them and goes running off to find a piece of paper. I am trying to discourage the pens, because she doesn't necessarily keep it on the paper. Instead, I have some washable crayons for her, but the best thing is the MagnaDoodle I bought for our recent long car trip. She draws and erases, draws and erases, and is so pleased with herself. And just over the past two weeks it's been interesting to watch how she approaches drawing develop. At first she would hand us the pen/crayon/MagnaDoodle and demand that we draw for her. Then she started requesting certain things. I drew approximately eleventy frajillion cats on the way up to Humboldt, but she would sometimes take the picture from me and scribble over it a bit. And now, while she still likes me to draw for her, she is more likely to sit and scribble without asking me for help, or scribble purposefully when I ask her to draw me a cat or a bird.

She has days when she eats well, and days when she still mostly wants to nurse. If I cradle her at all, it seems to remind her of nursing and she starts asking to, which in most cases is fine. I do catch myself offering her real food first, when she asks to nurse--not a conscious decision to move more toward weaning, although I suppose that's exactly what it is. Most of the time it fails, though; once she has asked for milk, milk is what she needs. She does eat fairly well most of the time. Less sensitive to textures than she used to be, she is willing to try a variety of foods. We are struggling with some food sensitivities--it seems that most fruits cause some eczema around her mouth--so we are trying to figure those out. It was one thing when it was berries and stone fruits, as those are seasonal and I figured we could wait until next summer to see if she outgrew them. But tomatoes and apples? Those are a way of life, so now we are considering our options.

Over the last month Adriana added two "words" to her repertoire: "nie," for "neigh" when asked what a horse says, and "Ana" when asked to say "Adriana." She says "moo" (well, "mmmmmm") when she sees a picture of a cow. She's been telling us what a cow says for some time now, but it's only recently that she has begun to volunteer the information. She's up to about seventy signs now, and she nods "yes." For a while she would shake her head "no" or do nothing. Now she has an adorable full-body nod. She is practicing to be two, though, so her first instinct much of the time is to say no. Then she will change her mind and nod, or just do whatever you asked her to do.

Sometimes I am counting down the days until November 11. I hear that at 22 months, kids start to even out--with their sleep and tantrums and clinginess and everything. There are days when I think we are already on our way there--on Saturday night we even managed to go out to dinner, walking downtown and back (with Adriana in the stroller, miracle of miracles) and sitting in a (child-friendly) restaurant without a single meltdown. And there are times when I wish we could slow down or go back in time. She snuggles on my lap after a nap or holds my hand while we walk down the sidewalk, and I want to hold onto this time as long as possible.

Photos: Arcata Farmers' Market

All summer long I walked around the Mountain View farmers' market, admiring the piles of rosy peaches, the baskets of gleaming strawberries, the mounds of richly colored greens and wished I had my camera with me. But the market is crowded and we are trying to manage a toddler and our shopping, so I never get to take any pictures. We spent last weekend up in Humboldt County, visiting friends, and I had a chance to walk around the less crowded market in Arcata with my camera while Brian kept Adriana occupied with chalk art during Pastels on the Plaza. It was obviously a cooler climate--only a few berries and no stone fruits were left--but late summer and early fall vegetables that were in were still gorgeous.

Photos: Pastels on the Plaza

Over the years I've seen photos of the art my friend Lynn has created for Pastels on the Plaza, and I've always sort of wished I could go see her work and that of the other artists, so this year we drove up to Humboldt County the first weekend in October to check it out.

Lynn's sponsor was Jitter Bean Coffee. In honor of their "Daddy's Special," she worked from a photo of her husband and their new daughter. I didn't end up with a photo of the finished piece, but I do like these ones I took of the work in progress:

Other artists also did impressive work:

There were some small squares marked off for kids to create their own work. While I wandered around admiring the market and the art, Brian and Adriana got to work:

20 months

Every month, I sit down and think about the challenges and the blessings of another month with Adriana. There are some months when I think the challenges seem to overwhelm the blessings, but as I write this after a rough week, the blessings are so apparent. Yes, Adriana did keep me on my toes each day. Yes, she threw tantrums over seemingly small things. Yes, she terrified me as she tried to do things at the park that she's just not physically capable of doing at this point, and would have hurt herself if I hadn't been there. Yes, there were days she barely napped, so I didn't get a chance to write it all down when I wanted to. But. But. There are things that I never thought about as things people had to learn, such as what a shadow is and how to jump, and I get to be there as she works those out. I got to play "Ring Around the Rosy" over and over again and heard her giggle each time she fell down, to see the delight on her face as she hung from the monkey bars at the park, to watch her studiously pour water from one container to another in the bath, and to feel her lean in for a kiss as she wrapped her arms around my neck. She left me exhausted, but she also left me in awe.

A few weeks ago, Adriana settled into a nice schedule: she woke up around 7:30 every morning, napped for two hours starting at 12:30, and went to bed at nine. I loved the predictability of it, and wondered why I hadn't tried to get her onto a schedule months ago. Then she changed her mind, and I realized that I hadn't gotten her onto a schedule so much as she'd gotten me onto one, and having it yanked out from under me was hard to cope with. I keep blaming her lack of predictability for making me nuts, but I think it's probably more closely related to the fact that she isn't going to bed until ten o'clock.

She is also going through a very clingy stage. She has always been clingy with me, but evenings lately have been rough: if she can't be in constant physical contact with me, she should at least be within one foot. If I want to get myself a glass of water six feet away from where she's sitting at the dinner table? Totally worth a tantrum. If I dare to walk into another room to get something? CALL CPS HER MOTHER IS ABANDONING HER. It's actually okay once I've left the room. I can go take a shower and after she screams and cries and throws things for a few minutes, she plays happily with Brian. Until I come back, at which point if I stop touching or looking at her for a second, we're back to where we were before. It's tiring, and it's all I can do sometimes to remind myself that this is only a stage, that she's only small once.

Yet she also is very independent in some ways. (Perhaps that's actually connected to the clinginess?) She wants to walk everywhere now, and usually fights the stroller or the Beco (although once she's in one or the other, she admits defeat and settles down), and it's fun to walk places with her. She knows she has to hold a hand when we cross a street, and usually when we walk along the sidewalk, she reaches up for a hand to hold. It feels so perfect to walk down the street with her and Brian, Adriana between us, holding our hands. She wants to sit in a regular chair, not a high chair, and feed herself. She's always been a bit like this--strong-willed and wishing she were more self-sufficient--but now she is much more vocal about what she wants, screeching when I try to do something for her.

She is making more attempts at words that she has in the past, although usually, no matter what we've asked her to say, she just tells us, "ba ba ba" or "ma ma ma." Instead she continues to sign constantly, picking up signs almost immediately (and has over 60 now). Reading with her is fun, because she knows so many signs and tries to tell the story too. For each page of Good Dog, Carl, she makes at least one sign. She's also paying more attention to the pictures now. Toward the end of Wynken, Blynken, and Nod, another current favorite, she started signing "bird," and finally I asked her where the bird was. She pointed and there in the corner of one of the pictures there was a little bird in the tree that I hadn't even noticed.

She notices everything and is very busy. She will sit still for a story (sometimes several, or at least the same one several times in a row), but other than that it seems that she's constantly moving. Every day we go to the park, and she climbs up and down stairs, goes down slides, attempts to climb ladders, hangs from bars. She digs in the sand, throws and chases after a ball, kicks her legs to try to pump herself even higher in the swings. She keeps me running as I play games with her and try to keep her from falling. And even though I complain about her dare-devilish ways, I am also rather proud.

There are days I look at Adriana and I am just amazed that this is the little baby I had just last year. There are these little gestures she has--brushing her hair out of her eyes, sticking her tongue out a bit when she concentrates, tipping her head to the side as she watches something I am doing--that just make me want to cry, because they seems so perfect to me. I watch her when she's asleep, and I am amazed at how beautiful she is and I have to remind myself that picking her up just to hold her could wake her up. But sometimes I can't help myself and I slip into bed with her, even if she doesn't need me at that moment, just to enjoy the sweetness of being near.

Nature walk: Castle Rock

We hiked at Castle Rock State Park once last fall and Brian has been wanting to go back ever since, but most weekends that he suggests going, I veto it because I am a horrible wife and enjoy making him suffer the weather report has always said that it was going to be 90 degrees there and I just refuse to hike in that kind of weather. But last weekend when Brian was talking about getting out for a hike, I checked the weather report and, after discovering it was "only" going to be in the low 80s, suggested we head up to Castle Rock.

We did the loop suggested by Bay Area Hiker except in reverse, sticking with the Saratoga Gap Trail at first and coming back down on the Ridge Trail, detouring slightly to the campgrounds so that Adriana could get out of the backpack and run around during lunch. I am not a very experienced hiker, and there are some bits of this hike that make me nervous, but I clung anxiously to the metal rope and didn't look down on one narrow part of the Saratoga Gap Trail (and carefully did not watch Brian as he did the same part with the baby on his back), and scooted along using five points of contact as I descended over a rocky bit on the Ridge Trail. But it's good for me to fight my natural inclination to be such a chicken, and the views from up there are worth it.

19 months

These days it seems as though our main goal is to wear Adriana out. I am naturally a bit of a hermit but I do need social interaction, so I think it is good that in order to keep Adriana happy (and tired at night) we have to get out to the park every day. We let her walk to and from the park most days, hoping to tired her even more. The walk is slow, as she stops to inspect leaves (big, leathery ones from the magnolias are the best), gather small rocks from the landscaping along the sidewalk, and pick up every piece of trash she encounters (I never realized how much litter there was in our neighborhood), and I have to remind myself that she is learning and that this is just as much fun and as interesting as the park for her. Plus, at least she's not climbing anything and terrifying me.

She has so much fun at the park, too. I think she was about 16 months old when she fell off a slide, and she'd been afraid of them ever since, but suddenly she's back on them, and clearly enjoying herself. We usually take a ball to the park, and she likes to chase that around. I do feel a bit silly playing fetch with a baby, but hey, it helps her sleep better at night. She has always been sensitive to different textures, disliking the feel of sand and grass, but she is beginning to play in the sandbox a bit. She still doesn't want to walk on the sand too much, but she'll sit at the edge and shovel sand into a pail. And last week at Eagle Park, where there is a spigot in the middle of the sand for the kids to made puddles with, she had a great time getting dirty and wet, which is totally unlike her.

It's so interesting to me to see Adriana show that she has a real memory now. It's a bit easier to see in the kids we know her age who are talking: when a child's mom mentions some activity from the weekend, the child will jump in here and there with little words that show she or he remembers the even too. But suddenly Adriana is showing that she remembers things, too. I think she did before, but now it is more obvious. After I had suffered one night from severe insomnia, Brian came home early from work to take her to the park and give me a break. The next night when he got home, she got her shoes and started signing for the park. When we arrived at my dad's house for a visit, she went first to the room where the stereo is, so she could request music, having remembered where he'd turned it on a few weeks before on our last visit. Then she ran straight for his fridge, where she can just barely reach the water and ice dispenser. And I was fascinated when, at play group one day she started signing "dog" and I turned to see that some friends who had brought their dogs to the group two weeks earlier had arrived. Adriana signed dog frantically, looking toward the tree where the dogs had been tied the last time they were there. The dogs weren't there this time though--it was just that Adriana associated this other mom and baby with their dogs. I was surprised that she remembered the dogs being there, but I was especially surprised that she could remember who the dogs had been with.

I wish I could remember when Adriana's imaginative play began. I suppose she was pretending to nurse a baby at 14 months. But now she plays little games all the time. She likes to pretend to feed her baby and to feed me. She makes her monkey turn somersaults. She picks up the watering can and pretends to water the plants on our balcony that are at her level. She gets her popper when I say it's time to vacuum to pretend that she is vacuuming. And she does seem to be something of a neat freak (although you wouldn't guess it by looking at our apartment). She can reach into kitchen drawers now, and often after she plays with a juicer or measuring cup for a little while, she puts it back and closes the drawer. If I splash water on the floor while I'm doing dishes or cooking, she gets a towel and wipes it up for me. After I give her a tissue to wipe her nose, she runs to put it in the trash herself.

Summer has been good for Adriana's eating. She tastes all the fruit at the farmer's market. Her favorites are berries. We're on a break from strawberries right now--I think they are responsible for the little rash around her mouth--so she is instead attempting to eat her weight in blackberries. She likes the veggies that Brian grills and gets excited when she sees me shucking corn. I wish she would eat more protein-rich foods, so I scramble her an egg a few times a week, and she is pretty good about eating cheese. She hasn't been particularly interested in what little meat she's been offered, but when Brian started calling the chicken he was offering her "bird," she suddenly was willing not only to try it but also to ask for more. I don't know if it was that "bird" was a word she recognizes or if it was because it's also a sign she knows so that she could ask for more, but I am totally calling beef "cow" the next time it's offered to her.

Her sleep still isn't perfect, but it's improving. We've discussed night weaning, but it always sounds a little traumatic or just like too much work, and I give up the idea rather quickly. It's not that I'm still at the point that I hear mothers talk about where they treasure the nighttime feedings with their babies, since I barely remember most of the nighttime feedings. Some nights are better than others, and I think things are improving. Last summer, Adriana was still consistently waking up several times a night and then getting up for the day around seven. Brian would get up with her and I would get up an hour later to find them out on the balcony together while Brian ate breakfast. It was very sweet to see them together, and I loved getting that extra hour of sleep. Now that she sleeps better, I'm usually the first one up, and I have been treasuring my quiet time in the morning, so I was a little disappointed on Friday morning when, after nursing Adriana back down at 6:30 and getting up to feed the cat, I turned to find her right behind me, smiling. I drank my juice while she played, and then I made myself a cup of cocoa and took it out on the balcony to enjoy the cool, grey morning air. Adriana joined me, and we ate some berries and cereal together, and then cuddled in the chair while we watched hummingbirds at our feeder. She's normally so active that I don't get a lot of snuggles except when she is nursing, tired, or sick, and I was so glad that she had gotten up early that day to share my quiet time.

Things that made me happy last night

1. Going outside to admire the color of the sky at sunset and seeing a rainbow.


2. Two silly monkeys with their "big smiles."

Hi Mary Ellen!

Look! It's not a sandwich recipe anymore! Aren't you happy?

Instead, here are some pictures of a little girl eating corn: