I sit a cat water

This is what Daisy says as she sits down in the bowl of our cats' water.

I guess this sounds right. But does it?

You Are a Question Mark

You seek knowledge and insight in every form possible. You love learning. And while you know a lot, you don't act like a know it all. You're open to learning you're wrong. You ask a lot of questions, collect a lot of data, and always dig deep to find out more. You're naturally curious and inquisitive. You jump to ask a question when the opportunity arises. Your friends see you as interesting, insightful, and thought provoking. (But they're not always up for the intense inquisitions that you love!) You excel in: Higher education You get along best with: The Comma

What Punctuation Mark Are You?

I eat a lakes!

Daisy has a rather disgusting habit of licking at her bath water like a dog. I want to stop her, but when she looks up at me with a look of devilish glee and crows, "I eat a lakes!!", I usually lose my resolve to reprimand her and start laughing.

One of our other favorite comments of hers now is one she does whenever she squats down, eating something--could be anything, anywhere--and says, "I sit a picnic!" She said it today while squatting in the hallway eating Goldfish crackers.

She has so many funny sentences but those are the ones that come to mind right now. Unfortunately, she has gotten very into "No" and "Not" already, which I thought were more the province of the terrible twos. One cute use of it, though: she has started disliking any part of a book in which someone cries, so when I'm reading to her and I tell her some character is crying, she immediately says, "No. Not."--and flips the page.

Oh dear God, that's cute

Or should this be titled, "Henry and his girlfriends"? :-)

This morning

In her high chair, while I was preparing her breakfast, Daisy yelled loudly, "I likes toast! I likes berries! I likes dancing!"

Her new thing seems to be, "OHHH, NICE!!!" said the way--I don't know--you might comment on a great play in a sports game you're watching. I guess Mark and/or I must say this without being aware of it. Sometimes it is a comment on something spontaneous that happens, or sometimes the comment is attached to a noun--so, for example, she opened her Richard Scarry book last night and said, "Ohhh, nice book!" It is said very loudly and enthusiastically. This morning she said to a plastic penguin, "OHHHH, NICE PENGOS!!!" Pengos is her word for penguin.

18 months old

Disclaimer: this post is to record and remember what Daisy was doing at this age--so probably will not interest many.

Daisy is, it seems to me, a special and intense and strong-feeling and thinking little girl. There is so much going on all the time with her, and you can tell. It is something about the way she remembers her favorite books and music-- how she attaches to them, remembers them page by page (or lyric by lyric) and responds so strongly and consistently to them. It was one of the good things that came of the baby modeling: one of the photographers said to me, months ago, "She's so responsive!" (to singing, at the time). I think that is a good word for it. The other day when we were out at a coffee shop, and I suddenly revealed to her that I'd brought along a favorite book of hers, she screamed out (so loudly everyone in the coffee shop turned their heads), "Snipp, Snapp, Snurr!" and was visibly shaking with uncontrollable excitement. (The book title sounds more like "Sipp, Sapp, Surr" when she says it--I think two consonants together are hard for a baby to enunciate.)

Her communicativeness continues to surprise and delight us. Last night in the bathtub she said, "What does Mama say? Hi, Daisy. What does Dada say? Poop." Okay, that amused us in itself. But it's also indicative of something she's doing now, which is posing a question to herself out loud and then answering it. So she'll say, "What's that? I don't know!" Since she has a lot of sentences now, I've been meaning to write down what some of them are, and so I hope I can remember some of them now. She says "I know it!" and "Why not?" and "Yes, I will!" in adult-sounding inflections that crack us up. She'll survey her room and say, "So many toys!" When my mother ("Gommy") told her the other day that she was making stew for dinner, Daisy said, "It tastes good!" Dena asked her if she liked Henry's bike yesterday and she said, "I like it!" She often says to me, "Hi, Daisy, it's Mama!" (something I say). And she also says, "Hi, Mama. It's Daisy, Mama." Always like that. She has lots of polysyllabic words now, which she pronounces clearly enough for anyone to understand: crocodile, alligator, peekaboo, butterfly, and elephant are a few examples.

She can count to ten now without any assistance or prompting, and now, instead of just filling in words in songs and nursery rhymes as we recite them to her, she will sit and babble an entire nursery rhyme by herself. She leaves out words here and there, and can be mumbly on others, but they are totally recognizable. For example, she'll say, "Handy pandy, Jackie Dandy, loves pum [plum] cake and sug candy! Went into a shop, out came, hop, hop, hop." There are others she can do all by herself, with no help or prompting from us whatsoever (like Georgy, Porgy, Pudding and Pie, and All Around the Mulberry Bush, for two examples). It kinds of amazes us. She asks for books by name, very clearly: "Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile!" "Tue-days"! (Tuesday), "Pigs Agore!" (Pigs Galore)...etc. Or songs: "Farmer Dell" is the favorite, and she likes to change the words, so the "farmer takes a gommy, the gommy takes a Daisy, Daisy takes a stick," etc.

Today I was watching as she read her Everything book to herself (a title she pronounces pretty darn clearly-- "Everything book!"). Watching and listening, I could tell that she had many accurate words for every single page. I was most amazed by the page that shows eggs cracking and crocodiles popping out. She said, with total clarity, and in the way I always say it, "One egg, two eggs, three eggs, four eggs, five eggs. Five crocodiles!" As plain as day. And every page was like that. She can even sort of imitate the tune and rhythm of sing-song we do on particular pages (like the two blackbirds sitting on a hill--she singsongs, "Fly away, Jack. Fly away, Jill. Come back, Jack. Come back, Jill"). We really do have conversations now. I ask her questions, and more often than not, she answers them. Or she tells me of her own accord what she wants: toast, prune juice ("poon"!), a particular book, "music," to see Dada play the guitar (actually, she most likes to SIT on the guitar and ride it like a horsey), or even a nap. Yes, she has asked for a nap, and she has also asked to go to bed at night.

Daisy is shy around people she doesn't know, and often happiest in a familiar setting, with books and animals and music she loves, and people she knows well. She is comfortable with Gommy, Gompy, Nana, and Samantha, and is also very fond of the friends she sees most often, Henry and Elise, and their moms, Dena and Ann. She often expresses delight when I tell her we'll be seeing them, or will ask me if she can see them. Once around Henry and Elise, she follows them around with big smiles on her face, delighting in what they do (since they both do more exciting physical feats than Daisy does yet!).

Lately she has been sleeping--if we are lucky--about ten hours a night. Not the awesome twelve that some parents get! But still good. We feel very lucky if she doesn't wake up crying in the night. A typical night, then, would mean she slept from about 8 PM to about 6 or if we're VERY lucky, 6:30 AM. She was going to bed just fine at 7:30 PM, but then waking up at 5:30 AM... which is really not okay with us. So we made bedtime a little later in the hopes that she'd make it to 6 or 6:30. It still feels crazily early, but since the 5 and 5:30 AM wakeup calls, we're grateful for it. Sadly, it is all relative. I never thought I'd say I felt lucky to be waking up at 6.

Daisy is definitely behind on the motor skills I see other little kids her age using. I am happy, of course, that she walks now, and even approaches a run sometimes; she climbs ("Climb couch" or "upstairs!" are two of her favorite things to do); and she has pretty good fine motor skills. But observing a child a month older than Daisy at the playground the other day, I realized that she is probably a bit slow in this area. This little girl was easily climbing in and out of a sandbox with pretty steep sides, running up a play structure all by herself and going down a big slide all by herself, and skillfully scooping sand with a shovel and dumping it in her bucket. Daisy, on the other hand, would definitely need help with all these things.

It was funny, actually: Daisy wanted to sit in the sandbox and lift individual grains of sand, one by one, between her thumb and forefinger, and place them in her bucket. I think she could have gone on doing this for an hour. It was really sweet and cute, but I tried to show her how to grab up a fistful of sand, at least. She grasped this and was excited by it, but could not figure out how to keep the sand in her hand long enough to dump it in the bucket. She has started scooping sand in her shovel, but has a hard time making it to the pail.

It's okay, of course-- I know there's no definite timeline for these things, and all good things will come eventually. And I know not to pressure her. But I do think it would be good to expose her to more physical types of activity, show her different things she might try, and just give her opportunities, generally, to practice motor skills, if she wants to. She LOVES being outside, doing anything, really-- loves flowers and birds and dogs (and is totally fearless of them), going uphill and downhill, fences, clouds, planes, anything. She gets truly joyful and excited outdoors. Yesterday I had to repeatedly restrain her from leaping into the lagoon outside the Palace of Fine Arts to swim with the swans and ducks.

She has been imitating physical gestures of adults a lot lately. Dena noticed yesterday that Daisy was crossing her arms, just like Dena was doing. And today Daisy took a wad of paper towel and started pressing it to her nose... just like Mama has been doing, every single day since she got this horrific RSV virus.

She still calls me "da Mamas." She still nurses, and even though I'd like to wean, it never seems like the right time to do something that is so clearly going to be so hard for her. It just never happened naturally.

There always seems like so much more I could say about her. But I'll stop for now.