The Monkey

I have a few things I want to record... but first, I MUST record that tonight when we put her to bed, Daisy said to me, "Thank you, Mom. Thank you for the bed and the milk and the books and the playing." Completely out of the blue!

Lately Daisy has been very into make-believe. She spends long periods of time moving her animals and dolls around, babbling out narratives for them that I can partially understand and that partially seem like nonsense; the stories combine bits of books, things Daisy has experienced herself (like the Scary-go-round and the "Haunting House," which she still talks about almost every day), episodes of "Sesame Street," and things that just seem totally made up. It is very funny and also it seems neat that she can divert herself for so long. I also notice how everything is a text with her--so, for example, she'll make one of her characters say, "Tell me about the Scary-go-round, said Mama." (Or, "said the fairy," or "said the townspeople," or someone.)

Another aspect of Daisy's pretend play is that she herself now has several alter egoes. They are: the monkey, the waiter, the townspeople, the girl that I knew somewhere (the title of a Monkees' song--which is where I think she also got the idea of being a monkey), and the fairy. When she is being one of these characters, she refers to herself in the third person and says things like, "The waiter is washing the wall!" as she herself dumps a cup of water on the wall of the tub (for example). As strange as it might seem that these are her alter egoes, I know where they all come from (the waiter and the townspeople are both from a ballet she likes, and the fairy was her Halloween costume).

Daisy has more and more been insisting that she will do things "all by herself." She pushes my hand away when she's walking, and it can be hard to keep a grip on her when we're crossing the street. She also has been telling us that she "wants some space," ordering us to get off the couch when she's on it, or leave her alone when she's playing make-believe. I used to sit in the tub with her for convenience sake when I was washing her, but now she tells me to get out and give her some space. These tendencies, along with her non-stop talking all day long, tell me that she is really growing up!

Happy Thanksgiving

I think I forgot to post Halloween pictures of Daisy as a fairy, so here are a few, belatedly.

Update

Child went to bed tonight without a problem, just like she used to do until about a week ago. I am rewarding myself, apparently, by watching a documentary about Adolf Hitler.

I don't believe this

After months and months of a perfect sleeping routine, we seem to have hit another bad time. This time it's not like any of the other times. She has been going into her crib happily enough at bedtime, but then not going to sleep. Tonight she sang the alphabet song at the top of her lungs for about ten minutes. Then she started yelling other things, such as "My elbow hurts" and "I want to be naked in bed." I finally went in and kissed the fake boo-boo on her elbow, thinking it might help. She looked so tired, it was like she could barely keep her eyes open while I was talking to her. So imagine my surprise when five minutes after I left she started screaming, "My elbow hurts again!" Really, that has to be the lamest procrastination device EVER.

She is still yelling and it's almost 9.

EDIT: Okay, that was funny. She just yelled, "Mama, come back here! You're going too far!"

Bathwater tea

Yesterday, when I prevented Daisy from drinking a big cup of her own bathwater, she informed me, "Even grownups drink bathwater." She then expanded, "And persons drink bathwater. And babies drink bathwater." Very persuasive, but probably still not a good idea.

She has been narrating some story to herself for the last twenty minutes, nonstop. These are a few snatches I have caught:

"Hey, Henry! What? That's Dena!"
"'I'm so sorry,' said Mama."
"I'm going out shopping on the merry-go-round."
"Look, that baby's in the corner! Even grownups put their babies in the corner. And even persons get their babies to go into corners."

Hmmm... that sounds kind of disturbing, actually.

I just heard, "Daisy's in the corner, putting her mess all over the floor."
EDIT
Okay, Daisy is definitely getting a lot of mileage out of this "Even grownups..." formulation. Just now I told her not to write on the coffee table with her markers and she told me witheringly, "Even grownups write on coffee tables. Even PERSONS write on coffee tables."

Happy birthday, Mama!

Daisy wishes me a happy birthday almost every day, and I've had to explain to quite a few neighbors that it isn't actually my birthday or anywhere near it, while she is hollering her birthday wishes at me in the lobby of our building. I think she thinks it means, "I love you," or something like that. She is also REALLY into creating Playdoh birthday cakes, sticking candles in them, and presenting them to people.

She has been a little crankier than usual, and like every other time in the past, I am pretty sure it means she's on the brink of some developmental advances. She's doing a LOT more pushing my hand away and saying, "I'll do it all by myself," and she's been walking downstairs by herself, holding the rail instead of my hand... often, holding the rail with both hands. I know, most kids her age have already been doing this a long time, but it's been a big deal for her.

It's been a long time since we've had any sleeping problems with her-- she usually goes to bed between 8 and 8:30 and sleeps till 6:30 or 7 with no problems whatsoever-- but the last couple nights she's been calling from the bedroom, asking for more milk. And we've been giving it to her, which is probably a mistake. Soooo... again, when I look back on it, she was always somewhat crankier and had sleeping issues when she was on the brink of a milestone. I figure these milestones will be potty-training and greater physical independence! We'll see.

Quotes of the day

My favorite is from her bath: "I'm being myself. I'm being myself in the bath."

Daisy has been saying a lot of things lately that make her sound older than she is-- like, "That's incredible!" or "That's weird!" or "Come along, Mama!"

I've noticed she is also experimenting with the "because" sentence structure. She talks and talks and talks and the word "because" enters into it a lot. I wish I could transcribe some of these convoluted sentences-- they are so funny, because the CONTENT that is filled into the "because" structure is almost completely random. In short, she is learning more complicated sentence structures and practicing them, but she doesn't quite understand what they mean, and this is making her say things that are funny funny funny.

Daisy's first concert

I've been meaning to blog this first for awhile now: Daisy went to her first sit-down, formal concert a couple weeks ago, a band that played polkas, tangos, mariachi music, etc., at the Healdsburg Public Library. She is really too young to go to concerts where sitting still is required, but we hadn't realized it would be that way when we showed up. Since we were already there, though, we decided to stay, and Daisy was pretty good! She named all the instruments and commented on the music, seeming quite fascinated, and lasted about 50 minutes before becoming squirmy and needing to leave. Her only major breach of decorum was when she finished off a bowl of cherries she'd been eating and said loudly, "They're all gone! Now it's a hat!" and put it on her head.

A few noteworthies

Apologies--this is meant as a record for me to remember a few of Daisy's milestones, and I know it doesn't make scintillating blogging.

First, Daisy has been counting accurately, more and more frequently. She counted some items up to thirteen this morning without making a mistake, and then she skipped to seventeen. We note that she does this every time, and Mark thinks it's because she has a book in which a girl counts something as "thirteen seven." Then, after eighteen, she has a tendency to return to five, for some reason.

Also (and I know this is really flukey): Daisy was drawing on her sketchpad last night and suddenly she announced, "I drew a nine!" We looked down and yes--there it was. I think she drew it inadvertently, and then recognized it. Mark actually said, "That's a six, not a nine." ????? She is getting more control of the crayons, definitely, because then for fun, and to see if she could do it, we asked her to draw a few things that we thought would be on the easier side, like an O (which she can do, not too surprisingly), and a V-- and she did it! It was a sloppy V, but it was identifiable. She is growing up so fast it's unbelievable.

She said a few funny things that I wanted to record, but of course now I can't remember. One thing is, she's been saying, "Daisy is too much!" And just now, she had all these stuffed animals in her lap and was reading to them, and she said, "It's getting crowded in here!"

On the more negative side, she was really a terrible hostess yesterday to her little friend Franny, who is leaving San Francisco on Friday and came over for one last playdate. Daisy's sharing skills were not at their high point, to put it tactfully. It's too depressing to elaborate.

High and low

High: I can say definitely now that Daisy knows her ABCs. She's been singing the song for some time now, but that didn't mean she could identify all the letters accurately. She's been able to get most of them right for awhile now, but for the last few weeks she's been getting all the letters, all the time. We just went through the alphabet with a book she has and she got them all quickly, too. So, yay!

Low: MITTEN PUT-ON-AGE. Oh my God. Daisy is so verbal, really she is, it's amazing. But with the motor skills... not so much. She has been asking for a pair of mittens for months, ever since she saw her friend Elise's. So I bought her a pair. But Daisy cannot get the skill of sticking her thumb into the thumb hole and it has led to some near nervous breakdowns between us, with me desperately trying to get her thumb to follow the right track through the mitten, and her not helping, or sticking her index finger into the thumbhole and declaring, "There!" only to say a few minutes later, "Help, Mommy! It's not on right!" This is driving me INSANE. I never knew mittens could be a source of so much frustration. And I thought mittens were the EASY option, as opposed to gloves. Just now, I was letting her watch Teletubbies so that I could pack for my birthday weekend with Mark, and she asked me to put on her mittens while she was watching. The ensuing exchange went something like this:

Me: Please, Daisy, just try to help. Watch what I'm doing. Wiggle your thumb. Okay? There it is. Now push it through that hole. Push it! PUSH IT!!

Daisy: Mommy, the mittens are watching Teletubbies!

Me: Pleeeeease, Daisy. I can't do this by myself. You have to participate. See this hole? See it? Now please push your thumb through! Not that finger--the thumb!

Daisy: The mittens are watching! The mittens are watching!

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Some rare footage of ME with Daisy...

...thanks to my friends John and Rachel Rivera!

Daisy and the Melvins

Daisy is really into the Melvins, a loud, abrasive, sludge metal band. She calls it "spooky music." She asks me to put on their Stoner Witch CD every day and dances around the living room. I am definitely learning to appreciate them, but they're a little hard to listen to first thing in the morning. This girl's musical tastes are certainly getting eclectic! She still loves classical music and her new love is the Monkees. She immediately forms favorite songs and less favorite ones, and she likes to narrate what's happening in the song by saying things like, "Now it's getting slow. Now they're getting excited! The music is swelling!" It is so funny. Last night when we were putting her into bed, she said, apropos of nothing, "You won't find my name in your book of who's who." That's a line from "I'm Not Your Stepping Stone." Daisy often does this now--quote something, randomly, and sometimes you just have the strong sense that you've heard that line before but you can't quite think of WHERE... it was Mark who pointed out what she just said. We find ourselves constantly saying, "Did you hear what she just said??"

This is a pretty fun age... other than the "NO!" and the throwing and the demands that come up from time time :-)

I need to cut back on my use of exclamation points

I have no problem seeing what's objectionable about them, aesthetically speaking. But for some reason, I keep exclaiming. Unless I take the time to go back and proofread something I've written carefully (which I don't always do, for shame), I am bound to have sent someone something chock full of melodramatic, gushy exclamation points. I hate it. !

I should be going to work now, instead of blogging. I am the worst procrastinator, exclamation point. I am so tired. Daisy was up at 6 AM today and she's been doing this since the daylight savings change. Before it, she was getting up at 7:30. Wahhhhh.

We had an okay morning, though. I gave her a bath and she instructed me to draw "boobies" all over the bathtub with her bathtub crayons. She also told me to draw a hand with fingernails, and then to make it HAPPY (meaning I had to draw a smiling face on the hand). It was kinda weird. Then, she spent a big portion of the morning in solo imaginative play, which has really dramatically increased over the last month or so. She will spend hours pretending something now. Today, it was that she was cooking in a pot (her plastic pumpkin from Halloween). She was making "sweet potatoes, cake, cookies, spaghetti, and chocolate bats." Doesn't that sound delicious? And she was going to share it with Liza Lou (a character in one of her favorite books). She narrated the cooking process to herself, mumbling on and on, and it was pretty funny to listen to. She had mixed together in the pot all different kinds of Play Doh, crayons, Play Doh tools, Play Doh containers, and a few toys. It looked scrumptious.

Two years, three months

Daisy was difficult today, at least in the morning. She has been pretty easy to deal with for a long time now, but today I thought I was seeing signs of some of the two-year-old behavior I've heard about, lo these many years. I wouldn't say she quite had a tantrum, but she whined loudly all morning, demanding various things I had told her she couldn't have (like lollipops and popsicles). She got her voice to make this particularly annoying, whiny sound, and it was like she was making it on purpose to antagonize me while I was getting all our stuff ready to go out for the day. It was so irritating that for the first time since I've had her, I felt like I needed to do deep, meditative breathing to keep myself from wanting to scream at her or tear my hair out. I was tired, from having stayed up late grading papers the night before (and from Daisy getting up at 6:30 that morning), and it was particularly grating that she was doing this to me while I was trying to pack all our stuff for a day of fun I had planned for HER.

This was my first time encountering this level of toddler annoyingness, and I don't think I passed the test with flying colors, but I do think I made the right decision in the end. The incessant whining/screeching made me want to tell her, "Fine! We're not going! Stay home and go to your room!" But I decided to go ahead with the day, since maybe she just didn't know how to get herself out of this whining mode, once she'd started down the path. I thought a change of scene might do us both good. And, this time at least, it worked. As soon as we were on our way to Fantastic Friday, she seemed to snap out of it and get into a new mode. And we ended up having a great day, after all (see my next entry--Daisy rode a horse at Crissy Field!). So-- I know. She's a two-year-old. I have to get used to this. What did I learn? Try your best to stay calm; do some deep breathing; and get a change of scene, if possible, to (hopefully) snap her out of it and get her going down a different behavior path.

Daisy rode a horse today!

Well, sort of. A ranger on horseback came to Fantastic Friday at Crissy Field Center and let the kids feed her horse carrots, pet him, and sit up on his saddle. I thought Daisy would be afraid, since she is afraid of a lot of things, but she was not. I was amazed! She let me put her up there and was totally unfazed, even though older kids had been scared to go on before her. So... my girl is afraid of baby swings and butterflies, but not to sit on horses. Who would have guessed! I think she loves animals so much that she overcame whatever fear there might have been. She has never seemed too afraid of other animals, either. I wish I'd taken a picture of her up there.

Two pics to help celebrate Obama's victory

I found some great pictures of Obama with children but these were the two best, I thought. I discovered the second picture on the LJ of silk_noir, and the other through a site I somehow stumbled upon following links from silk_noir's blog--the amazing "Yes We Can (Hold Babies)" blog. There were quite a few wonderful pictures on this blog, btw.

In honor of Obama's victory...

...I am re-posting two of my little Daisy videos.
"He's running for the kids"

Daisy endorses Obama

Election day

I am so excited today I feel like I am going to pop out of my skin.

Reflecting on reflection

How postmodern-ly self-referential and narcissistic!

But, anyway: I was looking back at the earlier entries of this blog, the ones from Daisy's first few months of life, because the birth of my friends' baby Coral and my inability to remember ANYTHING or answer ANY of their questions intelligently got me curious to see what the hell actually happened. The thing that struck me, though, was not so much the information I imparted about having a newborn baby as it was the style and focus of those entries. I was really working some stuff out in this blog... really poking around inside my own thoughts and feelings, and expressing things about *myself* and my inner states of being. Now, I realize, so much of what I write is about Daisy, plain and simple--stuff she's saying and doing--pictures and videos. It all seems a lot more external than internal.

It's funny, because I know I felt a lot more self-sacrificing back then--like my life was all about ministering to Daisy and not taking as good care of myself. I certainly have more "selfish" time now than I did then. But this blog doesn't reflect that at all. If anything, you'd think I was spending a lot more time contemplating my own thoughts and feelings back then. I wonder if that's just because I don't need the blog to serve that function for me as much now as I did then--precisely because I'm taking better care of myself now? Or, does it have to do with the fact that Daisy is such a vivid person now, such a strongly defined character and personality, and I'm sort of letting her subsume me--writing about her, rather than about me? Back when she was an infant, let's face it: the entries I wrote about her really said more about me than they did about her. I felt the need to work out my own emotions through the blog then, and now I feel a lot more stable and set in my ways... and often I'm just using this blog to record some new funny thing Daisy did or some milestone or to put up pictures before they become consigned to hard drive oblivion. It's strange to think that I am no longer constantly trying to figure out my own states of being, because I have ALWAYS been like that-- very introspective and self-analytical.

I wonder if I am shrinking... or if I'm just having more of an identity outside of blogginess, and so not using the blog for that purpose. I don't know, and I'm not sure it's all that significant a question. One thing is for sure: I am not nearly as funny now as I was then. I can't believe how funny I was. I got quite a chortle out of reading those entries. Who knew? I should have enjoyed myself more, instead of spending so much time on low self-esteem. Alas, alas.

Having a new baby creates such intense states of mind. I guess partly because you're always trying to figure the baby out, your wheels are always spinning, spinning, and you want to ask other new parents questions, or test out new theories that you have, or share some new triumph or despair. The neurons are firing away constantly, and things are always changing. I must have slipped into a more stable time without even realizing it. I know it's been a long time since I've posted about, say, Daisy's sleeping habits! (She sleeps for 11 hours at night and almost never wakes up during the night anymore--but now that I've written that, I am positive she is going to wake up tonight.)

I think I'll create a state of the Daisy post soon, though, because just like I can't remember her infancy anymore, I probably won't remember this age someday, either.