radish times

Time is passing so fast. Katya and Vanya are growing in waves and bounds. It is quite amazing to be part of it.

At 16 months, Vanya has a driving determination to do everything his sister does regardless of the two year difference between them. Hence, he is climbing stairs by holding the hand rail and straightening one leg after the other. He is swinging on the big kid swings, climbing up ladders and sliding down any and every slide in the playground. He eats beautifully with a fork. He demands candy from the candy bag high up in the cupboard. He yells “mahhhmah, mahhhhmah” just like Katya. He likes to sit on big chairs and swing his legs. And now, he loves to brush his teeth (or tongue as it may be). If Katya get something he doesn’t or gets to do something he doesn’t, he forces his small little body into your face crying “me, me, me, me!”

Added to these things he is also developing a little repertoire of his own things. When it is time to go out, he often brings his shoes to someone to get help putting them on. When he is done with that, he brings the grown-ups their shoes so they can get ready. Today he brought his grandmother her sweater so she could get ready. When he has to go out of the room to get something (particularly at story reading time before bed) he holds up his pudgy little pointer finger, nods his head as if to say “you understand,” and says “min’t, min’t” (“be back in a minute”). Then he runs out of the room and back in again.

He is anxious to communicate with either signs or words and gets a thrill whenever anyone understands him. He routinely says “ta ga” (thank you) with a slow nod of his head if you give him something. A few days ago he asked me to change his shirt by doing the “change diaper” sign and tugging on his shirt. Tonight, he got me to push his chair in at the table by saying “puh me, mama, puh me.” Lately he has taken to muttering to himself “dubbahdubbahdubbahdubbah” over and over again and he gets a huge kick out of it if someone says it back to him. He has also developed the strange habit of liking to have his tongue cleaned. If he is eating something that he doesn’t quite finish swallowing, he’ll stick out his tongue until someone wipes it off with their finger.

Katya just started pre-school two days a week. The beginning was a little rough for all of us. Katya was fine the first day. Peter and I brought her to the classroom, stayed a few minutes and left. The second day, Katya cried and cried when I finally pulled myself out of the classroom. It was much harder to leave than I ever anticipated. The first several days that she was in school I involuntarily watched the clock wondering what they might be doing in school. Was it snack time? Was it roof time? Were they napping? When I would go pick her up or hear from my parents that all was well, all the anxiety and energy would drain from me and I would be left mostly useless for the rest of the day. It was hard. We didn’t know exactly what to do or what to say to Katya about why we were sending her to this place that was making her cry. I didn’t fully realize how difficult of a transition it was for Katya until her teacher commented on the fifth day she went to school, “today was the first time Katya ran around on the roof during play time, laughed and had a good time.” Oh, that was heart wrenching. But, after that things got better pretty fast. Now, instead of saying “Mama, I don’t want to go to school” every morning, Katya asks in the afternoons if she can go to school the next day. What a relief!

Peter and I are doing well, if a little tired. Peter has been preparing for a photo exhibit in Wels, Austria in a few weeks. Once that is over, he’ll attend another festival in Austria in December to take photos and then turn his attention to preparing for an exhibit in Oslo, Norway in January. I’ve been working on developing our training curriculum at OPTIONS and planning a whole string of grant-funded trainings around financial aid for college and working with immigrant students on the college process. Not a quiet moment most days.

We have two big reasons to celebrate in our household:

Reason 1: KATYA IS POTTY-TRAINED!

Three weeks ago, we threw Katya a Potty Party. A Potty Party is an intense event. It involves teaching your child how to teach a doll how to use the potty, purchasing a doll that “pees,” explaining to your child why water is leaking out of the dolls armpits and hip joints, identifying a proper substance that looks like doll poop but doesn’t tempt you to eat it, and much much more. The purpose of a potty party is to make your child so excited about learning to use the potty that he/she will offer no resistance and be carried away on a wave of big kid peeing euphoria.

Our potty party turned out to be successful, but it didn’t live up to all that. A couple illustrations will suffice to demonstrate on what a lower level our potty party registered on the excitement scale (even though I tried my hardest to be the enthusiastic parent):

•After going with her doll to the bathroom to pee three or four times, Katya completely lost interest. I said “OH, EMMA (our doll’s name) NEEDS TO PEEEEE, KATYA.” You can imagine my voice twittering with excitement and anticipation. Katya said, “Oh?” “LET’S GO WITH HER TO THE BATHROOM” (at which point you are instructed to grab your child’s hand and rush off to the bathroom). I grabbed Katya’s hand attached to her totally sedentary body, and she looked up and said “No, mom, you go.” “You don’t want to go?” I say trying to sound unbelieving and still excited (instead of disappointed – not that she had also lost interest in this game but that she would not see and appreciate what a great poop I made out of prunes this time). “No, you go. I’m busy.”

•At the crucial point a little later, the point where Katya opened her gift of “big kid underpants,” and was supposed to jump for joy and beg to put them on, she looked calmly up at me and said “But where is my other present?” I was confused. “What other present?” She said “Another present. I don’t want this one.” PAUSE “Oh, but these are really exciting. They are your new big girl underpants, just like Emma’s. Let’s try them on.” NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO,” she wailed as she fled from me. For a moment it seemed as if this whole crazy farce was all for nothing. A deep breath. A reach down to center. I walked after her, clear that there was nothing else to do but quietly persist in my objective, which was to get her to put on some big girl underpants. As I put a pair of underpants on her, she wailed “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, NOOooooooo, NO, noooooo, nooo….” But as soon as they were on, she stopped, jumped off the couch and said “Let’s play babies.” And that was all there was to it.

•That afternoon, after she had used the potty successfully three times (another part of the potty party is inventing ways to get your child to drink 12 gallons of liquid) and been greatly celebrated with stickers, treats, hugs and kisses, she had to go again. As she sat down on the potty, she looked up and said with a slightly bored tone “I want no stickers, no treats, no hugs and no kisses, Mama.” And she proceeded to pee in the potty, get up, wash her hands and leave the bathroom.

Reason 2: VANYA CAN CRAWL!

Yes, you read it right. Vanya can finally crawl. He is very pleased with himself. His relations are less pleased… those relations, that is, who like to keep their electrical cords in one piece, their garbage in their garbage cans, their laundry in their laundry bags, the cat food in the cat food dish, and their legs without bite marks.

Oh, yes, did I mention, he also learned to chew (bite) on people? And, did I mention, it HURTS!!? He has four sharp !#%!!# teeth.

Unfortunately, the only thing funnier (to Vanya) than tipping over the garbage can is the word “no!” My parents insist that he even knows how to say this word and that when they say “NO!” he laughs and turns around and says “no” right back.

He is communicating up a storm. The second sign he picked up (after “milk”) was “all done.” He uses it constantly – whether to tell you he is all done with the apples or all done with the meal in general. If you try to ignore it, he gets really upset, arches his back and screams. In addition to this, he has just learned that he can pull his bib off. Even when it seems to be hurting him, he pulls, pulls, pulls, scrunches up his face and throws his head back, and POP! off it comes.

His nickname is trouble (double double toil and).

If you are interested in seeing the two sweet munchkins in action, you can look at these two videos they made to wish their grandmother a happy birthday:
Katya: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wzKSLeVnFs
Vanya: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJCEuC4lEe0

Sometimes Peter and I like to call Katya “pumpkin head” as an endearment. “Hello my little pumpkin head!” “It’s time to go to BED, pumpkin HEAD.” I am not sure why we started or where it came from, but the other night we were unwise enough as to have a prolonged conversation about it:

“Are you a pumpkin head?”
“Nooooo”
“Who is my little pumpkin head?”
No answer.
“Who is my little pumpkin head? Who is?” [Tickle Tickle]
“HAA HAA HAA HEE HEE HA”
“Are you my little pumpkin head?” [Tickle tickle tickle]
“HAA HAAA HEEE” [gasp for breath] “HAA HEE HAA YES HAA HE HE”
“Is mama a pumpkin head?”
“No.”
“Who is mama then?”
“Mama is a pickle head.”
“:( … is papa a pumpkin head?”
“No. Papa is a sausig head.” [sausig = sausage]

It is somewhat berserk having two little children. There are whole hours where not even an instant of quiet breaks through the noise. Katya has taken to talking non-stop and asking “why?” about every 20 seconds or so (this is particularly true when you are engaged in some kind of hard physical or mental labor). Vanya, having passed through his screeching at the top of his lungs phase, had entered the eternal noise and babbling stage. He just puts out a constant string of sounds, which occasionally are very cute “da da da’s” and more often are less amusing (i.e. extremely irritating) moans and groans.

Katya’s nose runs often in the winter time. We are not sure if it is the wintertime snuffles or allergies. But she often asks for a tissue. Just now, as I was writing this, she asked for a tissue. I took the opportunity to use the toilet and get her a piece of toilet paper for a tissue. As I handed it to her she asked,
“It that you pee one?” “WHAT?” “Is that you pee one?” “NO.”

Katya has become very directive of late. She has always known quite clearly what she wanted, but now she is able to articulate it. And, she does, non-stop.
•Upstairs: “Mama, I want seltzer with ice in a sippy cup, please.”
•On the way up the stairs: “Carry me, mama. Turn on the light. When we get upstairs, I want to play play dough in my playroom for a couple minutes. You turn on my light.”
•On the way down the stairs: “I want toast with black berry jam and a bowl of yogurt with honey and Mama’s cereal.”
•At the breakfast table, sitting backwards in her chair observing my mother, who makes us all breakfast: “I want a waffle, Mya Mya. I want a waffle, Mya Mya. Mya Mya I want a waffle. I want a waffle with syrup and egg and toast, Mya Mya. I want some water. Mya Mya I want some water… NO, not in that cup, in a sippy cup. I want some juice, Mama, I want some berry juice in a regular cup… NO, that doesn’t match, that doesn’t MATCH…”

Matching is a big thing. We mistakenly bought her a multicolor set of plates, spoons, forks, bowls and cups. Now it is one of the essentials of each meal that Katya’s food is all served on the same color table ware – so if you choose a blue plate, you must also be able to find the blue cup, the blue bowl, the blue fork and the blue spoon.

She has also been building lots of skills. She can do 12 piece puzzles all by herself. She is learning to play concentration with bear cards. She loves to help wash vegetables, make jello, pour pasta into water to cook and do art projects. She paints, glues, and scatters sequins and colorful cotton balls all over the place. She still loves to build towers with blocks or legos, play with her little wood and plastic people and her “babies.” She loves to migrate various items throughout the house. For example, this morning she had to take a plastic cabbage, apple slice and piece of corn down to her grandparent’s apartment.

Vanya is doing well. He is pretty big now, being seven months old and almost 20 pounds. He has recently learned to do lots o things, which put me in mind of writing his chronology before I completely forget when things happened for him:

Contractions started: Jun 10, 3 pm
Bought coconut water at store for consumption during labor in the hospital: Jun 10, 4 pm
Labor started in earnest: Jun 11, 2 am
Called doula to come: Jun 11, 4:30 am
Doula arrived: Jun 11, 5:30 am
Labor progressed with unusual speed: Jun 11, 7 am
Started feeling urge to push: Jun 11, 7:15 am
Fled to the hospital: Jun 11, 7:30 am
Arrived at hospital: Jun 11, 8 am
Born: Jun 11, 8:18 am
Longingly remembered the coconut water we abandoned as we fled to the hospital: Jun 11, 9 am, 9:30 am, 10 am, 10:30 am, 11 am….
Came home: Jun 14, 1 pm
Started breast feeding: Jun 15, 7 am
Started solid foods: Oct 11
Rolled over: Sometime in October or November
First tooth: bottom front, Nov 15
Second tooth: other bottom front, Nov 29
Sat up without help: early Dec
Stopped breast feeding: mid-Dec
Started sleeping through the night: Dec 24
Moved into a room with his sister: Dec 27
Did his first sign: Jan 1 (sign for milk)
Started babbling: early-Jan (a da da da da, a ma ma ma, a pa pa pa )
Started pulling himself to stand on his knees in his crib: early Jan
Started clapping: early Jan
Held his own bottle: mid-Jan
Shouted with anger when he was barred from entering his sister’s play space in his walker: Last week
Started finger foods: today
Third tooth: any day now
Started crawling: sometime soon or he will bust a gut
Mom completed healed from ballistic birth: before this calendar year is over?

Vanya’s defining characteristic is his calm bright cheerfulness. He can sit for ages quietly engaged in playing or contemplating life but when someone looks at him or talks to him, he positively lights up.

It has begun to become clear that Vanya is developing strong will power and sense of determination where his interests are concerned. He is not easily dissuaded from completing the tasks which he sets for himself. Downstairs at my parent’s house, they have had to rearrange the kids’ play space because of Vanya’s escapades in his walker. At first, he wasn’t really good at maneuvering around in it. But he slowly got better and better. Then he began to conduct a series of drive by’s of Katya’s table, often abducting little plastic people standing too close to the edge– and the only thing louder than Katya’s shriek of dismay is Vanya’s howl of rage at being barred from the area.

Unlike his sister at his age, Vanya likes to try to eat books, or at least chew them, and he loves to grab them and feel them. He is crazy to crawl. He tries and tries and tries – and falls, falls, falls…. and tries again and again and again. He can move around a very wide area just kind of scooting and half-crawling. He can also pick up tiny things off the floor – so we have to sweep all the time. He loves music. As soon as someone starts singing or playing music, Vanya invariably starts bobbing up and down and smiling and sometimes clapping. He definitely claps if the song is “if you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands.”

Two sweet sleeping babies lay upstairs. One tired gum-chewing tea-drinking mama sits downstairs in front of her computer zoning out.

Today was quite a day. Katya is getting her two-year molars. (She let me look in her mouth with a flash light!) She is crazily vacillating between playing cheerfully and whining intolerably. She even had about 30 minutes when she was just crying inconsolably. She asks for all kinds of snacks, but doesn’t eat them. She wants to sit up at the table for lunch and dinner but only to play with her food. She is contrary and has tried everyone’s patience by dripping cereal on the table and floor, mixing up Myamya’s embroidery threads, throwing toys on the floor, sticking leaves in her mouth, crying over everything, constantly demanding “new” water or juice or snack, and then sinking back into Myamya’s chair pale and tired saying “I don’t feel well, mama. Pick me up!.”

We took a walk to the park this morning. When we got there, she wanted to walk. So we helped her out of the stroller. She hadn’t gone five steps when her (new) pants started falling down. In the summer time when that happened, we just took off her pants. But today it was cold. So, we stood there racking our brains for something to use as a belt. I scavenged around through the diaper bad while Katya was standing there crying like she had lost her best friend. The only thing I could find was a plastic bag. So I tore it down the middle and wadded it up and bent down to loop it through the belt straps on Katya’s pants. She started shrieking “NO! I don’t want the bag. I don’t want the bag.” and crying hysterically. It took us more than 5 minutes and every ploy we could think of to get her to calm down and accept the bag as a belt for the time being. I think the winning ploy was that she could hold the bag of popcorn that we were taking to feed the ducks.

Needless to say, I am quite tired tonight.

Peter is in Austria. He has been there for 6 days and I miss him terribly - not just because of the relentlessness of being with two kids all day long. He is my relaxation. When he’s home, we relax in the evening together - whether we go see a concert (extraordinarily rare these days) or watch House, MD (very common) or just talk for a while and then go to bed early. He is my relaxation even when it stresses me out to be doing nothing instead of something. He will be home tomorrow.

Vanya is teething too. But his teething is regular “wah wah mrhhmmmm mrhhmmm mmmrahhrahh rah mrrr mrrr rahhhh” constantly all day long type of teething. You know, the Dab of Orajel, Drool Profusely, Fall Right Asleep kind of teething.

Otherwise, he is an extremely cheerful little guy. He loves to put stuff in his mouth: his toys, his hands, your hands, his clothes, his burp clothes, Katya’s toys, your toys, diapers, wipe-ees, papers, pencils, tubes of Desitin, plates, whatever he can get his pudgy little hands on. He also loves to keep rhythm. He has a little rocking chair and he knows just how to move his legs to keep it rocking for 10 minutes, 20 minutes, an hour. He can rock himself across the room. He is just learning the same thing with his new johnny jump up. He is beginning to bounce in rhythm, up and down, up and down, up and down, no higher, no lower, no higher, no lower, up and down, up and down. He is eating solids already. He eats cereal happily, squash less happily and pumpkin somewhere in the middle.

AND, he is learning to sleep through the night. He sleeps about 10 hours a night now, which is great! In fact, I am going from this e-mail to the shower and then to bed with the possibility of sleeping for seven hours straight. (I haven’t realized this possibility yet because Katya started to wake up at night just about the time that Vanya started sleeping through them, I think because of her teeth. But, even if I don’t realize it, going to bed with the potential for sleeping 7 hours straight is much better than going to bed without that potential).

HELLO!! I hope everything is good with you. It has been so long since I wrote an update that I have decided to split the main news into two e-mails - one about Katya and the other about new baby Vanya. I’ll try to write a more general one soon.

Katya is now 2 years and 4 months. She is talking up a storm these days, saying impossibly cute things like:

“Mama, pick you up.” (Mama, pick me up)

“Mama, pick you up Vanya.” (Mamy, pick Vanya up)

“Papa, I want water mama.” (The “mama” at the end of the sentence being a generic word she sometimes puts at the end of requests regardless of who she is addressing.)

“Hold you.” (Hold me)

“I wanna be like a baby” (This she says before sitting in Vanya’s chair.)

“Need more money. Money melted.” (This she said when riding on one of those little rides they have on the street outside of stores which require an endless stream of quarters.)

“Ha ha! Munny joke!” (Funny joke)

“One, two, blee, bore, bive”

“I have a little ploblem.”

“Not like dis. Not like dis!” ending on a rising note of panic. She says this when you are trying to help her rearrange something, dress her doll, build something with blocks, put food on her plate, sit in a chair in the kitchen… or any other time when her idea of the necessary position of any item does not correspond to your intention or action.

And once, after I farted when putting her to bed, “Mama pooped. Needs new diaper.”

Two very recent language developments include using the word “our,” as in our house, our car, our stroller, and the word “on,” as a universal preposition. For example, “I want to play on the baby on the room.”

Just listening to her talk when she gets in her groove is mind boggling. The other day I jotted down some of her dialogs with herself and with me. Here’s an example:

She was playing with two pails. She has just told me that one of them is her coffee and the other is my coffee. “That a lot. A lot of holes. Dat Mommy’s. Mommy’s coffee pouring out. My coffee gone. My coffee gone. Not dat coffee. It’s drippin out. I wanna see anoder cup.” A little later she came up to me and said, “My belly dirty.” I asked “Your belly is dirty?” She replied, “Dis water, not tea. Berry juice,” showing me a doll’s cup full of water. “I want that cup.. water on the belly. I did it. Not anymore. I want to drink dat water.” Then, looking up, she continued with hardly a breath, “Belka. Belka. Belka.” And then looking at me, “Call belka.” (meaning I am calling a belka). (Belka is the russian word for squirrel)

Just today at lunch, Katya was full of crazy things. The first thing she wanted was a pear. So I gave her one, a really good one that Peter had just picked up at a farmers market. A few minutes later I looked over and saw one whole finger of hers had disappeared into the pear. “What are you doing?” I asked. “Making holes,” she said, removing her finger and sticking it into another part of the pear, as she had clearly done several times previously. “Stop doing that. You’re making the pear disgusting,” I said. She looked at me, looked at the mutilated pear, and then held it out to me and said “Mama eat pear.”

Later she wanted a sandwich with mayonnaise, ham and cheese. So made her one. A minute later I looked over and saw that she had put the sandwich near my plate with one bite out of it and a chewed up piece of sandwich sitting neatly on top. “You don’t want your sandwich?” I asked. “I don’t like it,” she answered. A little later she said “I want bread.” Thinking I had found a very clever way of getting her to eat her sandwich I said, “Why don’t you have some of your sandwich?” She looked at me, then considered the sandwich for a moment. Finally she nodded and said “Take off cheese, take off ham, take off….” I interrupted, “OK. OK. Here’s a piece of bread.” I gave her a fresh piece of bread and finished eating her sandwich myself.

I just read through my last update which I wrote in December. The last line was “I hope to be in touch more often now that the worst (first trimester) is past.” Quite funny as I have rarely written so infrequently

We are all doing well. I am 8 months pregnant, a balloon already and getting bigger by the day. Katya just turned 2 on Saturday. She is doing really great - learning and growing all the time. She is just beginning to speak in sentences. She says things like

- “No eat grass
- “No myamya baba. New toys. Mama by.” (I don’t want to go downstairs for breakfast. I want to play with my new toys with Mama sitting next to me.)
- “KaKa poop. Need new diaper
- “No dirt. Play on grass
- “No Papa push” (when Peter tries to get her to walk a little faster)

She can walk about 1/2 mile or so without getting tired. She loves to play in the playground now - swinging, playing in the sandbox climbing and sliding. She loves to play with her little village people, her babies, play dough, water, and almost anything else she can get her hands on. She still loves to swim and take baths.

Peter is doing well. He has been sorting out and posting all his photos on-line in preparation for the rush of new baby photos.

So first, I will tell you about Katya… (surprise!)

We are so excited that Katya will be multi-lingual. She is learning English, Russian, and seems to have retained a smattering of words from her previous habitation on a planet nearby Mars. Hence, we are all becoming multilingual. There is not one person in our household (no, nor cat or dog either) who cannot translate the following sentence correctly:

I saw a La La La sitting in beung eating badum badum.

The answer is clearly:

I saw a pig sitting in water eating pasta.

Of course, Katya is not forming sentences yet, but she is clearly naming things. How she gets these names, we are not always sure. The La La La we can explain. It comes from a Boyton book which begins: “ A cow says ‘Moo.’ A sheep says ‘Bah.’ Three singing pigs say ‘La La La.’” The other words we have decided she remembers from her stay on “her” planet.

(Interestingly, while “water” is “beung” in English, it is very correctly “voda” in Russian.)

Other words more closely resemble English or Russian. When she wants out of the stroller, she points to the ground and says “wahkh.” When it is time to go to bed, she says “poka poka” to papa and “bye” to mama. She can say both “belly button” and “pupok” (Russian for belly button) and knows where it is. When she wants to go from the first to the second floor, she says “Up Up.” When she wants to hear her favorite CD (which is every 5 minutes) she says “A B” for the first two letters of the alphabet, denoting the alphabet song. She also frequently requests “Ra Ra Ra” (The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round) and “Ro Ro Ro” (Row Row Row Your Boat). She now has words for raisins, pudding, peas, apricots, and the list is growing so fast it is impossible to keep up with. About three weeks ago I wrote down all the words she was using and there were about 30. I have no idea how many she has now. Word acquisition at 19 months seems exponential. She is also picking up some choice phrases, often from her grandmother, such as “nice rice,” “GRReen beans,” and the old favorite “peas please.”

Katya’s character is developing more and more.

•She likes order. If you give her peas and corn for dinner and put them in different compartments on her four compartment plate, she will move any peas which strayed into the corn to the pea section, and the same for the corn. She will also reorder her toys if they get out of order. A couple days ago she found a fisher price people’s chair in her plastic food bin and ran to put it into the fisher price people bin.

•She loves water. She loves drinking water, bathing in water, swimming in water, spitting water on the floor, pouring water on the floor. She spends her swimming classes either under water or floating on her back.

•She is very responsible. If you make the sound of her baby crying, she will stop whatever she is doing and run over to her doll and pick it up (and then, on the flip side, drop it on its head). This is very useful when she is doing something she isn’t supposed to be doing or when she is working herself up into a fit about something else. It has the strong power to sway her mind.

•She is very loving. She loves to kiss people and blow kisses. This afternoon when she got up from her nap, the first thing she did before letting me lift her out of her crib was to pick up “Mousy,” turn him to face her and give him a kiss. Then she laid him down and held up her arms, ready to be lifted out of her crib.

•So far, she is persuadable. “Mousy” is the stuffed mouse that sleeps with her. When it is time for bed, Mousy calls her to let her know he is waiting for her. Very often this will convince her to let me take her upstairs to bed when before it she had been disinclined to go with me. My parents tell me this trait is likely to change within the year.

Now, I have some other important family news…

It seems that Katya will not be an only child for long. We are expecting our second baby in June and are very excited. So far, I am little over 3 months pregnant and things are going well. I am extremely thankful that the first trimester is over, as it was more trying that the last time. It seemed that I was submerged in nauseating incapacitating water for about 14 weeks… but only realized how far gone I had been when I started to emerge. I realized that I had even been too tired in those weeks even to talk to myself. Surely too tired to criticize or second guess myself. I was surprised that when my energy started to come back, so did the judging voice, the guilt voice, the “what if” voice. It is perhaps the one good thing I know about first trimesters.

Anyway, happy holidays and happy new year to you! May your new year be happy and healthy.

I hope to be in touch more often now that the worst is past.

Whew! I just finished a mad clean of the house. I vacuumed and mopped all the floors in the house – except Katya’s because she is sleeping. In fact, I have mopped myself into the corner with my desk and computer. So I figured I would try to finish this update which I started on August 4. It has been such an amazing time, these last two months. Katya is growing and learning faster than seems possible.

• Katya discovers more and more.

Katya discovered how turn the volume up and down on the stereo.

She discovered cool round buttons on my laptop which turn blue when she presses them.

She learned how to turn on the TV. The first time she did it, it scared her to death.

She discovered the joy of opening cabinet doors and drawers and pulling out all the contents.

• She begins to understand more and more.

Katya points at the book I am reading. I say, “This is my book. Do you have books? Where are your books?” Katya stands there several moments with a look of concentration on her face. Then she turns around, walks to her bookshelf, chooses a book, and brings it over. I look at the book, see that it is in Russian, and say, “that is a book that Papa can read to you.’ Without hesitation, Katya turns around, walks over to Papa, hands him the book, and holds up her arms so he can lift her onto his lap.

One morning when I was dressing Katya, I lost the pair of socks I was going to put on her. I looked all over the changing table but couldn’t find them. So I got out another pair, finished dressing her and put her on the floor. I hadn’t walked three steps when she shouted to me, pointed at the sock on her foot, and pointed under the dresser. Sure enough, there were the missing socks.

Katya now knows what eyes, noses, mouths, ears, teeth, hands, feet and (last and most important) belly buttons are. She knows what socks and shoes are. She knows what pens, pencils and crayons are for (… to eat, of course).

•She begins to express more and more:

She knows exactly where she wants me to sit these days. She expresses it by pointing at the floor or chair where I am to sit and shouting “MAMA AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH…” The shout lasts until I have assumed my appointed seat.

She has created her first word. A small toy car is a “go go.”

She says “Mama” and “Papa” really clearly now. She even sings little songs like “Mamama mamama, mamama…” She also sings “Rrrnd rrrnd rrrnd,” which is, as you know, “the wheels on the bus/car/truck/wagon go round and round, round and round, round and round.” She sings this for blocks while riding in her stroller. She is getting “grandma” and grandpa” clearer and clearer but I can’t really transcribe what she says. It sounds something like “bababa.” “AH” is cat. “Bhk” is book. “Hrch” is yes. She now babbles in what sounds so much like real sentences that it takes me a while to be sure that she didn’t just say something real.
She still uses signs. Her most popular signs these days are: eat, bottle, more, train, bird, helicopter, change my diaper, and cat.

•She begins to decide more and more things:

Katya decided for the first time that she didn’t like wearing a dress. She looked up at me and ripped at her dress, pulling it this way and that, making a growly strangling sound. It was very clear that she was saying “Look, mom. I can’t play in this thing. My legs are all tangled up.”

Just last night, for the first time ever, she started to decide what bedtime songs she wanted to hear and which she didn’t. She is apparently not a fan of the song “The Rose.” (You know… “When the night has been to lonely and the road has been too long, and you think that love it only for the lucky and the strong, just remember that in the winter far beneath the bitter snow, lies the seed that with the sun’s love in the spring becomes the rose.”) She rejected this song, not once, not twice, but several times.

•She begins to play more and more complex games:

She loves her teddy bears, mice and baby dolls. She carries them around, hugs them, kisses them, feeds them and gives them something to drink.

She will walk round in circles getting a kiss from everyone – a kiss from Papa, a kiss from Mama, a kiss from Grandma, a kiss from Grandpa, and back around.

She can fit the shapes into the box with holes for shapes. It is still trial and error, but just a month ago she couldn’t orient the pieces so that they would fall in.

She loves to screw and unscrew bottle tops (if you will sit for hours on end holding the bottle for her.)

She loves to play in the sand box now. She can dig with a shovel and put dirt in a bucket. She can expertly mash sand towers. And as all the other babies, she ignores all her own toys but loves to use other kids’ toys.

She has become a great leaf collector. No leave is too small or too disintegrated to escape her notice. She collects all sizes, shapes, colors and conditions of leaf. She can spend hours walking down the street examining leaves, dropping leaves, recovering leaves, screaming about leaves, laughing with leaves and transferring leaves from her hand to my hand and back again.

•She begins to become more physically adept:

She pulled herself up to standing for the first (and almost last) time. In this area, Katya is not ambitious. She seems to feel no drive whatsoever to master all the skills which would render her completely independent.
She can bend over, rest her weight on her hands, then straighten back up.

She went up three stairs by herself in the park the other day by holding on and pulling herself up.

She often tries to crawl. (She never crawled before. She just started walking) From sitting she moves onto her hands, but then her legs get all tangled and she can’t move anywhere. She hasn’t quite got the idea of what to do with her legs.

•Our house begins to look more and more like a toy store circus disaster. It only looks relatively put together on the days she stays with her grandparents.

Did you ever notice that when someone is trying to understand how small a baby is she doesn’t look at the baby? She looks instead at the baby’s hands or feet, tiny little fingers and toes, to get the full impact of smallness.

It is the same thing with me about bigness.

I cannot look directly at Katya and grasp how much bigger, older, cleverer, abler, grown-uper, understandinger she is than she was. When I look at Katya, I see Katya. I am often delighted and amazed at how much she can do and how many new things she has learned. But, I cannot feel the impact of the change in the moment.

It is at completely other times when I feel staggered at how much she has grown. For example, I felt it when I was cleaning out the bib and burp cloth drawer. All the little bibs, with their breast-milk and formula stains, that were absolutely indispensible for months and months when Katya was a little milk monster and even after for her first forays into solid foods, all those little bibs: we don’t need them anymore. How did that happen? How is it that we can now use that drawer for candles and slides?

We have had to put up gates on the stairs, clear off all our low shelves, and carefully guard our garbage cans and electrical cords. We put all the walkers away. We don’t have to stay at alert to protect our toes from the walker wheels anymore. We don’t have to lift the walker up and down the step from the kitchen to the sun room, from the kitchen to the dining room. We can’t just put baby in the walker with grapes and cheerios and relax for twenty minutes.

It is the changes in our daily life and rituals which make us feel the immensity of the time which has elapsed.

I haven’t written recently (or more accurately “finished writing” anything) because the changes are so fast and yet so gradual. Katya is walking, walking, walking. She can go anywhere now. Her head is always bobbing up and down around the apartment. She likes to walk then squat, walk then squat, walk then squat. The other day I found her with cat food in both hands, with a butter knife, a carrot peeler, and with her hands in the garbage can.

Just today she started to shake her head “nooooo.” She does it with a joyfully mischievous smile. It is the growing consensus that she is going to be a rare handful. It is not that she is badly behaved. She is, more often than not, beautifully behaved. But she has a kind of utterly patient determination which makes you worry a little. As her grandmother says “she does not like to be thwarted.”

She got her first “punishment” (a little slap on the butt) for knocking a plant on the ground (for the nth time).

She is able to say more and more these days, recently with signs rather than new words. She does a superb “eat” sign now and a great “more.” Tonight she tried to tell me that she wanted to see the train in the book by handing me the book at making the “train” sign. She is getting better and better at letting us know that her teeth hurt and she wants some medicine. (She has somewhere between 7 and 10 teeth. She is not super cooperative about giving us a look in her mouth.) She recently asked grandma to change her diaper using the “change diaper” sign and we still argue with her about whether an airplane is an airplane or a helicopter. We are just starting to teach her the sign for “squirrel” (we use with Russian work “belka” with her because we think she will pick it up much faster), “butterfly” and “pain.”

Her verbal progress mostly involves humming and rhythm these days. She walks around going “Mmm mmm MMM, Mmm mmm MMM, Mmm mmm MMM” and “hmm hmm hmm” to the tune of “This Old Man.” (You know: This old man, he played one, he played knick knack on my thumb….” She never gets past “This old man.” So she hums: “This old man, this old man, this old man…”) She is great at copying intonations and will repeat a phrase with nonsense words but the absolutely correct intonation.

Right now she is sleeping. She is getting her top molars and she has been quite fragile all week – more hugging and crying than usual. You can feel that her top gums are both completely swollen in the back. Poor thing.

But, if you really want to please her, regardless of what small catastrophe may have just befallen her tired little self, all you have to do is ask her, “Do you have any peas, please?” and her face will break out in a little smile and she will put her face forward for a kiss.

June 14, 2007: Katya took her very first steps all by herself. (WOW!!)

I was intending to be cavalier about it. I had convinced myself that since she will take so many steps in her life that it was really not so important to see the first ones. But, boy, when she did it, so unexpectedly, I was astounded at the surge of joy we both felt. She was ecstatic, maybe even more excited than I was.

I was sitting on the floor intending to help her practice standing up on her own. I spread out my legs, set her in the middle, counted to three and let go. Instead of just standing there, she took four steps and landed in my arms laughing and squealing. Then we tried it again, and again and again. Each time I would set her facing me and she would walk toward me. What a rush!

June 21, 2007: Katya learned to eat using the dipping technique.

None of the mommy books prepared me for the fact that babies learn the dipping technique so early. (You know, the technique you use at cocktail parties to dip your broccoli and carrots in sour cream dip.) In fact, none of them mention it at all. I was feeding Katya lunch and having a little snack myself. She had toast, cauliflower, carrots, pasta and a bowl of yogurt. I just had a cracker with cheese. I was bored with my cheese, so I dipped my cracker in Katya’s yogurt … looked away … and when I looked back, Katya was dipping her toast in the yogurt. Then she dipped her cauliflower and put it in her mouth. Then she dipped her carrots, pasta, other toast, fingers, cauliflower, everything, yogurt, yogurt, yogurtpastacarrotmash.

Nor did she forget about it at dinner. There we were, dipping again. Her dipping skills are pretty good. Sometimes she loses the sense of it all and starts total emersion, but generally she sticks with dipping. You can tell the difference between dipping and emersion by the amount of dipping substance on her hands. If just her fingers are covered, she is practicing dipping. If more of her hand is covered, she has probably been toying with emersion. If dipping substance can be found on her elbow or in her armpit, she has been involved in total emersion.

June 23, 2007: Katya danced at the Vision Festival.

The Vision Festival is an annual festival of free jazz and other kinds of free music here in New York. As some of you may remember, Peter and I used to plunge into the festival for the whole week, listening to music, cooking, serving, shopping, and taking thousands of photos. In the past two years, we have done less cooking, serving and shopping because these things are a little harder to do with a baby. Instead, we took the baby to the festival and she loved it! Even though she was only there for two out of about 30 sets, it felt like it took more energy than all the cooking shopping listening serving of the past years during all 30 sets. Partly this is because when at a concert, it is important to encourage Katya to keep quiet. At 14 months, for Katya, this means walking and walking and walking and walking. And if she is tired and has skipped a nap (which she had) it means walking and walking and walking and walking and walking and walking and walking and walking and walking and walking. I hope you are forming the right mental picture. She is not confident enough yet to do all this walking on her own without a parental finger. So for me, it meant stooping and stooping and stooping and stooping and stooping.

The one piece of respite for me and my back was during the second set (which Katya really liked) when Katya stood on the balcony watching the musicians holding the wall and dancing (wiggling and jiggling and popping up and down). It was exuberantly adorable.

June 25, 2007: Katya is mastering the spoon self-feeding method.

And finally, Katya is getting really good at feeding herself with a spoon. This has to do in part with an executive parental decision about the foolishness of the popular baby safety spoons which we had been using. These spoons are slick and clever. They are made of some kind of rubbery plastic which changes color when they come in contact with hot food. The color change is intended to warn parents when the food is too hot. Its main flaw is the fact that the portion of the spoon that changes color when in contact with hot food is almost always covered by the food in question. So unless you are serving your baby clear broth, it is not excessively useful. It also has another flaw, one which makes it hard to teach a baby to use it on her own: there is not much area in the valley of the spoon. Therefore, food is much more likely to fall off the spoon before the baby can get the spoon to her mouth. So we have switched to good old fashioned grandma/grandpa/papa/mama hand-me-down metal baby spoons. These work ever so much better and Katya is getting along extremely well with them. She can use them to eat cereal and yogurt and she doesn’t get so frustrated with it all.

Aside: Safety baby forks are also less than useful because their tongs are dull and therefore baby can under no circumstances pierce food with them.