beung
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.