Da Mamas

That is yours truly. I am "da Mamas." It is very charming, how Daisy makes things plural. She plays a game now where she puts her rubber ducky on a ledge and perform "Humpies." It goes like this: "Humpy Dumpy had a wall. Humpy Dumpy, one, two, pash!" (That last means "splash," and that's where the duck gets to fall off the wall.)

She is infatuated with Mark's KISS book. She identifies Ace and Gene (pronounced "GEEN" with a hard "g") fairly reliably. She likes to give hugs to the KISS members' images, apparently not put off at all by the horrific faces they're making. She points to a skull in one of the pictures and says, "Baby!" She points to their flashy stage lights and says, "Sun!" She will sit and read this book for hours, hugging it and pointing to the various characters. It is very funny. She does call them "Tubbies" from time to time; yes, she has seen the Teletubbies, I will admit it, I will admit it. There is some vague connection between KISS and the Tubbies going on in her brain.

This girl is waking up at midnight (one night ago) or 1:30 (last night) and absolutely refusing to go back to sleep-- despite the fact that we have the most beautiful bedtime ritual in the world. She often asks for "bed," she gives us goodnight hugs, she seems totally content to be placed down in her crib, awake, holding her monkey. She goes to sleep and sleeps for five hours. And then she wakes up and the horrors begin.

So-- I could talk about that, I suppose. But there is not much to say. I am definitely suffering health-wise (all day today I had a pounding stress headache, for example, and I feel dizzy, and somewhat sick to my stomach-- all of which I'm pretty sure is sleep deprivation, not an actual illness).

But I guess I'd rather focus on "Humpies," and the adorable little sentences she's stringing together, and how she can say all of the "Ring around the Rosy" nursery rhyme with only a few words left out here and there.

A girl and her dada

An outing

Dada will be doing most of the work


I must clutch both my "flaymos" in my hands at all times


The Lands End trail is only two blocks from my house--not bad, eh?


Check out my dimp







I'm getting a bit tired now


They have really worn me out, but I'm still clutching my flaymos


I will soon drop one of the flaymos, causing Mama to run frantically back down the path to retrieve it; a girl must have not one but two flaymos.

My girl wows me

We noticed tonight that if we sang parts of Daisy's favorite songs, or recited nursery rhymes she likes, and then stopped to let her fill in the blanks--she could. It was sort of mind-blowing, how many of them she knows. She did this over and over again for different songs and nursery rhymes, filling in key words. But even more astounding to us, she finally just started singing along with Mark as he sang "Wings like a Dove." I didn't even know that song was one of her favorites, or that she ever listened to it in a particular way. It kind of freaked me out, truly, to hear her _singing_, lines at a time (in a babyish way, of course, but recognizably the right words). She was also roughly on key, her notes fitting in more or less with Mark's. This girl wows me!!!!!

She can also count to six flawlessly, and then to ten with mistakes :-) "Seven" and "ten" are not her favorite numbers, apparently. She has a bunch of sentences now and long phrases. I should see if I can remember some of them: "Mama, knock on doors" (she says this when I go to the bathroom, and comes knocking on the door--doesn't like me to have any privacy, that girl); "Up and down, up and down"; "Ready, set, go"; "Ten apples up on top" (of course); "Bump on head" (and "Bop head"); "Clap hanties"; "Wash hands"; "Find Wacky" (our cat); "Flamos in cup!" (as she insistently inserts her "flamos," her two pink flamingo magnets, into a cup); and lots others that I really should be recording. She speaks in long sentences but sometimes I can only make out a few words, although I know she is intending more. She sits with her books for the longest time, narrating them in this hilariously authoritative voice. She'll clear her throat and say, "One day," as she begins (because, hey, that's how a book often begins, isn't it?) and "The end" at the end. And in the middle, there's lots of babble with appropriate inflections that sound sort of like the way we've been reading the books to her--very good imitations of our sounds and rhythms. But more and more, I notice it isn't just babble; that for every page, she's saying multiple words that really apply to what's going on. I honestly stopped writing down her verbal stuff in my book for her because I couldn't keep up with her anymore. She says many new things every day and never fails to surprise me. And she is so damned funny! I can hardly stand it. We are always laughing at something she's saying (or crying-- I have to say that hearing her sing tonight made tears spring into my eyes). The small detail alone that she calls us "Mamas" and "Dadas" (plural) tends to crack me up consistently. She has some funny personality quirks, too-- so, when she wants to nurse and I won't let her, she flings herself on the floor and yells "Bonk!" (signifying the bonking of her head on the floor). And as I've mentioned before, "Ding dong! Ding dong!" is her distress cry, also so amusing to us that today we deliberately took the "flamos" away in the hopes that she'd yell it. She is also deeply attached to a particular stuffed doggie, a stuffed monkey, and various other animals. And she is VERY deeply attached to particular books, which she specifically names and asks for.

Well, that's my update for now. She wows me!

Even better

Thanks to Dena, now I have a whole series of pictures of Daisy and Henry at Crissy Field (see below), including a little sequence in which Daisy tried to put her favorite flamingo on Henry's head...because, you see, everything must go "up on top," where the ten apples go. It was a beautiful day and there is such a nice wide path there for Daisy to practice her Frankensteinian walk.

Thrown for a loop

Okay, has anyone ever heard of this?? And can you please tell me what the heck is going on??:

Daisy is now doing the most beautiful bedtime routine imaginable. It is almost stunning how perfect it is. She ASKS to go to bed. I nurse her, but only for the briefest time, and she usually doesn't even seem interested in a bottle now. She takes just a sip or two of it and then asks to go to bed. And all of this is happening in the living room, btw. Mark carries her to her crib and places her down in it, awake. She snuggles her monkey and gets comfortable and goes to sleep. It is UNBELIEVABLE.

Except night after night after night, she wakes up at midnight, screaming for us, and is totally inconsolable. Basically, we don't sleep between midnight and five, because it's back and forth, back and forth to Daisy. She only sleeps intermittently in that time, too. Last night she slept from 5 AM to 7:30, finally, and then was up for the day.

What is going on? Does anyone know? We have read in all our sleep books that problems like this tend to arise when you put a baby down in her crib asleep, and then she wakes up in the middle of the night and doesn't know how to soothe herself back to sleep, because she's so dependent on you to get to sleep and doesn't remember being placed in the crib. So to put a baby down in her crib awake and let her get herself to sleep is what all the books recommend. Okay, I know-- the books don't know everything, and I must sound terribly naive to be saying, "Why aren't things going according to the books?" It's just that when sleep problems have come up in the past, I've been able to find at least some solace in looking through the books for advice, and now I just feel like I'm out there in outer space with no idea what to do.

We do have a few theories. The most plausible explanation seems to be that this is somehow being caused by the huge milestone she just hit (walking-- and every day she's walking more and more confidently, and further and further away from us). Last night we noticed that in her efforts to get back to sleep, she seemed unable to stop fidgeting and tossing and turning. It was like her body was getting out of her control, and just needed to move. I'm thinking the new impulses to walk, along with her amazing cognitive/linguistic developments as of late, might be throwing her off in some way? I don't know. Or maybe she's having nightmares. It's just odd, how it always happens at exactly the same time (midnight, give or take ten minutes). And since she's so capable of going to sleep in the first place, why doesn't she soothe herself back to sleep when she wakes up in the middle of the night?

We're going on now almost a month of not sleeping much at night. It's kind of crazy, how I continue to function.

Daisy in purple

Daisy in Macy's One-Day Sale catalog for Dec. 8. I would love a hard copy if anyone gets this catalog.

How sweet it is

when your beloved daughter, whom you've been ministering to for the last *twelve* sleepless nights, rejects your loving goodbye embrace as you leave for work and instead clings desperately to "gommy" as though a monster from her worst baby nightmare were after her....

Walking

I think I will officially annouce that Daisy is walking, at 16 months. It's not perfect-- she still looks shaky and has to sit down sometimes. But she will walk across an entire room now by herself, and yesterday she stood up from a sitting position without needing to pull up on anything. So, I think this counts as "walking," even if it's not 100% steady!

So, let's recount: walking, check. Sleeping, no check :-)

Ding dong!

Daisy has a new thing she does, and I first noticed it over Thanksgiving, when we were visiting our family in Fort Bragg. If the play with her two-and-a-half-year-old cousin Hannah got too rough in some way (and I should add that in general, she was totally delighted by Hannah and has been more physically active and walking more since this trip), Daisy would start shouting, "Ding dong! Ding dong!" like she was sounding an emergency alarm and needed to be rescued. I didn't think anything of it at first, but then she did it again under similar circumstances, and she's been doing it since we've been home. Mark reported that when he turned on the blowdryer (she hates its sound and the sound of the vacuum cleaner), she started crying and yelling, "Ding dong! Ding dong!" And today when I tried to give her a nap and she clearly didn't want it, again, "Ding dong!"

It is so funny. I wonder where she got this idea. It is oddly appropriate... like sounding a bell or an alarm to alert people that an undesirable situation is occurring. You know, we should really all start doing this. It is so simple, yet so evocative. It would be so nice to scream out "Ding dong!" and then be rescued from whatever life situation was happening that one wanted out of. Yeah.