radish times

Vanya is 2 1/2 months old. He is harder to write about than Katya. He is a sweet, good natured, patient baby. He doesn’t cry unless he is hungry or he wants to be burped - and even then he only cries if you ignore the vast number of squiggly grunting signs he gives that something is wrong. He hasn’t cried at night for at least 2 months now, which is just amazing.

Since he is so quiet, sometimes you almost forget he is there, sitting in his chair or laying in his bassinet. That doesn’t mean that occasionally he doesn’t demand a lot of attention. He does. There are days he seems to be hungry all the time or simply uncomfortable. And, he does like to be held and talked to. He completely lights up if someone bends down to pay attention to him. He smiles and laughs and coos.

He has developed a mesmerizing cooing repertoire. Accompanied, as it is, with laughing and smiling, he pulls you in so that it is almost impossible to turn away. He uses a great variety of sounds and tones, including some impossibly high ones. And he bats his eyes at you as if you were his whole dependence and delight.

For the last two nights he has been working at twisting me around his little finger by sleeping for 7 and 8 hours at a time. I am completely charmed. Although I have to relearn how to sleep for that many hours in a row. He sleeps soundly through. It is I who keeps waking up… to check on him, on how many hours he has been sleeping, on when I might need to pump, on whether I have to go to the bathroom, on how many hours might be left…

He is very healthy and growing right on schedule. At his 2-month visit, he was in the 50th percentile across the board for height, weight and head circumference. He now weighs more that 12 1/2 pounds. It still absolutely amazes me, as one of Vanya’s older cousins highlighted for me by continuously asking to see the milk, that though you never actually see the milk going from your breast into the baby, that the breast feeding thing really works.

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.