More great pictures

These are from yesterday's trip to the Discovery Museum--thanks to Dena! The first shot below, the one Dena took of Daisy wearing the bumblee backpack (you can't see the bumblebee, but that's what it is) has got to be one of the best pictures of Daisy ever taken. I did a doubletake when I saw it--not only because it's such a lovely picture but also because it's the first picture of Daisy in which she looks more like a young lady than a baby, I think. My girl is growing up!






I love this picture of Henry and Daisy-- it really looks like they're kayaking, doesn't it?

Daisy recites "Tiny Tim"

This rhyme will be familiar to those who have taken Music Together classes. I think this is sweet so I can't help posting it. It's not just that Daisy memorized this rhyme-- it's the way she says it with such pronounced inflections and mannerisms! She gets really theatrical when she sings or recites and can imitate the sort of characteristic manners of the person (or recorded voice) she heard doing the original. I think maybe she's going to be an actor or performer of some kind-- like her dada. (I also think it's cute that she says "throap" at the end instead of "throat"-- she makes it rhyme with "soap," which totally makes sense!). Anyway, her skills in mimicry really impress me.

Nap training

Daisy has been sleeping later in the morning lately, which is very nice for us. What do I mean by "later"? Well, she used to wake up around 6:30 AM, and recently she's been making it till 7:30 or even a bit later. That's great, but at the same time, her nap has been getting harder and harder, and we've had to start a new routine. More explanation below:

These last couple days have been some of the hardest for me as a mom thus far. We have been trying to help Daisy learn to take a nap without being rocked to sleep. I know, I know, I know: bad habit, the rocking, and we did it for two years. But we have an absolutely beautiful night-time routine, and so we didn't really feel like the nap was a hardship. However, the rocking hasn't been working too well lately. It's been taking forever to get her to sleep, and then she often screamed when we lowered her down into the crib. We realized that we needed a new nap routine and that we'd better figure it out now, before school starts up again.

We thought we'd try to translate our beautiful night routine to naptime. At night, we read some books, have some milk, spend a little time together in her room, and then she usually ASKS to go into the crib. We put her in, she smiles and wiggles around, we hand her her stuffed animals and put her "cozy blanket" on her; we say goodnight, I love you, and she says goodnight and I love you to us. We leave, and all is well. It wasn't ALWAYS like this, however, as anyone knows who's ever read my blog before! It took us about three days of letting her do some crying in the crib before she got used to it. This was painful, but well worth it.

So, for the last two days, Mark and I have been trying to do her nighttime routine at naptime. Day One, Monday, was TERRIBLE. She cried and screamed in the crib, and we could only stand it for about 25 minutes. Then we went and got her out. The rest of the day was pretty rocky, with her being so tired, but we knew that it probably wouldn't work on the first day. The whole point is that she's got to get used to a new routine, and the only way to do that is to be consistent for several days in a row, till she gets the picture.

We tried again today, around 12:45, and the same thing happened. She cried and screamed for about half an hour, at which point we couldn't take it anymore. We got her out and let her play, gave her snacks, etc. Then we decided to try again at around 3. I remembered that when we taught her to go to sleep on her own at night, one of the strategies that really helped was giving her a later bedtime, at first. She'd be so tired that she'd only whimper a little and then go to sleep. I figured the most important thing was for her to have the experience of falling asleep on her own in the crib, regardless of the time, and then we could start moving the bedtime earlier and earlier, as she got used to going in the crib awake. This worked very well. So-- maybe we should try the same thing with naptime. 3:00 is too late for Daisy's nap, ordinarily (she's quite tired by between noon and one). BUT, we needed for her to have that initial experience of going to sleep on her own in the daylight hours.

IT WORKED! We did the routine again--books, a little milk, then putting her in the crib and giving her her animals and cozy blanket--and this time she smiled, did her happy wiggle, and let us leave without crying. And she went to sleep. This is the first glimpse of hope I've had for our new nap routine. Now the trick will be to see if we can repeat the magic tomorrow, and gradually start to move the nap earlier, since I think ideally, her nap should start somewhere between noon and one, or one at the latest.

This stuff is hard.

Two

I don't think I ever created a post for Daisy's second birthday, which occurred a few days ago, on July 20. I'm sure I can't do justice to her now, but I will report a conversation I had with her this morning that at least will give an idea of her current obsession: ORCHESTRAS.

Daisy: The clarinet is in the woodwind section. [said with total clarity--wow]
Me: And what other instruments are in the woodwind section?
Daisy: The bugle is in the woodwind section.
Me: I think the bugle is in the brass section. What about the harp? [Daisy's current favorite instrument]
Daisy: The conductor plays the harp.

As you can see, she's working on it. Her grasp of the orchestra is not complete, but she's getting there. She demands to watch classical music every day now and she gets excited beyond belief whenever the music swells. She yells, "It's getting louder!" and flings her arms around in the air as though she's conducting.

On a less charming note, her behavior has gotten more difficult in the last few days. It's odd-- it's like she's on this exact timetable and when she turned two, something clicked into place and said, "Time to start being difficult." I hope I have the strength to help her through this rough spot!

Discussing a beach ball

Daisy (pointing to an orange circle on top of the ball): What's that? What's that?
Me: An orange circle.
Daisy: No, no, no. It's a bald spot.
(Note: Daisy does this a lot now. She asks me a question, then says "no, no, no" to my answer and supplies what she thinks the answer should be.)

Balonious Monk and the Marcus Roberts dance

EDIT
Daisy just added the cutest move to her dance--she puts her arms out and wiggles her fingers like she's playing the piano.

At the Discovery Museum

My thanks to Lisa for these pictures!

Daisy on Le Top site

My friend Marina found these! I am so grateful because it had not occurred to me to look there. She is in the Le Top Plum Pretty collection on their website. The page itself looks really cool, the way it is laid out, but I can only seem to capture the images without the text, so check out the website:

http://www.letop-usa.com/plum.php

Daisy's two-year checkup

Daisy had her two-year checkup today, and she was very, very good at the doctor's office, despite the fact that her nap lasted a mere half an hour in the car on the way there. She did not cry and was very patient as the doctor took her heartbeat, listened to her ears, felt her belly, etc. That can't be easy for a two-year-old. I was proud :-)

She now weighs 25 pounds and is 34 and 3/4 inches and tall! Yes, people, that's right: Daisy's height percentile has gone way up and she is now in the 76th percentile. You heard me right. Her weight percentile was up, too, to 31st, and head circumference was almost 93%. Biiiig head.

On other developments, our informational sheet said our child should know at least 20 words and be able to say two-word phrases. I felt like we must look show-offy when we said Daisy knows hundreds of words and can speak in sentences. Then, we can never get her to demonstrate anything very impressive to the doctor, although she did say "chrysanthemum" and "escalator" with crystal clear pronunciation and our doctor was impressed by that.

We fessed up to Daisy still taking a bottle, and I left feeling that the arguments against this are not totally and entirely convincing to me. I mean, I understand that if she's sucking on a bottle she could damage her teeth and palate; but she drinks from a bottle for maybe twenty minutes total every day. She does not use a pacifier or suck her thumb, which seem more potentially damaging. And, we learned, she certainly is not getting more dairy than the acceptable amount (up to 24 oz., our doctor said). So it seems like a lot of the anti-bottle stuff is about how unfashionable it would look if she went to preschool with a bottle. I do hope to have her off it before then, of course. (And, for what it's worth, she DOES drink from a cup, too-- she just wants milk from a bottle and drinks her water from a cup or a sippy cup.)

It was a good checkup and it looks like (knock on wood) the girl is doing fine. Oh yes, and our doctor looked at her teeth and thought they looked good, despite the fact that she still drinks from a bottle. But she also gave us a list of pediatric dentists in case we want to get her more thoroughly checked.

She didn't even need a shot!

Austen's edge

I decided to re-read Jane Austen's six novels this summer for fun, and it has been such a rewarding experience. I had thought I knew them all pretty well (except for Sense and Sensibility, which I was reading for the first time), but it's part of Austen's greatness that there's so much on a subtle and nuanced level to discover when you read the novels at different periods of your life. Honestly, there are aspects of Pride and Prejudice that stand out to me a lot more now, at 34, than they did when I read it as a teenager-- perhaps because I didn't take the time to unpack all the sentences as carefully then, or because I didn't fully understand a reference, or because this time around I simply paid more attention to different elements of the novel. Anyway: they have all been different reading experiences this time, with new shades of meaning emerging. I think I could probably reread them every year and see new angles in them. Mansfield Park remains a favorite of mine, for some perverse reason. (I'll just say that this time around, I was really struck by an almost gothic element of the plotline-- how terribly coercive Fanny's friends and family are in trying to convince her to marry Mr. Crawford-- not one single person on her side or supportive of her holding out. It truly is one of the darkest and most uncomfortable episodes in Austen, and it brought to my mind both the moral weightiness of Clarissa and the drama and terrors of the gothic genre, which Austen's not usually associated with, except in the parodic way of Northanger Abbey.) I think, also, that Mansfield Park contains some of Austen's most morally ambiguous and complex characters, making it very interesting to me.

I could go on forever about Jane Austen, but it's late and that's not what I intended in starting this post. I just wanted to make the point that she has some of the nastiest lines in the English language--the most wittily cruel, pomposity-puncturing, pitiless lines I've ever read, anyway. It's interesting because I know there is a tendency, sometimes, to think of her out there in the pop culture as a nice, homey Victorian lady (though she didn't write during the Victorian period, actually) who came up with pretty romances that took place in drawing rooms and that affirmed all that was sweet and good in the end, however bumpy the ride was to get there; her novels make people feel good. I don't exactly mean to argue with that last line, because they make me feel good, too, or at least that's one part of my response. I do find myself shrinking into my cocoon and feeling safe when I read her, despite the fact that there's a lot of unsafeness for her characters, really.

But, boy, could she write some mean lines when she wanted to. As I said, I could go on forever about this-- about her cleverly wicked descriptions of the annoying behaviors of children, for example-- but I just wanted to quote a few lines from Persuasion, which I think has the meanest lines I've come across so far. First, here's part of her description of poor Dick, the Musgroves' younger son: "the Musgroves had had the ill fortune of a very troublesome, hopeless son; and the good fortune to lose him before he reached his twentieth year"[.] Dickie "had been sent to sea, because he was stupid and unmanageable on shore," "had been very little cared for at any time by his family, though quite as much as he deserved; seldom heard of, and scarcely at all regretted, when the intelligence of his death abroad" reached them.

Then his mother is mocked for seeming to miss him so very much, now that he is dead and his death can be romanticized. Mrs. Musgrove is a large woman, and Captain Wentworth is to be commended for "the self-command with which he attended to her large fat sighings over the destiny of a son, whom alive nobody had cared for." THEN, most shocking of all to me, in the next paragraph the narrator says: "Personal size and mental sorrow have certainly no necessary proportions. A large bulky figure has as good a right to be in deep affliction as the most graceful set of limbs in the world. But, fair or not fair, there are unbecoming conjunctions, which reason will patronize in vain--which taste cannot tolerate--which ridicule will seize."

Maybe you can try to convince me that Austen means us to look skeptically her narrator's views here-- but I am going to need a lot of convincing. Basically, her reliable narrator is saying, "Hey, it may be unfair, but large people look ridiculous when they're crying. Grief looks much better on thin, attractive people."

This edgy sort of humor is only one aspect of the Austen reading experience, I know. But I thought I'd mention it because it so often seems to fall by the wayside in our popular cultural thoughts about Austen.

Shameless gushing over my girl

But first I have to report that she ate her dinner tonight without my having to sing "There Was A Tree." (Okay, that was kind of a lie: but I only had to sing one or two verses.)

So, my mom is probably out there wondering why I haven't blogged about this yet; it's because of fear of grossing people out by going on and on about how cute Daisy is being. But, this IS really cute and I should blog it.

For the last few weeks, Daisy has been obsessed with a short video featuring clips of three performances: one from the children's opera of Where the Wild Things Are, then a piece of a piano performance by Marcus Roberts of Thelonious Monk's Blue Monk, then a longer segment of a performance by an orchestra featuring a guitar soloist named Eduardo Fernandez. Now, Daisy LOVES this tape and asks us to play it over and over again, and she comments on the music in the most fervent way possible. First she's all excited about Max and calling out, "Look, there's Max! There is a wild thing! It's blowing fire out of its nose!" Then, "Marcus Roberts is coming on!" She watches the video of him playing the piano with totally rapt attention. Then--the biggest attraction of all. "The orchestra! The orchestra!" she shouts in excitement. "Where is the Ductor?" The Ductor is the conductor and she is completely in raptures with him.

She narrates the whole classical piece from beginning to end, saying, "It's Eduardo Fernandez, playing the guitar!" Then she names all the other instruments as they come onto the screen or she hears them-- "It's the xylophone! It's the oboe!" Then, as the music swells, she wants to stand on the coffee table and conduct along with the Ductor, waving the Conducting Earrings. Now, I wasn't home when she came up with the Conducting Earrings, so my mother can explain better, but essentially, she told my mom one day that she wanted to conduct while holding a pair of earrings, one in each hand, and she has done it ever since. IT IS SO CUTE. She waves her arms enthusiastically along with the ductor, crying out, "It's getting louder! It's getting louder!" as the music rises.

She seems genuinely moved by the music and is very interested in the players of all the different parts. There is nothing in life that grips her more. So we think she might be innately a musician. Or a Ductor. She is sometimes so excited by the orchestra that she can barely contain herself, and she begs me, "Play the orchestra! Play Fernandez!" every single day.

A final note about something I'm noticing lately about Daisy, and I don't know if it's just Daisy or whether children in general do this. If she asks me a question and I answer a certain way, she seems to want the same exact wording the next time, and she corrects me if it's not exact. So, she pointed out a bird in a book the other day and asked me what it was; I said "A bird" and she said, "No, no, it's a hawk." Another example: during Marcus Roberts's performance tonight, she asked me what was on the screen and I said, "The audience watching Marcus Roberts," and she said, "No, no, it's the people's heads."

I find that cute. Oh my gosh, she is amazing. I could gush forever, actually. Tonight when I read her Goodnight Moon, she went through a page and named every single object on it, without my prompting. And she honest to goodness has dozens and dozens of books memorized. The best part, though, is listening to how spirited her readings are-- how she modulates her tone for different scenes, and does funny voices for dialogue, and gesticulates, and points at the page dramatically. She has certainly learned the Mama and Gommy Susan reading style!

I know it's not a good idea to bribe your child

but tonight Daisy was refusing to eat anything for dinner except peaches and grapes and I was getting desperate. I had cooked her a lovely meal and I really wanted her to eat it. She would eat the noodles but nothing else. Finally, with the aforementioned bribery, she ate a piece of broccoli and a piece of chicken for every verse of "There Was a Tree" (as she calls it) I sang to her. It was touching to me how much she values my singing! She had been vigorously spitting out broccoli and chicken and saying, "No no no no no." Then she asked for "There Was a Tree" and I told her I'd sing one verse if she tried the chicken and broccoli. She did. Then I told her I'd sing another verse if she ate a little more. She did. She was perfectly happy and she ate her dinner. She LOVES that song and she has the whole thing memorized, every last thing that was on the bloody tree, and it goes on and on and on.

I guess if I keep going like this, I am going to have no vocal cords left :-)

No room for error

I have mentioned before, I know, that Daisy has an astounding memory for song lyrics and books (and everything, actually). Well, today she amazed me anew! She (unfortunately) has a great love for hearing me sing the kinds of songs that build and build and add things on endlessly-- like, for instance, "The Green Grass Grew All Around," which she calls "There Was A Tree." You know this kind of song; you say the limb was on the tree, and the tree was in a hole, and the hole was in the ground, and the green grass grew all around, all around... then you add on, so a branch was on the limb, and the limb was on the tree, and the tree was in a hole, and the hole was in the ground... and then a twig was on the branch, and the branch was on the limb, and etc etc etc.

I was singing this song to Daisy today and I grew tired, as I often do, that I accidentally repeated a verse. I sang the flea verse twice: the flea was on the feather, and the feather was on the bird, and the bird was on the egg, and the egg was in the nest.... blah blah blah. I realized almost immediately that I'd made a mistake and was singing the "flea" verse twice, and it surprised me that Daisy didn't correct me with something like "No, no, the hair was on the flea!" But she didn't say anything for a few seconds, and I thought, well, she's not quite as attuned and memorize-y as I thought she was.

Then she said, "Mama, there were two fleas. There were TWO fleas!" I really love that. Instead of seeing the repetition as a mistake, she just decided there were two fleas on the bird's feather this time around. That is creative and cool, I think.

We saw a catbear!

Daisy endorses Obama

Life Changiness

I feel like I've been through a lot in the last couple days and I don't have much time right now to capture it, so here is my brief version. This weekend I attended two all-day workshops on going back to school and becoming a psychotherapist, which I'm seriously thinking about doing. I have drawn pictures with my left hand. I have held hands. I have reached into the "fertile void" of my "magic box" to try to find my inner strength. I have participated in an exercise in which we all made funny sounds and movements. I attended the Best of the East Bay show at the Oakland Museum and guarded the ladies' room door while Mark's KISS band changed in it. I physically prevented a woman dressed as C3PO from entering it and I interacted with Chewbacca. AND, I am very excited to report, Mark and I hung out with Krist Novoselic from Nirvana in the VIP staging area and he was totally, totally cool. Yeah. I should write more on that one. I think I'll create a longer post out of these tidbits, on my other blog probably, when I get a chance.

Oh, and this is the most surprising revelation of all from the weekend: I voluntarily went back to nursing Daisy, after almost having her weaned, because I MISSED IT. I don't think I know myself as well as I like to think I do.

"She was fired! And she went away."

Oh my gosh... I think I actually did this. Check it out! I have a new video camera and this is my first little attempt. It's Daisy reading one of her Amelia Bedelia books. "Oh, my cream stuffs!" said Ame'ya Bede'ya. This cracks me up. Daisy loves these books, and they all have the same... exact... plot. In this particular one, Amelia's cream "stuffs" get her out of trouble for the horrible incompetence she perpetrates (pouring coffee onto cereal when Mrs. Rogers asks for "cereal with her coffee"); in the original book, it's her lemon meringue pie that saves the day. Or it's strawberry tarts... or coffee cake. In one, she's asked to do some gardening and she nails bloody raw steaks to bean plants (when asked to "stake the bean plants"). That was when I thought I might have had enough of poor Ame'ya Bede'ya.... But I am sure there is much more of her in my future. Daisy has a passion for her.

Today in music class...

...all the kids wore sticky nametags with their names on them. Daisy looked very cute with her DAISY nametag on her vest. At the end of class, she announced, "Daisy wants to take off her Obama sticker!"

I think she thinks if one is wearing a sticker, that is what it says.

Discovery Museum

Daisy not ride on the train!

Daisy is going through a fearful phase--at least I hope it's a phase. She has become terrified of carousels, which she used to love, and today at Free Zoo Day, she made it very clear that she wanted to WATCH the little puffer train but not ride on it. She was very excited every time it went by, commenting happily on the amounts of steam coming out of it, and waving to the little kids on it. But every time I renewed the suggestion of going ON it, she said, "No, no! Daisy not go on the train!"

This was the first time we've been back to the zoo since the tiger mauling. I thought it might not be jam-packed, since the weather was cold, but it was of course extremely crowded anyway, being free zoo day. We saw: giraffes, a zebra, an ostrich, a peacock, flamingos, a wallaby, a gorilla, a chimpanzee, three polar bears, two spectacled black bears, a grizzly bear, and penguins. The grizzly gulch exhibit was especially exciting for Daisy, as she got pretty much face to face with him through the plexiglass. She enjoyed all the bears and was quite thrilled with the penguins and flamingos (birds are some of her favorites).

Daisy is taking her nap now (2:00). Her nap has been getting later the last few days, starting at 12 or 1 instead of 10:30 or 11. I don't know if it's a permanent change, though, or just a fluke. She also slept till past 7:30 this morning, which was unheard of, and didn't actually ask us to get out of the crib till about 8. It is INSANE to feel this well rested.

I bought a new camera and so am hoping to post some Daisy videos soon.