Wednesday, October 21, 2009

The Days These Days: 15 months old

She wakes up at five, and this is so much better than four, I take pity on her and bring her into bed for a crack-of-dawn snack and a little nap. She nurses on one side, looks up at me and says, "Mo!" as if I might forget, and then nurses on the other side. She sleeps between us until six-ish, when she rolls over, stands up, and says either "Dada!" or "Cheese!" depending on how hungry she is, I suppose. Her version of cheese sounds like "deezh!" or "jeezh!" or sometimes just "deee!" She loves cheese, and gets excited and asks for it whenever she hears a similar word: jeez, she's, peas, please, Jesus, etc.

Her dear Dada gets up with her at six and they do the dishes and clean the kitchen while I sleep in until the luxurious hour of 7:30-ish. Then we all eat breakfast together, and she waves and says "Ba-ba" to her dad. I check my email, she plays, and eventually she realizes that we are inside when we could be outside, and she reminds me that it's time to go "Outh!" She gets her hat, and we head into the back yard, where I rake leaves into piles and she helps me by spreading them around again. I work slightly faster than she does, so it's a net benefit to the yard, and keeps us both happy.

Naptime's around ten, and lasts for a precious thirty minutes. She wakes up and goes instantly from half-asleep and bleary to bright eyed and grinning and asking to see Dada. So we go upstairs to the office and say hi. Once she's changed, we go see friends or go to the park or the market. She loves her friend Ari, and asks to see him at least twice a day: "Ar-ruh? Ar-ruh?" We have lunch, and she eats either almost nothing or an astonishing volume. According to the parenting books, I'm supposed to cultivate an air of detachment about this. It is hard. But her average diet is varied and plentiful, and she gets bigger and heavier all the time, so it's all going well. She loves noodles, apples, rice, bananas, cheese, crackers, carrots, oranges and peas. If nothing else is available, she'll eat green beans, white beans, tomato, bread, egg yolk, vegetable fritters, chicken, and fish. She will spit out avocado every time, along with anything that's too big or too tough for a kid with only two teeth.

The afternoon nap is similarly brief, and at three o'clock is the changing of the guard. I go to my studio, and Dada takes over, and there's generally a trip to the park. At the park, or, in Cleo-ese, "guck! guck!" she climbs up and slides down the slide feet first, on her belly. Her ability to do this all by herself is directly related to the Dada school of park/kid management, i.e.: let 'er alone, she can do it. I admire this approach, but I find myself having to jam my hands into my armpits and hold myself back from hovering when it's my turn at the park.

At six, I come home and it's time for a wash and bed for Cleo. Our current baby-bathing technique is for one parent to shower, the other to hand in a naked, grubby baby, wait five minutes, and then remove and wrap in a towel a wet, clean baby, and bundle her off to be pajama-ed. Inexplicably, she loves this whole process, including being held right under the shower for a good rinse. Well, she tolerates that part. She loves everything else, especially the towel.

The current bedtime story list has grown: we're now up to (in strict order) Miss Mary Mack, Mr Brown Can Moo, The Little Book of Hugs, Yummy Yucky, and Goodnight Moon. Each of these has its own favorite phrase or page or illustration, and there is a lot of pointing and conversation and turning back and forth of pages.

Once sleep is firmly established (I've Been Working on the Railroad), it's time for grown-up dinner. This meal has been drifting downwards in quality recently, and hopefully we hit bottom the other night with frozen fish, frozen peas and carrots, and rice. But that's another story.


1 comment:

mk said...

This is so interesting! I babysit two fifteen-month-olds (a boy born 8 days before Cleo and a girl born the exact day as Cleo).

the girl is now completely weaned (her mom had surgery recently and didn't want any pain meds passed to her daughter), but doesn't like whole milk very much so it's a task getting her enough calcium. so it's good that she loves cheese and yogurt. She drinks milk for me more easily than she does for her parents, oddly enough. She LOVES the playground but some days all she wants to do is watch the dogs run around in the park outside the playground, and she makes the sign for dog, and then she chases the squirrels and makes the sign for dog and says something that (I think) sounds remarkably like squirrel... she loves tofu and lasagna and would eat peas forever, but also REALLY likes to throw food on the ground, I think just so she can laugh while I pick it all up. Her favorite book is Dear Zoo, and she will diligently tell you the sounds of cows, monkeys, and snakes, if you ask her nicely. but her favorite animal is dog, without a doubt. She puts herself to sleep so easily - zip her up in her sleep sack, put her in her crib, she sticks her pacifier in her mouth and tucks her little soft animal blanket thing under her chin and lies down, and then you just walk out of the room and shut the door! sometimes she makes some noises but if she's tired enough, and she's now dropped her morning nap entirely so she usually is tired enough, she just lays there (I assume, 'cause I'm downstairs with the monitor on by that point) until she falls asleep. So cute.

The boy is the youngest of three, under a 7 year old and a 4 year old, so he is a little different. I've been sitting him since he was five months, so whenever he sees me he gets so excited he wiggles til he falls down. I can't seem to get him to eat chicken, but he'll eat any fruit ever created, and has almost mastered using a spoon for his cheerios-and-yogurt. He'll eat almost anything if I strategically attach it to buttered toast. He's got TONS of teeth, and the other day he took his sister's whole apple when she had eaten off the skin around the whole thing, and started taking bites. It was totally scary so I watched every single bite he took to make sure he wasn't going to choke, but he just took tiny little bites around the whole apple and had the time of his life, and he ate almost all of it! He doesn't have much of an attention span for books (yet?), he still prefers to try and eat them. He loves music so much, he dances and claps and wiggles and dances some more. Also! He's started throwing temper tantrums (learned behavior from his older siblings, like WOAH) - when you take something from him that he's not supposed to have, or something, he just starts screaming and kind of lays down on the ground and pushes himself around, but if you step over him and ignore him, he gets over it in about 15 seconds. totally scary for a kid that young to be throwing tantrums like that, though. He loves bathtime, has stopped trying to drown himself and instead just sits there and splashes and wreaks general havoc.