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.
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