a day with JJ, aka JNanners, aka The Nanners, aka The hip-hop grandma

Sophie's spending the last few days of fall with JNanners. She's at the park playing in the sandbox. These last couple weeks, she's started looking more and more like her dad. Her blue eyes are slowing turning hazel. It seems odd to think of her as having dark-haired, but then again she was born that way. I have a hard time of thinking of her as younger or of being older, she always seems just right at the age she is now.

update

-Sophie stayed home with JNanners for the weekend while the parents escaped for a weekend in Toronto. When we returned, she didn't even seem to notice that we had left. Guess she had a good time.
-She's starting to add two words together. It's clear that she's on the verge of stringing longer sentences together. It's also clear that she has a lot to say.
-She's getting the idea of kicking a ball. She likes to kick, run, throw.
-Lastly, she's turned into a wonderful sleeper. At 8.00 she goes into the crib without a peep. At around 7.00am-8:00 she wakes up excited to start the day. If she wakes up in the middle of the night or early in the morning, we pop her pacifier back in and she'll turn over and go back to sleep. How lovely!

fall has arrived

The weather is getting crummy and only allows for a few hours of outdoor play each day. Got to make the most of them.

baby in the stroller

Babies are really important now.

Mah Bay-bee!

A sentence! Or not? A fragment, perhaps. But certainly evocative, communicative even. Two words. Two. Not one.

So language learning proceeds apace. And we are all given to understand that this is Sophie's baby--not Mommy's, not Daddy's. She looked askance when I suggested that Sophie was Daddy's baby. A bit too meta, no doubt.

(She'll also give us an occasional unsolicited "tank u". Which technically is a sentence, no doubt. But that's a result of phrasal chunking, whereas the "Mah Bay-bee" was generative and thus more impressive).

In other news, she came up to us unbidden while she was playing, and *smack* *smack* gave us each a big sloppy kiss.

So that's it, I'm tapped--all out of ponies.

gratitude and compassion

Today (or was it last night?) we got another unsolicited “thank you” from Sophie when her dad brought her some food. Yesterday, she gave up her doll to a girl who was sad and tearful because she didn’t have one. This isn’t the first time she’s displayed such grace. At school, one of the boys was really upset that his mom was leaving. Sophie walked over to his cubby, got his favorite stuffed animal and brought it to him. I find these moments quite uncanny because this comes from a little girl whose working vocabulary is probably around 100 words and she can’t really even say her own name, but she can demonstrate gratitude and show compassion.

NO! No! No! No! No! No-oh-oh-oh-h!!!!

no.

At the library in the rain

After storytime, Sophie wanted to play in the rain. Actually, she wanted to sit on the wet ground. She was thrilled when I acquiesced.

Fall has arrived

small, but shiny

Sophie is such an easy child, so good natured and ultimately accommodating--even if she does think the library is for shrieking and racing around the aisles--that I feel guilty making any sort of noise about when things get trying.

Nonetheless, I feel I deserve just one very small medal for successfully washing her hair (or, okay, rinsing it with sudsy water and a perfunctory scrub with a washcloth) without her mother here to help me.

Sophie survived. But I fear she and Mr. Hairdryer are not friends.

Sunday Morning

It's 9:40am and Sophie is still sleeping. This is nothing short of a miracle. Consequently, others in the house have been able to sleep. I had a languorous sleep until 8:30am, which clocks me in for just under a 9 1/2 hour of almost continuous sleep--amazing! Mike's still asleep, he went to bed later and was up at around 5.00am when Sophie thought maybe it was time to get up. Luckily Mike managed to convince her that it still a bit early. I think that somehow reset her sleep clock. An unfamiliar but welcome calmness permeates the house this morning. A hot coffee would make this perfect, but I am afraid any little sound will wake her.

Sophie's killer app

She understands an astonishing amount now. We'll suggest she take a seat at the foot of the bed to eat her piece of apple. She looks at us earnestly for a moment, and then plops down. It's almost like she understands people-talk.

Along with her growing awareness that she's a person in a world filled with other people comes a certain reticence when dealing with strange adults. And a fierce determination to defend her property rights when dealing with other toddlers.

Today we rolled up to My Urban Toddler. Her face changed from agonized, strapped-into-a-seat-for-God's-sake boredom to giddy joy when she realized where we were. Once in, her mother plopped her into the play area and she was off on a mission to find and take possession of the Baby Doll.

She advertised her intentions by chattering "Bay-bee! Bay-bee!" as she prowled the room looking into boxes and under chairs.

Once she'd found her Bay-bee and had installed her in her proper place (a shopping cart filled with plastic cans, two plastic strawberries, an unappetizing looking plastic fish who was loosing his coloring, and 27 dollars in play money), Sophie began pushing her about the room, ever vigilant against possible encroachment by other toddlers.

The three little boys who were sharing the play space displayed no interest in Bay-bee and thus posed no real threat. Sophie was taking no chances. Whenever they came near, she hunched her body protectively over the shopping cart while muttering "bay-bee. bay-bee" sotto voce.

Her realization that there are other people in the world has been accompanied by an annoyingly strident avarice.

There are moments of sweetness, however. Such as when she brings her little friends in daycare their stuffed animals when they appear to be having a rough time of it.

She's also fairly good at trotting out the cute when we go out in public. Her shyness means it takes a little while to get her to say Hello, but she's always ready to say Bye-Bye.

And then there's her killer app: her willingness to blow kisses on command.

When she does this, it is always a big hit. An 18-month-old blowing kisses? Please! An initial small-child solemnity makes was for a big silly grin and--Mwah! Mwah! Mwah!--her interlocutors--cashiers, coworkers, kindly strangers on the street--all uniformly melt.

Yes she's still doing interesting things

And keeping us busy, busy, on our toes.

She's of an age where attention must be paid to her at all times or

AHHHHHHH! AHHHHH! AHAHHHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA!!!

UP! UP! UP! UP! UP! UP! AHHHHHHHHHH!

MINE MINE MINE MINE MINE-AH MINE-AH MINE-AH MINE-AH MINE!

(Small child collapses into inconsolable heap. Heartbroken, abandoned, totally hopeless weeping follows).

AHHHH! HAHHHHHH-HA! HA! Ha. Huh. Huh. Huh. Huh huh.

(Deep shuddery breaths--we've been picked up. All is not lost.)

Mahmeh! Dahdee! (in delighted tones--we're now happy again, as we've been given a small token of love. A piece of tin foil, say. Or perhaps that toilet paper we've had our eyes on).

Wash--rinse--repeat until bed time at 8:00 p.m.

Elmo

She thinks he lives in our computers.

I guess he does, kind of (Youtube).

In the driver's seat

It's getting harder to take Sophie places.

We now understand what people mean when they say that newborns are more portable than 18-month-olds.

One reason it is harder to take Sophie places, is that immediately upon seeing the car, she wants to get the door open so that she can climb into the driver's seat and play with the windshield wipers, mirrors, emergency brake, horn (honk!), cup holders and handles that do there reside.

Maybe it's the fact that her car seat is positioned in the center of the rear seat, where she can watch us drive and co-drive.

Another reason it is hard to take her places is that she wants to pull everything down from the shelves. The other day, at My Urban Toddler (where pulling things from shelves is not such an issue), she walked along a low shelf literally sweeping everything to the floor. She even stopped to make sure she had gotten all the pieces of the puzzle out before proceeding on. Like she was some miniature mafioso making a point about protection money. "Next time you pay up, see? Or I let my baby loose in your fine establishment with a stick. So's she can reach the high up breaky things, see? You got a lotta nice breaky things here. It'd be a shame to get them, you know, broke."