Travel journal: New York with kids (Day 3)

Before we left for New York I picked up a book on things to do with kids there. It listed lots of parks and zoos and museums, and offered the very useful tip that the Children’s Museum of the Arts had drop-in art classes for kids one to three-and-a-half several days a week. Adriana has loved the art classes she’s done at home, so on the third morning of our trip, I braved taking the girls on the subway during the morning commute, and headed downtown for the class. I think it was even better than the art classes we have done here. At $22 per family per class it seemed a bit pricey, but it was nice to have a morning with less time on my feet and Adriana really enjoyed it.

The class started out very small: there was a table with play-doh and a table where the kids could draw with markers. A few museum employees were around to chat with the parents (and grandmothers and nannies) and kids while they worked on their art. They were nice and the kids were happy, but I wasn’t terribly impressed with the class. But then a folding screen was taken down and we were able to move further back into the museum. Here there was a sand table filled with soft white sand, some water colors set before mirrors for self portraits, and some sort of goopy stuff. Adriana went straight for the sand, while Lyra crawled around on some beanbag chairs. Shortly after that, the next screen was removed, revealing a table for doing collages, and one for painting with little toy cars, but Adriana was working intently with the sand. A couple of times I pointed out the other projects to her, giving her time warnings, so that she wouldn’t be disappointed if she didn’t get to them, but she was happy pouring sand around in the table.

And then suddenly one of the museum people had a tambourine and was singing, and he led the children and their caregivers down a steep flight of stairs for music time. It was funny to see how quickly the children all followed, even the ones who, like us, had never been there before. Downstairs, he sat before them and led them in songs. Some were songs that all kids know, some were new to me, but he never stopped singing, it seemed, just went from one song into the next. Adriana mostly observed but seemed happy, and she eagerly took a drum for each of us when they were passed out. After music, the kids went into a sort of ball pit to play--an area of the room with walls a couple of feet high filled with yoga balls. I think Adriana would have loved it eventually, but she only went in for about two minutes at the end. I could tell she was interested, but in a new place with so many new people, she just needed time to watch, and then the class was over and we had to go.

I hadn’t packed us a real lunch, so as we left the museum, I gave Adriana some snacks and wandered through SoHo, looking for a place to eat. So many places looked good and interesting, but I knew I needed something casual, fast, and with something that Adriana would willingly eat. I kept wishing for a Mexican place to suddenly appear, but wasn’t having any luck. Just as I was kicking myself for not bringing a picnic to eat at a playground, I spotted Ideya. There was a news clipping in the window identifying it was a good place to eat with kids, and I quickly scanned the menu and spotted beans and rice, which meant Adriana would be happy.

She was happy, and so was I, with a bowl of cold soup and a salad, and after that we felt better about walking some more, so we walked and walked. I took a meandering route from SoHo to Greenwich Village, spotting a few familiar places on the way. Finally Adriana spotted a playground and asked to stop. I remembered the first time we took a trip with her as a toddler, just a weekend in San Francisco, and how our rule was to stop whenever we saw a playground. She needed time to play, the baby needed to nurse, and my back needed a break, so it was perfect. Also perfect, of course, was that it was conveniently across the street from Magnolia Bakery, and I had been promising cupcakes, so after some play time, we each picked out a treat.

It was a very kid-centric day. I went to New York to do a kiddie art class, play on a playground, and eat cupcakes, I thought to myself as we headed back to the subway. And just as I thought that, I glanced up, feeling a sense of vague familiarity with where I was, and realized I was right in front of a bar, where on a previous trip to New York, a work trip, I’d stayed out until two in the morning drinking and listening to music with a friend. Then I had no choice but to laugh at how much things had changed in the six years since that trip.

“Do we need an uphill train or a downhill one?” Adriana asked me as we folded up the stroller to go down into the subway, making me laugh even more.

Travel journal: New York with kids (Day 2)

On our second day in New York, the girls and I got on the subway and headed for Brooklyn first thing. Well, first thing is perhaps not exactly accurate. With all of us sleeping a little bit late because of the time change and Adriana’s generally cranky mood, it took us a bit of time to get out of the apartment in the morning, but we eventually made it onto the train. We stopped first at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. Although we had the stroller with us, Adriana was eager to walk through the gardens. She liked smelling the herbs in the herb gardens, dancing by the lily pool, and exploring the vegetable garden. There was a children’s garden that was perfect for her: little hedges cut with tunnels for her to walk through, benches shaped like butterflies, and a worm bin to dig in.

After the garden, we headed back up to the Brooklyn Museum--not to go in, but to visit outside with a friend who works there. Some company was doing a photo shoot outside (I’d noticed them setting up when we’d first come out of the subway that morning), so the fountains weren’t on, but we got to watch. I couldn’t figure out why they were bothering to do the shoot outside the museum since they were using a green screen. A couple in business attire strolled back and forth in front of the screen for a while, and then a woman in a pink track suit jogged on a treadmill that was covered in the green screen stuff.

We walked from the museum through Prospect Park to the zoo. I didn’t realize at that point that we weren’t going through the main entrance to the zoo, but I’m glad we entered where we did, because we entered at the Discovery Trail, where there was a rope “spider web” to climb around in, big turtle shells for pretending to be a turtle, and giant eggs to hatch from. Adriana had fallen asleep on the walk there, and waking where there was a place to play was perfect. It was mid-afternoon by the time we got there, so the animals weren’t particularly active and the zoo was nearly empty of visitors. We saw wallabies (and I discovered that Adriana thinks the Wallaby brand yogurt I buy for her comes from wallaby milk; that was so cute that I certainly did not disillusion her) and emus, red pandas and peacocks. The baby baboon had gone to bed for the day, but we got to watch the adults grooming one another, and Adriana was thrilled to see the tamarin monkeys chasing one another through their habitat. I was eager to get on the subway before rush hour, but as we headed toward the exit, I realize that the sea lion feeding was about to happen. It was already four o’clock, but I stopped anyhow, because we got to be right there for it, with only two or three other families. Adriana was thrilled to see the sea lions leaping and diving. It was worth not making it onto the train until after five. And the trains weren’t that crowded in that direction at first anyhow, so we found seats without any trouble.

I’d learned my lesson the night before and prepared her a real dinner at the apartment and gave her a bath, even though the nap in the park meant she wasn’t going to bed for some time. She went out with Brian to bring back take out for our dinner, while I put Lyra to bed, as we began to realize that putting either one to bed while the other one was present and awake was just not going to be possible when we were all in one room.

Travel journal: New York with kids (Day 1)

This was written months ago, but it needed to be edited, and I never posted it. After taking a quick pass through, I'm going to upload it, however out of date it is.

There are these moments when we travel, where Brian and I look at each other in horror and wonder what on earth it is we’re trying to prove. It happens early in the trip, as we deal with a tantrum or some discomfort or confusion, and the entire trip seems like a mistake before it’s barely even started.

We went to New York in September and the what-were-we-thinking moment came not too long after we’d made it into the studio apartment we were renting for a week. Brian was there for work for a week, and rather than face seven bedtimes on my own with both girls, we were all there, but I was beginning to doubt the wisdom of our decision as we moved furniture so that the bathroom door could open even when the sofa bed was unfolded, and we dealt with the reality of trying to get the girls to bed when they were in the same room.

But in the morning, once everyone was fed and dressed and Brian was leaving for work, suddenly it seemed fun again. It wasn’t that we were trying to prove anything. It was simply fun to travel and fun to do it with the kids--a new kind of adventure. And with a little apartment and a Starbucks on every corner in a city where I could always find someone who spoke English, it wasn’t a very complicated adventure.

I started out every day the same way--with our typical morning struggles (Adriana is so not a morning person), then Brian leaving for the subway, and a while later, heading out the door with Lyra on my back, Adriana buckling herself into the little umbrella stroller we’d brought, the diaper bag and a bag of snacks hanging from the handles. We’d stop at Starbucks to get a latte for me, vanilla milk for Adriana, and one of those fruit puree packets they’re selling now to make feeding Lyra easy.

Our first full day, Monday, didn’t go exactly as planned. The previous night we’d grabbed some snacks and breakfast stuff at the Fairway a block away from the apartment, but I’d planned on doing the real shopping for the week in the morning. However, when I realized that Brian had left with our only key to the apartment, plans changed: I wasn’t going to buy groceries if I couldn’t put them away. I called Brian and we made plans to have lunch together and hand off the key. I realized that we were only a few blocks up from Lincoln Center, and I figured Adriana would like to see the fountain there on the way to Brian’s office, so we started walking...only to discover when we got there that Gilmore Girls was filming there, and we couldn’t get close to the fountain at all. I used my phone for directions, forgetting I had it set for walking directions rather than transit. And the walking directions it gave me looked so easy--just head straight down 9th Avenue for a couple of miles and I would be there. So I started walking.

The walk was longer than I expected (I should have checked cross streets and gotten it into my head that it was fifty blocks away), but it was fun. Adriana occasionally hopped out of the stroller to walk, and Lyra napped on my back. We stopped to eat carrots and grapes from our snackbag on occasion--usually when we spotted some construction, so we had the entertainment of seeing diggers and cranes at work while we ate. I love just walking around cities, and I got my chance to do that, even with little kids in tow, seeing the different neighborhoods 9th Avenue took us through on our way to the office in Chelsea. Before this life with Adriana and Lyra, I might have planned my walk to take me by certain points of interest. This time we saw whatever was there on our way, which was kind of fun. A huge garage of giant mail trucks wouldn’t necessarily have been on my list, but Adriana was fascinated.

After lunch with Brian, I braved the subway for the first time with the girls, and found it surprisingly easy. We entered at a station with an elevator, which certainly helped, although I think that was the only time we used a subway elevator during the course of the week, and it was nice that our next destination, the American Museum of Natural History, was a straight shot on the uptown train. Since Adriana didn’t need a ticket on the subway, after she helped me unclip my bag so I could carry it and fold the stroller, she slipped under the turnstile and helped me maneuver the folded stroller through it after I swiped my card. She held my hand on the stairs to the platform and bravely sat between two strangers (both women--I think if they’d been men, she wouldn’t have done it) when she was offered a seat. I was also offered a seat but opted to stand, since I had the baby on my back. When we got off the train, Adriana was thrilled with the animal mosaics in the Natural History Museum’s station, and helped me get the stroller unfolded and my bag into it, informing me, “I don’t need to ride. I need to see dinosaurs.” When Lyra woke up from her nap, we did let her ride in it. It was nice to give my back a break and as much as she loves the closeness of the carrier, I think she was relieved to have a bit more space for a while.

I wish I could really know what Adriana thought about seeing the dinosaurs. I don’t know how much she understands when I tell her that these are the bones of animals who lived thousands of years ago, that these kinds of animals no longer exist. But she ran from dinosaur to dinosaur, making dinosaur faces and asking me the name of each one. She liked touching the screens on the computers for more information, and I would read the information to her, but I think most of it went over her head. Still, she kept asking me to read her more and I obliged.

After a long walk and being on a different time zone, one floor was really all we could manage, although I would have liked to see the space stuff. So we picked out some postcards for Adriana to send to her grandparents and a dinosaur magnet and headed back to the apartment.

Adriana napped in the stroller on the way back, which I knew she would do. The problem was that I thought that would lead to a good mood for the evening, and I let her have a bowl of cereal for a snack and planned on going out to dinner when Brian returned. That turned out to be a horrible mistake. Even though she was awake until ten that night, she was not fit for public consumption, and we ended up getting our food to go after experience a horrible public meltdown. It was another time when I wondered whether traveling with a preschooler was a good idea, but it was the last time for the trip.

13 months

When I called the pediatrician on Wednesday to ask about the rash on Lyra’s face and her fever and he observed that she was 13 months old, I was surprised, because I’ve noticed that they usually they don’t round up like that. Then I realized that she actually was 13 months old that day.

You would think at 13 months, I would be able to know when she was sick, but I had no clue. One weekend Lyra would only sleep in my arms, so I settled down in my bed with her and we slept for two hours. When we woke up, Brian pointed out that Lyra seemed warm, but I pointed out that we’d been snuggled up under a warm blanket together. It took some time before I registered that she really was too warm and just not herself. I had been enjoying how snuggly she was, when in fact she was snuggly because she didn’t feel well.

Lyra is a good eater most days, but it’s sporadic. When she wasn’t feeling well, she was eating a ton, but then she has days when she hardly eats anything. She’s losing interest in most purees and mashed foods, and wants to feed herself instead, which is slower and messier, but also frees me up. She would love to be able to use a spoon or a fork, but she just doesn’t have the coordination yet. After taking a few stabs at it (HA!), she’ll sit with the utensil in one hand, held high, while feeding herself with the other.

She is saying more words now, but mostly she just says “woof.” She says it when she sees a dog or hears a dog, when she’s pointing at a picture of a dog in a book. She says “boo” and “boom,” as well, or at least approximations of them. She does imitate other sounds when she’s in the right mood, which thrills Adriana, who is delighted when the baby complies with things like “Say ‘poop’ now, Lyra!”

Suddenly Lyra is afraid of loud noises. I took the girls to Berkeley to ride the steam train and the carousel, and the train was a terrifying experience for the baby. Our first ride on it, she was clinging to my neck and screaming every time the whistle blew, and only did better the second time because we sat in the very last car, and she could hardly hear it. She cried one day when I was using the food processor, and now when she sees me bring it out, she begins to wail in protest.

My favorite thing these days is her kisses. If she sees Brian and me kiss, she makes a kissy face. She points to stuffed animals and says “mwah!” and then will lean to kiss it when I bring it near her. She chases after our poor cat, saying “mwah tat.” She raises her arms to Brian to be picked up so she can kiss him when he gets home from work, and when Adriana will allow it, she wraps her arms around her sister’s waist and raises her face for a kiss. And best of all she runs toward me from across a room, smiling and making kisses, and then leans her face against mine.

My work here is done

"I can't eat pig because I can't eat Piglet because I like him, and if you eat the mommy or the daddy pig, then the little piglets will be sad. And really not the mommy pigs because all the baby pigs have to line up on her belly for their milk. I can't eat cow because I need the cow to give me milk for vanilla milk and cheese and yogurt and ice cream, and it can't do that if you eat it up. I can't eat chicken because then the kids at school would be sad if the chickens were gone, and the feathers taste bad too. I can't eat fish because they are slippery and get away and make funny faces. I can't eat bears because they might eat me first. So I'm a vegetarian."

Is it bad parenting to just tell her it spells "smartass"?

“What does this spell, Mom?” Adriana was holding up an index card on which she’d written out E-D-A-D. She likes to string together random letters and ask me what they spell. Sometimes she does hit on a word or an acronym, and I tell her when she has done that. Other times I will try to pronouce the word for her, if it happens to have any vowels in it, which makes her giggle, and sometimes remind her that not all letters make words.

“That spells ‘edad,’ the Spanish word for age,” I told her.

“I know Spanish?” She exclaimed happily. “Like Elena? Okay, what does this spell?” On the back of the card she’d written out N-M-A-F-r-F-E. (And yes, the R was in lower case.)

“I don’t think that spells anything. It’s just letters.”

“I think it might be Spanish. I think you just don’t know Spanish like me and Elena.”

“Oh, then what does it say?”

“I don’t know,” she told me. “I don’t know how to read.”

12 months (Or, OMG HOW HAS IT ALREADY BEEN A YEAR?)

I woke yesterday around 3:30 in the morning, with Lyra in my arms, and realized that a year ago I had been up with Adriana in the middle of the night, realizing that I was in labor. Watching Lyra sleep, I was amazed that it’s been so long, but as I studied her silhouette in the darkness, bent to kiss her cheek, leaned my face against her hair, I also realized that life without her is already a distant memory.

I lamented to a friend recently that now people were going to start chastising me for calling Lyra a baby, but she is still so clearly a baby, with her chubby cheeks, the way she reaches for me, the way she calms down when I carry her on my back or rock her in my arms. But she’s also growing up, becoming more kid-like every day. I realized one evening a couple of weeks ago that she was stacking two blocks on top of each other. I was stacking the little alphabet blocks into towers for her to knock over, and I noticed that she was trying to imitate me. She could stack on block on top of the other pretty easily, and occasionally she managed a third, but usually after two (and definitely after three) trying to add a block would cause the whole thing to topple. She began stopping at two and then lifting the bottom one while attempting to keep them stacked. She couldn’t keep them balanced for long, but it was fun to watch her experiment with it.

She is also beginning to work out the art of making mischief. I try to redirect her attention from something she’s doing, such as opening a door on the buffet or pulling cookbooks off the shelf, but a few minutes later she’s back at it. Only this time she’s not just doing it for the sake of doing it. Now she starts to do it, and then looks at me and giggles, waiting for me to come stop her. She grabs my phone and makes she she has my attention before she tries to run off with it.

Lyra’s sleep leaves something to be desired (note the above, where she was sleeping in my arms; that seems to be the only way she’ll sleep much these days), but I know she’ll get better at it eventually. Some days she’s down to only one nap, which is quite nice--it breaks up our day a little bit less, and it means she goes to bed at a decent hour. She is developing a good appetite, and we are often amazed at how well she eats, although her intake of “real food” doesn’t seem to have inspired her to cut back on her nursing at all.

She signs “music” all the time, and “milk” and maybe “all done” on occassion. She says “ma ma ma,” and “da da da” and seems to mean them to refer to us. She’s spent the past month pointing at the Christmas tree and making a “T” sound, but she also did a bit of that looking at fish when we went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium last week.

The aquarium was so much fun. Adriana’s been there several times now (as well as the ones in San Francisco, London, and Barcelona, but we all agree that Monterey is the best), and we always enjoy ourselves, but we didn’t take her until she was two, because we didn’t think she’d really appreciate it sooner. Now we realize that we probably didn’t need to wait. Lyra pointed at the fish, and ran around to the different exhibits. She watched other kids, and enjoyed the toddler play area. We had forgotten to grab the baby carrier on the way out the door and I didn’t have a stroller in the car, so she spent most of the time walking. She refuses to hold hands most of the time and tends to wander, so my mother-in-law tied one end of her scarf around Lyra’s chest, and then she felt as if she were roaming free and ran around with so much glee, that we were just happy to watch her.

I remember this age being a lot of work with Adriana. When they’re one they can do so much, but they don’t have any common sense yet. That means I’m constantly hearing the baby screech because she’s shut herself into a bedroom and can’t let herself out or making her sit down on the sit-and-spin or in the bath, fishing little things out of her mouth or reminding her to be gentle with pretty much everything. It's a little easier this time, because I've been through it before, so I was more prepared for it and I know it won't last forever. And also because there are still the sweet little baby moments--nursing her in the arm chair while she holds a fistful of my hair for security, her funny chuckle when we play peek-a-boo, snuggling her when she’s all wrapped up in a towel after her bath. It’s hard to believe that she isn’t the tiny little newborn I’ve been seeing in the pictures I’ve been looking at from last year, and it’s hard to understand that that little lump in the photos is this funny, adorable little girl napping beside me while I write this.

One Day

Today I finished reading David Nicholls’s One Day, and I have a confession: it’s the first book I’ve read since Lyra was born. I'm telling myself that it's perfect to finish a book for the first time the day before she turns one, but mostly it seems shameful in a way to me, someone who considers herself an avid reader--I was the kid who was admonished to put down my book and go out to play--but somehow I just haven’t been reading. I would say it was that I lacked the brain power after having a new baby, but I did a lot of reading when Adriana was an infant (mostly the New Yorkers that I hadn’t read while I was pregnant, if I recall correctly) and this wasn’t exactly an intellectually demanding book, so I think it’s just that coping with an infant and a preschooler has left me drained. I haven’t had the energy to read, at least not anything new. When I’ve wanted something to read, I’ve wandered over to the bookcases, looked guiltily at the books I was given last Christmas, and then picked up something familiar, something I’ve read before that doesn’t require a lot of concentration.

Of course, it helps that One Day was the perfect sort of book for me. I will read any book that promises me a love story, and this one reminded me of The Time Traveler’s Wife, a book I’ve picked up over and over again, since I first grabbed it randomly in the little bookshop near my office in Glover Park before I headed to the airport on a work trip to Iowa. They’re not written in the same style and are very different books in most ways, but it was a love story that followed a couple over a long time. I’m not entirely sure why it is I like that, but I fall for it every time. I liked that I basically knew where the story was going, but that it took a long time to get there and that in the end it did actually surprise me, but didn’t totally baffle me with where it went.

Mostly I’m glad I finally just picked up a book and started reading again. I began a couple of days ago t while I was nursing Lyra to sleep, and then began sneaking away to read more when Brian was playing with the girls. Today Brian took Adriana out on her new bike, and I read while I nursed Lyra to sleep, read while she napped, read while she nursed after her nap, and then put her in her high chair and fed her while I finished the story. It felt good to be immersed in the story, to wonder when I’d next have a chance to settle down to read, to see a new book on my nightstand when I settled into bed.

Now I have to read the other books I was given this Christmas. Then I’ll start on last year’s books.

Bath time!

I say all the time that Lyra loves the bath, but here is photographic evidence. We don’t always bathe the girls together--Lyra loves to splash, and Adriana isn’t always a big fan of that, so sometimes it seems easier not too. But Lyra is always eager to get in with her big sister, and some nights Adriana asks that they have their bath together. Those nights, Lyra usually comes out first, and I get her ready for bed while Brian washes Adriana’s hair. But tonight, after I did that, Lyra hung out in the bathroom while Adriana continued to play. Brian came out to tell me something, and a few minutes later, we heard Adriana screeching. We ran to see what was going on, and then Brian sent me back out for my camera

“How did she even get in there?” I asked after I snapped a couple of pictures.

“Head first!” Adriana told me. And Lyra just sat in there looking pleased with herself.

Going places

Adriana was playing with a little toy plane from Lyra’s Christmas stocking, and looked up at me.

“Mom, we haven’t gone on a plane in a really long time.” I agreed, and we decided that the last time we’d flown anywhere it had been our trip to New York back in September. “But that was a long time ago. Mom, let’s just GO SOMEWHERE.”

I know that urge. I’ve been expecting it myself, although I think for me it will wait until January, once we get through the girls’ birthdays. Last year, that urge had me planning a trip to Spain soon after Lyra was born. The year before I was shopping for airfare to London as soon as we got past the excitement of the holidays. It’s funny to hear Adriana expressing it, even though I know she loves to travel. She protested coming home when we were getting ready to leave New York (and a couple of weeks ago wondered aloud why we couldn't just go live there), and asks periodically when we will go back to DC or London.

“Maybe we’ll take a plane the next time we go see Grandma and Grandpa,” I told her.

“But let’s go some place NEW, too, okay?” That made me happy--I like that she wants to see new places.

“I think we’re going to Boston in the spring,” I told her, explaining when she asked that it was north of DC and New York, that it was where the ducks from Make Way for Ducklings lived, and how many months were between now and May.

“I think we need to go to the library. We need to get the ducklings book again. And maybe some books that tell us everything we can do and with maps. And then we’ll know everything when we go to Boston. And we can go to Paris after that.”

Sounds like a plan.

Not like the other

When Adriana’s first Christmas rolled around, I expected the whole thing to just blow her away. I expected her mind to be boggled when we brought a real live tree into the house. I expected to be shooing her away from pine needles and ornaments and lights constantly. But none of it happened. She didn’t like the way the tree felt, so she didn’t touch it or anything on it, and at the time I attributed her matter-of-factness about the tree’s presence to fact that everything was new and unexpected for her, so having a tree in the house wasn’t actually all that unusual.

Because of that experience with Adriana, it didn’t even occur to me to expect Christmas to surprise Lyra this year. But Lyra is a very different child. It’s her first Christmas and she’s pretty much exactly the same age Adriana was three years ago, but she is not just taking this all in stride. When she saw the tree on top of our car she pointed and shouted, and then kept on pointing. When it was in the house she toddled right over to it and kept patting the branches. As soon as I put the lights on it, she was tugging on the cord and tasting the bulbs. There are a few soft ornaments down at her level that she keeps taking off and bringing to me. For the first few days, even when she was playing with other things, she would occasionally turn and point and exclaim “Oooohhhhh!” Now it’s been over a week, and she’s not quite as amazed, but she still is excited to see it every morning when she gets up.

It has me rethinking Adriana’s initial reaction. When Adriana enters a new situation, she has a tendency to sit back and watch. When I signed us up for Music Together this fall, I knew that Adriana wouldn’t participate the first few classes. It took a month or so before she wasn’t sitting against the wall or clinging to me for most of the class. Lyra, on the other hand, watched the other kids intently, grabbed at instruments, and was climbing into the teacher’s lap the very first time. Maybe Adriana wasn’t just taking the tree in stride; maybe she just needed time to soak it all in. And of course she didn’t mess with the tree. This was a kid who had to be coaxed to crawl on grass, wouldn’t play in sand until she was almost two years old, and freaked out the first time she tried finger paints. Pine needles were too new and strange a texture for her, and since she never put anything in her mouth (not even food, it seemed) my worries about her swallowing needles and gnawing on lights and ornaments were totally unfounded.

I’m glad that now she loves the tree and the decorations, and I’m happy I know her a little better now, so I can know what to expect. Every kid is different, and I have my own example right in front of me. It’s strange to think that babies have their own personalities so soon, but I have evidence of those little personalities right here.

My very own Chicken Little

As we headed south on Grant Road toward Adriana’s school this afternoon, I pointed out the low clouds in the Santa Cruz mountains to her. “Aren’t the clouds on the mountains pretty?”

“Those aren’t clouds.”

“Yes, they are,” I told her. “They’re just--what are they?” I have to remind myself sometimes not to correct and instruct, and remember to just listen and explore and see what happens.

“That’s where the sky fell.”

“The sky fell?”

“Yeah, the blue sky fell. The sky is gray today. The blue fell off of it.” I was sort of surprised. It made sense to me that a low cloud was fallen sky in Adriana’s view of things, but this wasn’t quite what I’d expected.

“But that’s not blue right there. That’s white and gray.” I wasn't correcting, just testing.

“That’s because it’s the puff of dust. Because the blue sky fell and then the dust flew up when it hit the ground. Look! A GARBAGE TRUCK! Hey, are we almost to the diggers and the new houses?”

One little phrase

I watched this video last week when there was a link posted to it on Facebook. Most of the time I end up following one of these links, I have to admit I skip through it, jumping over most of the talking, so that I can hear the music. This one didn’t have any whole songs in it, and most of the music was background for the talking, so I listened, and I’m glad I did, if only for one line pretty early on:

"If you're very lucky, you get one little phrase that gets into a consciousness, and somebody else down the line will hear it and it will help them to understand their lives at a certain moment."

I guess that’s the point of all art. We listen to music, read stories and poems, view paintings and films, and sometimes it speaks to us in some way. It helps us to understand something. But I liked the way he said it, and hearing it made me think of the songs and stories that have touched me in that way. There are songs I have listened to over and over for just a single line in them that meant something to me, and others where it’s not any specific lyric that’s important to me, exactly, but the whole feel of the song. There are stories that immediately have gripped me, that I’ve related to, and others that I’ve come back to reread years later, when I remember that there’s something in them that might be important to me. Sometimes it’s an entire novel, sometimes it’s a stanza in a poem. One time I picked up a book I had read once before and flipped through it until I came to a passage on the lower half of the right-hand page, where I had somehow remembered it was. I suppose it had stood out to me the first time through, given that I knew where to find it, but it wasn’t until a year later that I needed that passage, that it connected to my own life. And there are a dozen other things I can think of: a painting in a museum, a picture on a photoblog, a handful of books, poems I’ve copied into journals, songs I’ve listened to over and over, waiting for that one important line, that expresses exactly what I need to hear at that moment.

Outsmarted

We do a lot of pretty ridiculous role playing around here. Adriana loves it and it’s the best way to keep her from arguing when we need her to do something, so we are constantly saying, “Let’s play haircut!” Or shoe store, or dentist, or jacket store. And it’s completely silly, but it helps with the stubbornness, so we do it. But it doesn’t always work.

Me: Time to brush teeth! Let’s play dentist.
Adriana: [Ignores me.]
Me: Adriana! Time for your dentist appointment.
Adriana: [Ignores me.]
Me: Ring-ring! Ring-ring!
Adriana: [Ignores me.]
Me: Ring-ring!
Adriana: Mom. I’m busy. I’m not going to answer. Just text me.
Me: But you don’t know how to read.
Adriana: It’s a pretend text. I’ll just pretend to read it.
Me: [Rolling my eyes right back at her.]
Adriana: Text me.
Me: Okay, I’m sending you a text reminding you of your dentist appointment. Ding! That was the text arriving at your phone.
Adriana: Hmmm...I have a text. Oh, it’s from the dentist....Ring-ring!
Me: Hello, dentist’s office.
Adriana: Hello, this is Adriana. I need to cancel my appointment.

11 months

Lyra is only eleven months old, but even Adriana is telling me, “She’s not really a baby anymore.” Just after reaching 10 months, Lyra took her first steps and her walk quickly developed from zombie to drunk elf to ZOMGWTFHOWISSHESOBIGALREADY. She still staggers around and falls down a lot, and still continues to crawl much of the time, but she scampers after her sister through the house as best as she can, a big smile on her face. Most of her stranger anxiety seems to be gone, which is convenient because as she toddles around, she doesn’t have to worry about whose leg she grabs to pull herself back up after a tumble.

We’re begin to think we might have a lefty on our hands. My mom was left-handed and Brian’s father is ambidextrous, so it’s definitely a possibility. When Lyra eats finger foods, she mostly uses her left hand, and that seems to be the hand she uses to pick things up, even when it seems to us that her right hand would be more convenient. When she goes staggering around the house clutching a random object (a block! a spoon! a Target receipt! a magnet! a package of dental floss!--all great finds when you’re 11 months old), it’s in her left hand. Wondering which hand she would use to draw or write, I tried handing her a crayon the other day when Adriana and I were drawing, and she took it in her left hand....and then chewed on it.

She eats what seems like a lot to me, although Adriana certainly messed with my perspective on that. She hasn’t mastered a sippy cup yet, but she likes to be offered one, and will also take sips from my water glass (with help, of course).

Lyra babbles a lot now, and so much of the time it sounds like she’s talking because of her different sounds and the inflection, but the only real word so far seems to be “mama.” She repeats sounds when asked (when she’s in the mood)--b, d, f, m, and s. She likes to pretend to talk on the phone. It started when she would grab my phone or a toy one, but she’ll do it with a block or another toy, or even just her hand. She holds whatever it is up to her ear and shouts vowel sounds. Sometimes she does seem to approximate “hello” (ah-whoa), but that might just be my imagination.

The phone trick seems almost like sign language to me, and I know I need to start being better about signing with her. Lyra does a little bit of signing, but nothing consistent yet. She’s had “milk” off and on for a few months, and I swear she signs music. Today I started noticing that when she was looking at and exclaiming over the cat she was patting her cheek, which seemed like a start toward the sign for cat.

For a while I thought we might have a better sleeper on our hands this time around, because Lyra seemed to sleep better on her own in the cosleeper than Adriana ever did, but now Lyra seems to sleep for extended periods of time only when snuggled up with me. As she’s struggled with a few minor colds this fall, she’s spent lots of time sleeping in my arms, which means I end up with a sore back and shoulder some mornings, but I haven’t been too inclined to do much about it, because waking up to find her still in my arms, my cheek on her hair is awfully nice.

She is a lot of work now: she doesn’t nap as much as I might like, and she gets into everything. I’m lamenting the fact that she’s no longer a tiny baby that rides in a stretchy wrap on my chest and sleeps most of the time, because I really do love the newborn days. But she’s fun now, even as she’s knocking down a tower of blocks that Adriana has worked so hard on or pulling bags of cornmeal and sugar out of the kitchen cabinet that didn’t latch properly. And when she was a newborn I couldn’t ask her for a kiss and have her lean in sweetly to give me one the way she does now.