watch einstein baby!

the child is actually conjugating sentences now. it was the night before christmas eve. we were sitting down to a nice simple dinner of soup and ciabatta, and thomas was interacting with sparrow in the way that he is so good at: with lots of fun and patience. sparrow has recently become so good at repeating sentences verbatim. she can pretty much copy anything we say! thomas said one phrase (i forget what) and of course she repeated it exactly. then he says to her slowly, "you're a copy cat!" and she--to our great surprise--said, "i'm a copy cat!" 20 months old!

thomas said that since she is so good at repeating things, we should be teaching her Bible verses, so the first one i started her on was psalm 27:1 "the lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall i fear?" i only started her on the first phrase--the lord is my light--and i made up little hand motions to go along with it so she would remember even better. however, she baffled me by making up her own version, which came from who knows where! i would say, "the lord is my..." and she would say "teee!" which was either a prophetic utterance from the mouth of babes and was supposed to mean "king"--which would be of course true, and quite amazing in its own way; or just an obscure association she had in her head that she could not easily override, having to do with tea, or keys, who knows. with the hand motions, she has gotten much better at saying "light!" and can say pretty much the whole first part when i say, "can you say your bible verse?" it's so sweet to hear her say "lord." then, the other day, we were all in the car, and i had her say the verse for thomas again, and to my great surprise, she said her part, and then she kept going, "my sa-va-dun" aaah! "did you hear that?" i had to make her repeat it several times, she was saying it so quietly! truly, i don't believe i challenge her enough! i mean, i had no idea she was paying attention when i would follow up with the rest of the verse, especially without hand motions, especially since salvation is such a long word, and she would have no idea what it meant! but pardon me, for she seems to be hungry for the word!

another, perhaps less edifying, activity that has popped into her life recently is the watching of movies. sometimes i get so desperate with her when i am trying to make dinner--she is definitely a child that needs a lot of external stimulation. her periods of alone play-time won't last more than 5 or 10 minutes, before she needs someone to rile up again. sigh. which is why she is going to be a big sister! well that's not the sole reason, of course. but it is a big one. i think her time of only-child-ness needs to end asap. so... i discovered baby einstein movies at the library and she is absolutely in LOVE with them. nothing else will really hold her attention, but the einstein series... she is riveted to the tv the entire half hour which allows me to get so much done. i don't know about those videos actually being helpful to their development, but honestly--it is a lifesaver and allows us to get dinner made! except every day, from morning til night, she now likes to ask me "watch einstein baby!" or "i wanna watch a movie!" yeah she can actually say that whole sentence just like that.

so we are really excited about the next little one coming along. (oh no--what will i do when i have 5 children? keep separate blogs for all of them? oops--should have thought of that before i named this one sparrowbella, eh?) anyways, on one of the occasions when she was examining my belly button (one of her favorite activities), i said, "hey sparrow--there's a little baby in there!" now every time she thinks of my belly button, she gently rubs it and says, "hi, baby!" instead of trying to bite it or poke it like she used to. "hi baby!" i asked her if she wanted a little girl baby or a little boy baby, and she said, "boy baby." she was so sure of herself. well, we'll see. i have a feeling that a girl might be easier for the relationship. but you NEVER know. i was the 2nd girl, so i have a soft spot for that place in the family. of course, if it is a boy, it takes the dang pressure off of having to have one! then maybe we can lay low for awhile before starting on our second batch. heh!

sleeping and nursing patterns are another issue (still!) i have sworn several times in moments of frustration, "i am weaning her tomorrow!" and especially being pregnant again, the nursing is a bit painful. my goal is to have her weaned and falling asleep by herself before the next baby arrives. hopefully WELL before. but i have NO IDEA HOW to do it! horrible. the first step has to be teaching her to fall asleep on her own, without nursing to sleep. i brought out the pack and play and put her in there a few times at nap time to fall asleep. it worked great two times, i was very pleased to discover that she won't actually climb out of it, even though she could. she climbs up onto the edge of it, and tries to put her feet down on the other side, but since she can't feel the ground, she doesn't let go, and then she eventually gets back in again! she only cried for 10-15 minutes or so. but: the third time she was up and screaming for at least 45 minutes, after which point i could not handle sitting there listening to it and biting my nails tensely ANYMORE! WHY wasn't it working!? i will never know. i went in there and picked up her little sobbing bundle of self and lay down with her in the big bed, where she wrapped herself tightly around me and we both fell asleep. half the nights, i manage to nurse her a little earlier in her routine, and then lie with her while she rolls around on my head and kicks my face restlessly until she finally dozes off. the next night we get home late or i am too bushed to care, or she is too bushed to stay awake, and she falls asleep on the breast again. i am too disorganized to be a parent! aaaah! blessed are the mothers whose children self-wean at the age of seven months. i have already decided: the next baby gets potty trained from birth, nursed only upon waking, taught to fall asleep by self from birth, and if there is ever a nursing strike, i am NOT going to work through it! there will be a lot more energy for playing and smiling if i am not constantly frustrated or exhausted!

side note: thomas is currently in china. he has only been gone for 2 days, but it is such a void in our lives! sparrow, of course, is not fully conscious that he is gone or why, but she misses him so much and here is the evidence: she is sleeping, but a few moments ago she woke up crying, and i ran in there to comfort her. i picked her up and laid her on my tummy and said, what's wrong, are you cold? she said, "daddy." i said, "daddy? you miss daddy?" and she said, "my daddy, my daddy," and fell back asleep in a little while. the poor dear! she is heartbreaking.

tiny mother

sparrow is having lots of fun in role play these days--being a mom, that is.

the other day, i noticed she was telling her elephant "lie down!" so she could diaper him. but then she must have realized she was still in the kitchen, and so she took her elephant and toddled down the hallway, and thomas and i snuck behind her all the way into the diaper room. once there, she put her elephant down on the changing pad and said, things like "poopy diaper" and "wipe wipe" (when she got the wipes out and wiped his blue elephant bottom). she even found a new diaper, and finally thomas and i helped her put it on him because she was getting frustrated with the dimensions of the project, but the diaper enveloped the elephant's entire torso. so we took it and put it on her purple teddy bear, which is much bigger. just now she decided bear must have a poopy diaper, and laid him on the counter, opened it, and pointed inside, saying "poopy diaper." she is so insightful. hahahahaha!

holly took her to the zoo today with samuel and hope and camille. sparrow got so excited by this adventure that she didn't even end up taking a nap at all today. i swear i nursed her for about an hour and a half, and she kept letting go and looking up at me with her big round eyes and saying things like "fishies!" and "mow-key! one, two, mow-key!" (monkey.) one time she told me, "long neck--holly--long neck." what? holly has a long neck? ok. ...OH! you saw the "long necks" with holly! (sparrow refers to giraffes as "long neck;" i think it's because she can't pronounce giraffe yet.)

she has so much fun with samuel and hope, she gets really excited every time we are driving to their house. i have to sing her songs all the way there like "there's a jason and a samuel and a hope and a holly on a bump on a log in the hole in the middle of the sea!" and "deck the halls with boughs of holly, fa la la la la, lalala la. this the time to go be jolly, falalalalalalalala. you will get to play with hope, falalalalalala la la, while mama goes to help rod cope, fa la la la la, lalalala!"

today when i picked her up i gave her a piece of bagel to eat in the car. pretty soon i heard "moe? moe?" and i said, "sparrow, more!? you still have a huge chunk of bagel in your hand!" pause, pause, then she says, "moe--hope!" hahahaha! she must love having baby hope around. holly tells me that whenever hope is taking her nap, sparrow will walk around for long periods of time saying "hope, night-night. hope, night-night."

something else funny the other night was when i had her on the floor to change her diaper. my foot was right by her head, and she looked over at it, and then said, "duddy--foot." (dirty.) it's true!!!!! i rarely get down to scrubbing my feet. saying "duddy" is a pretty common one now. she eagerly points into her book of farm animals and says, "duddy piggy!"

she likes to run around with a sleeping baby doll that i found in one of my old trunks, from when we were kids. she had been seeing dolls in books and already had the word "baby doll" down perfectly, so i thought i should get her a baby doll soon, but then i found this one. even better! she got really upset today when she was trying to put a diaper on this baby doll and it was way too huge. but her absolute favorite thing to do with the baby doll is to say "nu-nu baby doll!" and put her up to me as if she is nursing. she absolutely LOVES watching that! and she does it with her bear too.

sparrow is correctly identifying colors! today she looked at this muti-colored script on the back of a book, and pointing at the tiny individually colored letters, correctly pointed out green, blue, pink, and orange! i am so proud of her for that.

she speaks sentences!

last night, driving home from the reeves, little sparrow in her car seat suddenly says, "oh no! dark outside!" oh my gosh it killed me. i didn't even realize she knew what "dark" was, much less how to use it in a sentence!

boody!

i love the way sparrow pronounces things. she sits on the bed, for example, bounces up and down, and says, "bowncy? bowncy?" then, "mama--bowncy? bowncy?" "hahaha, sparrow i can't bounce with you! i am sooo tired!" she is undeterred. "Daddy--bowncy? bowncy?" she always does it when i am trying to get her to nap, too, so i can nap, and it doesn't help her being so cute because she makes me laugh so hard when she does that that i can't even properly discipline her to come back and fall asleep...

another one of her favorite things is to pat her bottom when she is getting her diaper changed. Thomas actually taught her to say "booty" instead of "bottom," and it kills me because she will twist and say "boody! pawo (sparrow) boody!" then follows the inevitable, "mama boody!" whence she is not satisfied until i, too, have patted my own boody.

i couldn't get what she was saying at first, but we were in the car the other day and she kept saying "toway! toway!" finally i realized she was pointing out the window at the trees. tree! toway! that is a new development! tree for her used to sound just like "wee."

i can't believe all the things she is saying! may-doe! (tomato) twacca (tractor) baby-dah! (baby doll) it is precious. what else... oh yes! she says "neiba--wady!" (neighbor-lady!) can you believe it? when she hears the neighbor lady work on her porch or walk up the stairs! now that's amazing! this morning we were on our way to samuel's house, and we stopped at a red light, when suddenly she cried out, "WED!" what? wed? ...oh, RED! red! she is astounding! she can also point out yellow for sure, but colors are still a bit mixed.

since her hair has gotten to an unfortunate mullet-like stage, i try to put her hair in pigtails every day. when we do her hair, we tell her to lie still, then take the brush and start working on it, counting. recently she has been finding the little rubber bands or her hair brush and attempting the process herself, counting faithfully along. she can definitely count to four, i don't know about any further.

we have taught her to drink out of a glass, a thick little blue flower-pot-shaped glass without a lid. i wanted her to become independent of sippy cups at an early age for several reasons: the plastic chemical contamination, also the impossibility of clearing sippy-cup crevices of mold, and also because i plain didn't want her to still be dependent on a sippy cup when she was seven. the sooner she learns to handle a glass and not to spill it, the better. she is simply addicted to (rice) milk. she cries for "maauk!" loudly several times a day, and devours it, with her cute little hands cupping the glass, one pinky sticking out. if she spills, i give her a towel and she has to wipe the spill. if she starts playing with the milk, i take it away.

the other day it came quite in handy because we were at the co-op and they had out samples of hazelnut milk. sparrow is always a challenge a the co-op because she doesn't sit happily in the cart for long, and jumps out on me, and then to let her down amongst all those bulk bins that she so desperately wants to dig her fingers into becomes quite the hawking experience for me. anyways, thank God for almond milk samples, because it kept her happy for another 15 seconds while i was trying to pay and get outta there, and she could drink it all by herself, straight out of the sample cup. i don't have to take an extra cup for her everywhere we go.

however, when her sample was gone, she loudly cried out for more milk. i wasn't going to just keep feeding her the co-ops milk samples! we were about to go to trader joe's so i told her she could have more milk there. she threw a bit of a fit, i'm afraid. still haven't quite figured out how to command immediate and unprotesting obedience in the store! she wailed and wailed and cried for milk almost all the way to trader joe's. at first i kept telling her she was going to get more. then i told her to stop whining, and subsequently ignored her. she got a lot more cheerful toward the end. once in tj's, i got a little sample cup and then opened a box of rice milk and she devoured almost 3 cups of it while we were shopping! but what a convenient thing it is to have her be able to drink it like that in a shopping cart!

sparrow does a million cute things, like say "okay!" and "alright!" and "whoa," and she keeps asking us to pray over and over again, throughout our dinner time. she stretches out both her hands to us and says, "pway? pway?" in the middle of church on sunday, jacob was teaching, and sparrow suddenly said "jay-bup!...jay-cub!" i couldn't believe she just pulled his name out of her memory like that! she has a thing for names. she knows all the lomelinos, and the other day we were playing in the reeves' yard (they weren't even there), and suddenly she said, "asha!" asher!? i thought she only paid attention to goldie! she also repeats "dowis!" if she hears anyone say my name.

she sits in a tiny blue chair at a coffee table in the kitchen. every time i give her toast or crackers to eat there, she settles in, then pulls out another little gray chair next to her and says, "mama?--mama?" wanting me to come sit with her. LOVE that!

ready for calculus

apparently my baby can count. of course she can recite a few numbers. she knows one, two, three, and possibly four after that, and she can copy us in saying them all up to twelve or something. she can also correctly place seven after six and eight after seven. we count when we set her on a swing, before we give her a big push! and we count in the morning when we put her hair in those adorable pigtails. nowadays she walks around with her hairbrush in hand, saying, "one, two, three..."

however, i was pretty sure that she was not exactly sure what the point of counting is or what it means, necessarily. about a month ago she was looking at the cover of her good night moon book and said "two--moon." sure enough, in the illustration there is one moon in the window and another in the picture on the wall. but i kind of thought it was just a fluke that she'd said that. however, tonight we were reading one of her favorite duck books, and she noticed a frog on one of the pages, and then another one on the same page. she pointed them both out and then said to me, "two frogs." she even put an S on the end of the frog! i think she's already surpassed me in intelligence. i mean, next month she'll be doing calculus!

a little sick bout

on monday sparow woke up with a stuffy, runny nose. oh no!! i couldn't send her to holly's this way, what with samuel and hope there, and sparrow's tendency to commandeer everyone's sippy cup! so i would have to take a day off work. this situation could not drag on. i would take the day off work, but i was going to make dang sure that she was better in the morning! first thing i did was give her a little of my amazing detox tea to flush her system. she gets the effects through my breast milk already, but i thought this situation called for extra.

she also had two doses of natural cold/virus medicine that day, and an extra vitamin. (she LOOOOOOOVES her vitamins because they are in gummy-bear format, and she calls it "minamin!" she asks for them all day, and whenever she gets one she gets this huge grin on her face--when you put it into her grubby, eager little hand, she laughs.)

that night, i remembered a garlic poultice for combatting sickness that kim told me about. it involved some sort of crushed garlic possibly folded into a warm, moist paper towel and placed on the child's skin or even in their sock overnight. the garlic seeps through and gets into the bloodstream through the skin and fights the virus. well i didn't think sparrow would keep a garlic sock on, as she is not used to sleeping with socks on anyways, so at the last minute i decided to put it in her diaper before bed time. however, i ditched the paper towel because i needed quick action, and i thought it might block the effects. plus i was just doing this from memory of something kim told me from something she found on the internet. anyways, sparrow ended up with raw garlic in her diaper. i told her all along what i was doing: "we are gonna put garlic in your diaper and make you feel all better..." i was slightly nervous and felt that i should go look up the kosher-ness of leaving it raw in her diaper, or if it was "caustic" and would irritate or something. but an hour later she had already woken up crying heavily and i immediately changed her diaper and took out the garlic just in case. later i read that one needs to be careful not to get raw garlic on children's skin. oops! but voila! it had already done its job! the next morning she woke up happy and far less stuffy and was well enough to go to holly's so i could go make up my lost day at work.

the next 2 times i changed her diaper after the garlic episode, she replaced her usual "sparrow--booty! mama--booty!" chant with this: "gaeec! gaeec!" i finally realized she was saying "garlic!" remembering from last night! isn't that amazing?

exercise

sparrow has become increasingly fascinated with exercise! first of all, she can say the word, which is more than most 2-year-olds can boast. she handed me the "going to bed" book the other day and said excitedly, "ecacike! ecacike!" i thought for 2 seconds... ecacike? oh exercise!!! "and when the moon is on the rise, they all go up to EXERCISE!" she loves it that there is a dancing hippo on that page, and always says, "hippo--dance."

about a week ago, i was contemplating doing a pilates session in the eve. while thomas was gone. i asked melissa if she had any pilates tapes, and then said to sparrow--"hey, do you wanna do some pilates with me?" i was totally blown away when the girl immediately started doing leg lifts and breathing pilates-breath!: "wh-wh" it was soooooo cute, and i couldn't think where she had picked that up except that nicole and i had been discussing and kidding around with pilates one evening, at least three weeks ago! crazy how she remembers things.

here's one i am really baffled as to how she picked it up: i was trying to change her diaper the other eve. and she was goofing off a bit, but as i was about to get annoyed, i tuned in to what she was doing, and she was doing SITUPS. she was putting her hands on her head, lifting up a little, and counting "one, two..." baffling! but i'll take it!hahahahaha!

she is well into doing her plies whenever prompted; she gets this verschminzt little look on her face--a slightly self-conscious smile, and bends her knees--down, up. thomas has been letting her watch dance videos on tv quite a bit. old ones of his performances, or fernando bujones in class or whatever. she LOVES it. she just stands in front of the TV and dances along and it is hilarious. i have to post a video of it asap. whenever she sees anyone dancing on the screen now, she thinks it's "daddy!" and if it's a performance video, and she hears people clapping, she starts clapping and exclaims, "Yay!"