This won’t be the birthday anthem to my daughter that I really want it to be. It’d take a few hours of hard thought followed by a few hours of drafting followed by a few hours of editing to get anywhere close, and I just don’t have that kind of consecutive time right now. So here’s a quick, humble little ditty instead.

Let’s start with a brief retrospective. When I wrote the big birthday message last year, Lennie was just starting to communicate with intention (as opposed to simple labeling) by instructing me in simple terms (”there”) to take her to one spot or another in the room. Now she communicates rather more extensively by saying things like “Lennie no want brush teeth with green tooth brush” or “chocolate milk is so delicious.” She has probably dozens of repeated sentences now and clearly knows enough of a grammar to compose understandable new sentences, often surprising us with her ingenuity. I guess she must have been walking a year ago. Now she runs, slides, jumps, turns somersaults; this evening, I tried to entice her into her bedroom for a diaper change, and one or the other of us suggested hopping, and sure enough, she followed me hopping through the house to get a clean diaper. A year ago, we were in the habit of calling her “Lou.” It felt right at the time, but we’ve moved on to Lennie now. We’ll no doubt oscillate between the two in the coming years.

The thing Mleeka and I consistently and frequently find ourselves thinking about Lennie is how astoundingly happy we are that we got her. And not that we got a baby, but that we got the very baby we got. She’s so bright (I mean in terms of personality in addition to intellect) and special, and there’s never in recent months been a single day during which we haven’t been delighted by some phrase she’s come up with or some impish thing she’s done or face she’s made. At every stage in her life to date, we’ve thought back to how far she’s come, and it always seems impossible that she’s progressed so far, that she’s managed to become so much more special than she had been the last time we checked. And yet she has. More and more, I find that I enjoy her not as my offspring, and not because I’m in some way bound to, but because she’s this objectively wonderful little person all by herself.

I gave up hope weeks ago on posting any baby updates of substance. I’m just too far behind. So for now, lest all written records of her recent activity be lost, here’s a quick list of what comes immediately to mind.

• She can jump (barely — it’s a two-year-old skill) and first showcased this while we were at the beach.
• She’s terrified of the ocean and will cling to you for dear life and climb up your very body in order to avoid being put down prematurely. Eventually, she warms up to playing in the sand and being walked (clinging very tightly to you) in the shallows. Once or twice, we actually got her in the water briefly, but further exploration of the beach will likely wait until next year.
• She’s turned into a big swimmer. Terrified as she was of the ocean, she was proportionally enamored of the swimming pool, to the point that we went out and bought her a life vest so she could have a little more freedom.
• She counts to ten in the proper sequence without skipping any numbers and with verve.
• She speaks in complete sentences and has brief conversations.
• She’s begun to express opinions (”no, blue cup” and “purple pants”).
• She apologizes (after bumping heads, “I’m sorry, Mama”)
• She asks for “tiny baby,” which is our cradling her in our arms like an infant, often while holding a sippy cup up for her like a bottle.
• She’s a great singer and can sing most of the alphabet pretty reliably, though with more emphasis on tune than on articulation.
• She knows concepts like “inside” and “outside” and “light on” and “light off.”

There’s gotta be more, but there’s a start.

A few weeks ago, I set myself a goal of writing around 5,000 words a week between this blog and my work blog. Travel, real life, and sloth have kept me from doing it, and a period of relative prolificacy has petered out into the recent stagnation both here and at my work blog. In keeping with the habit of late, this’ll be brief.

We’ve been eating a lot of pasta lately as part of our diet change, and we’ve had in particular a lot of the corkscrew pasta. The other day at lunch, Lennie ran out of pasta on her plate, looked at one of our plates, and promptly asked for more caterpillars. In the last couple of days, she’s started drinking a lot more cow milk and juice than previously.

I’ve noticed a trend lately when I’m giving her an early diaper change wherein she looks up at me and catalogues my facial features. Just out of the blue, “eye, nose, ear, eyebrow.”

She’s quite the singer now, and I think it’s pretty interesting that she can remember tunes more reliably than she can remember words. She pretty frequently sings “Twinkle, twinkle, little star,” and she gets the tune right but has to muddle through a few of the words. She does the same with the alphabet song (which is really a twofer, sung to the tune of “Twinkle, twinlke, little star”). She’s trying more and more to count, though she seems to have a particular aversion to the number four. Even in repeating numbers after me as we insert coins into her piggy bank or count out other items, she balks at four more than at any of the other numbers. In the non-musical arts, she’s been painting a lot with watercolors and coloring with various implements. She’s also taken up graffiti, doing several vertical scribbles on the wall in the hallway outside my office.

Lennie can almost jump (it’s a two-year-old skill, so she’s right on track), and she runs with more reckless abandon than ever now. She generally declines to sit in her booster seat anymore, preferring to sit on her butt or her knees while we eat.

In the people department, she asks for people by name all the time now and has greater object/person permanence. She and Mleeka went to Vanderbilt to visit Ashley while I was out of town last week, and she saw Ashley from a distance and started calling out her name excitedly. She frequently asks to look at pictures on Mleeka’s computer and has begun asking for particular people and particular pictures of them. For example, she’ll come up to Mleeka and say sweetly “Ella sleeping.” She’s also liked seeing pictures of herself and of a pretty recent visit with grandma and granddaddy. As for perfect strangers, she’s learned pretty reliably to identify general categories. She knows boys from girls and will point them out, and at a bookstore tonight, she saw a woman probably in her 60s and said “see grandma.” Most men are daddys. Lennie’s very good now about greeting people with a friendly “hi.”

She’s definitely started dreaming. One morning, she was talking in her sleep about sharing stickers. The morning I last left for California, Fleda stayed over to be around while Mleeka took me to the airport, and Lennie woke up early anyway, talking about Fleda, whom she had cried out for pitifully and at length the night before when she went off to bed. And then there’s the Easter Bunny fiasco and followup nightmare. Mleeka and Lennie and Stacia and Lowen were at the mall one morning after their baby/mommy group playtime meeting, and they saw an Easter Bunny kids could have their pictures taken with. From the second level of the mall, Lennie laughed and smiled and waved at the bunny, but when Mleeka took her down for a closer look, she cried and clung to Mleeka with no intention whatsoever of actually interacting with the bunny. That night, she woke up crying at some point, and it occurred to us later that what she had been saying when she woke up was “rabbit.”

We’re going on a beach vacation in a couple of weeks, and Mleeka was interested in renting bikes while we were there. A week or two ago, we had Dave take Lennie for a ride on his bike to see how she took to it, and her reaction was one of puzzlement and pleasure. So we went out and bought bikes and a seat for Lennie and helmets and a bike rack for the car. Her response to the bike ride itself so far has been pretty lukewarm, though she’s fascinated with bikes. She actually calls them bicycles. She’s interested in the idea but balks a bit at the fact of riding one. She’s not terribly fond of putting her helmet on, and on a couple of occasions, when we’ve tricked her into wearing it and have gotten her strapped into the seat, she’s lost interest. The last time we tried, we took a longish hilly ride around our neighborhood, and she seemed to like it. I think it helps when Mleeka and I are both around because one of us can ride along beside and provide encouragement and really try to sell the experience.

We made a little sandbox for Lennie. It’s just a big shallow rubbermade container filled with 50 pounds of sand. Now it’s filled with more like 49 pounds, as Lennie has dumped a bit out. She’s got a little shovel and rake and a bucket and some yogurt containers that she uses to move the sand around. The night we set it up, I was sitting in one of our foldy chairs nearby watching her play, and she came up to me and said “Share play, Daddy.” She’s asked Mleeka to share play a few times as well. What a wonderful synthesis of concepts this is. She knows sharing, and she knows playing, but she doesn’t know how to say “play with me” (which makes sense, because the connective tissue of that sentence is the abstract and almost meaningless “with”). So she combines two verbs she does know to communicate what she wants. It’s a great little innovation that I’m very proud of.

In other news, we’re thinking we’re going to try to lay off meat for a little while. More and more lately, meat has just grossed me out. Because good grilling weather is approaching again, I’ll feel like grabbing some nice big steaks, but when I go to the meat aisle and look at the glistening cold red slabs of flesh, I’m completely turned off by the idea. (The fact that the meat industry in America is terrible — that, for example, we have lower standards for domestic meat than countries we export to do, that we’ll feed our own people meat of a much lower grade than other countries will buy from us — doesn’t help.) Chicken hasn’t been bothering me as much, and we’ve eaten a fair amount of fish lately.

Partially in response to my being a little grossed out by meat and partially to get out of the food rut I’m in wherein I don’t feel like learning new recipes but am also tired of eating the same old things all the time, I sort of wanted to force a change on myself. I’m a slave to routine and the familiar, so making myself mix things up from time to time is good for me and will probably eventually keep me from turning into a recluse with ridiculously long fingernails who roams around the house with tissue boxes on his feet. So the other night, I made myself look up and decide to prepare some new recipes. Last night, I tried some black bean and artichoke burritos that were pretty good. I also picked up some tofu and am going to see if I can learn to like it (it’s never been my favorite). This is sort of an experiment, and I may decide I can’t live without meat and wind up going back to being an omnivore. For the moment, though, we’re going to try to avoid meat, and red meat in particular.

I should note that this isn’t part of some liberal hand-wringing for the poor animals or anything. It’s not a moral or an ethical issue. We’ve got teeth that are designed for tearing meat, for crying out loud (ugh, I’m teetering on the brink of the naturalistic fallacy there, I know). That said, I have thought for years that it was sort of bizarre that we decided at some point to chase small animals around to eat. I picture Og and Oog sitting by a fire. Suddenly, a rabbit darts out of the brush, and Og scratches his prodigious jutting forehead says to Oog, “see that cute little bunny? If you were to catch it, we could put it on this here fire and eat it.” To which Oog replies, “WTF? Last week it was ‘hey, jam this bone through your septum.’ Now this?” Maybe it didn’t play out quite like that, but the decision that it might be a good idea to chase around and consume other animals does seem a little bizarre to me.

My motivation for giving meat a rest is mostly just the gross-out factor, though. There’ve been times in my life during which I’ve gotten much of my nutrition from cold Chef Boy Ardee. During each of these phases, I’ve eventually grown sick and tired of the orange gelatinous tube of food and have laid off for a while. Now it’s meat’s turn.

Note: I’m cross-posting this from my Flock blog. We sometimes call our staff and users flockers. I post here for the obvious relevance to Lennie, and I offer this explanatory note because I refer to her in more distanced than usual terms like “my daughter.” Without further ado…

Huh? My daughter woke up at 4:30 this morning, and I was treated to very early morning TV. We often tune in to a station called Noggin that’s got some really great shows (take that, Barney). I like PBS and all, but it doesn’t hold half a candle to Noggin. I usually get my daughter up around 8:00 or 8:30, and we’ll tune in to Max and Ruby or Little Bear (I like Noggin, but both of these shows annoy me) while we eat some breakfast, take our Flintstones vitamins together, etc.  Noggin only runs from 6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., so we had to entertain ourselves for the first hour-and-a-half this morning (during which time mostly I lay in a daze on the couch while my daughter piled toys on me). When the cartoons started rolling, I was treated to a new (to me) show called Tiny Planets (review). The basic premise is that two fluffy white aliens fly around on their fluffy white couch to various planets in their area. One is the planet of light and color; another is a music planet; another is a nature planet; I think there are six in all. As they catapult around (literally — their couch is slung from their home base by a huge catapult attached to a cord by which they’re ultimately reeled back in) to the various planets, they experience various adventures and misadventures that afford them ample opportunity to try to use critical thinking skills to get out of the jams they find themselves in. It’s a neat little show, a CGI cartoon that’s wacky and strange, but fun.

A couple of times, as they were sling-shotting through space, they passed an asteroid on which three creatures were running around (that is, they were running in place with the asteroid spinning under their feet). The first time the narrator pointed them out, I wasn’t sure what she called them. The next time, I thought it sounded vaguely like “flockers.” And then a third time, in reference to similar creatures on one of the planets, I was pretty sure that’s what they were called. And sure enough, when I looked it up, I learned that these critters are called flockers. They’re described in an epinions review of the show as “a bird-like alien whose intelligence can best be described as ‘dim.’” Luckily, our own flockers far outpace these guys.

So, there’s not much of real relevance to Flock here, but this was a fun little discovery. If you’ve got kids and are fed up with Barney and the other usual suspects, check out the Noggin web site and consider queuing Tiny Planets up in your TiVo if you’re not game for an early morning with your little ones.

A couple of weeks ago, Lennie started resisting her car seat very strenuously. As in it was sometimes very hard to force her into it if both of us weren’t involved, and even then, we were very sincerely worried that we were hurting her a little as we forced her into it. Naturally, we had tried various enticements and briberies in an effort to seat her more peacefully. Finally, Mleeka hit on just the thing. Lennie loves Just Peas, and they’ve turned out to be the precise enticement we needed. As we approach the car now, we begin playing up the pea seat (or pea chair), which, from the way we sell it, is just about the most exciting thing one could possibly plant her butt in. More often than not, especially as we’re leaving the house, Lennie will agree to sit down in her seat without a struggle in exchange for a little cup of peas, which we usually wind up replenishing several times during whatever trip we’re on.

It turns out that Lennie’s a big fan of the great outdoors. We’ve had her out plenty, but this Spring, she’s aware enough of her surroundings to really enjoy it. She and Mleeka planted 40 daffodil bulbs a few weeks ago and have made a habit of going out to count the ones that have come up (32 made it). Today, they went out to weed our little (mostly herb) garden in preparation for the coming seasons, and she had great fun. Judging from the dirt smudges around her mouth, we have a little pica baby. I watched for a few minutes as she played with a spade, transferring dirt from a pot to the ground. Later, when I was done with work and was able to come out and really play with her some, she grabbed our garden gnome (yes, I know, dorky) and ran around the yard with him. She identified him pretty clearly as Santa without being prompted, which is especially weird because I don’t remember playing up Santa very much over the holidays. We sit out together on the swing on our back patio (during the first three or four months of her life, I was able sometimes to rock her to sleep swinging out there), and she climbs around on the swing and then hops down and putters around the yard, perking up when she hears birds calling. She’s such a little cherub, and it’s such a nice, pastoral little scene.

Lennie Lou. It’s a silly name, we know. It started out as a joke, really, but it’s a cute nick for her occasionally, and she wrings all the hillbilly out of it. Her friend Lowen, with whom we have several videos of her walking great long distances holding hands, has taken to calling her Lennie Lou, but he doesn’t have those initial ells yet, so it comes out Ninny New.

We almost feel safe having Lennie around stairs now. Ella has been negotiating her stairs for months now with no problem, and Dave and Karen could take their gates down but that we’re over there so frequently with our daredevil toddler. This weekend, she did much better on the stairs, bumping down them on her butt rather than leaning her big toddler noggin out at a 45-degree angle in front of her and trying to take them standing up. I don’t mind so much if she takes a little fall now and then (her recent exploits outside have resulted in a few scratches here and there, and I’m pretty stoic about it all, though Mleeka’s a little worse for the wear), but I really don’t relish the thought of her tumbling all the way down a flight of stairs. I think we’re not too far from the time when that won’t be so much of a worry, when we can turn Lennie and Ella loose without fear of a bad fall and without spending half the evening camped out on the stairs to cushion whatever fall may (but never does) happen.

We think Lennie’s going to grow up to be a pleasant mixture of girly girl and tomboy. She likes to play in the dirt (a few months ago, she was very prissy about getting her hands dirty) and was enthusiastic about poking at some sort of larval bug we found and about holding a toad (which Mleeka didn’t let her hold for fear of a squeezy Of Mice and Men moment). She’s also quite the little athlete, with a pretty good arm and abdominal strength that, proportionally, puts most people to shame. One of her latest tricks is to climb up onto an end table and dart across the length of the couch, dismounting onto the other end table and stepping at full height onto the arm of my big chair, where she stands and grins at her horrified parents, who’re afraid to move lest the lightest stirring of the air knock her to the floor or provoke her to leap floorward to certain and serious injury. So she’s rough and tumble, in other words. But at the same time, she’s the little girl who tucks her stuffed animals and babies into bed with kisses and (a recent development) nurses her baby dolls. She’s the little niblet who’ll point to the tiniest scratch or bump and tell you about the ouchy. She’s the powder puff who asks constantly for lotion to rub on her legs or hands or her stuffed duck (not a great outcome that). So she’s rough and tumble, but she’s also delicate and girly, and we think it’ll be a fun combination. She defies the old nursery rhyme, composed as she must be of snakes and snails and sugar and spice.

Lennie has discovered the shower. I’ve bathed her in there with me a few times over the last year or so, usually because Mleeka had already bathed or just wanted a rare bath by herself, and it’s never been a big deal. I’ve always held her in my arms to bathe her. She’s lately demonstrated a more pronounced interest in the shower. When Ella’s over for a visit, the two of them will run into the (non-showering) shower, and Mleeka will sometimes lift the curtain up so that they can run in and out unimpeded.

The other day, Lennie seemed to want to stand up on her own in the shower, and I let her, and it was fine. I gave her some soap and let her wash her belly, and then I put some soap on my leg and asked her to help wash my leg since she was down there anyway. I picked her up to do the finishing touches and take care of her hair, but it was by all accounts mostly a normal shower for her.

Last night, it wasn’t my intention to shower with her (she had already had a bath), but she was hovering around the shower as I prepared to hop in, and since she was between outfits and wearing only a diaper anyway, I stripped her down and let her run in there. She was startled when I turned the water on, but she stuck it out and just sort of played in the shower while I bathed. She’d cry out “Daddy Shower, Yay!” (who knew I was that dirty?) and sort of stomp her feet or crouch over the drain. Later, after I was long done with my shower and she was still standing there dripping wet, she peed in the drain to much praise from Mleeka and me. Hey, diapers aren’t cheap. Next, I think I’ll see how she manages with an old jelly jar.

Lennie’s had seven or eight wooden puzzles for months and months now. A couple of them she can probably boast to have had for well over a year, and it’s been long enough since we bought her one that I can’t remember when we did so. She never really mastered the art of the puzzle. She got to where she would get a piece in the right place but couldn’t get it rotated around so that it would drop into its recess in the puzzle board. Eventually, she lost interest, and we shifted the puzzles out of the rotation of the toys we keep out in plain view. Yesterday, Mleeka got them back out, and Lennie took right to them. Her puzzle-working skills flourished during the puzzles’ hibernation, and she now works them almost instantaneously and with no trouble. This morning, we were lying around having family morning time, and she slid out of bed, went into the den to get a puzzle, brought it back, went back into the den to grab a few of the pieces, and had us bring the puzzle up into bed so she could play with it. Tonight, I dumped the pieces to two of her animal puzzles on the floor in a promiscuous heap, and she put both of them back together in short order simultaneously. Somehow, she seemed to know intuitively which pieces went to which puzzle. The two we were working are of slightly different thicknesses (I’m talking milimeters) but are otherwise similar, save that one is mostly of barnyard animals and the other is of savannah animals. She’d pick up one piece and, without giving the other puzzle board a glance, move it toward the right puzzle before she can realistically have had a chance to see which board the piece belongs to. I figure she must either be anticipating which piece to grab from the pile after having seen what spots are empty on the board (this strikes me as being a rather complex bit of thinking for a 20-month-old) or she’s got some sort of intuition about the pieces. The former seems more likely if also — ahem — brilliant. In any case, here’s one more bullet point for her baby résumé.

Lennie and I read a lot of books tonight. We identified pictures (she learned “gnome” and “troll,” though I don’t know that she’ll keep them), and then she did some reading aloud of her own. She did this a lot when she was much younger, holding a book open and babbling in a tone very much like what we use to read aloud to her (which differs, of course, from the phone voice, which differs from the normal talking voice, which differs from the talking to the baby voice). I hadn’t noticed her doing this very much lately, but she revived it tonight, but with a new twist. Amid the babbling, she’ll say words she knows that correspond to things in pictures on the pages. So it’ll be “Duh dn duh poo bah spoon duh fnnruh bear duh dnduh.” At one point, she was saying something that sounded very much as if she was saying “I know how to read.” I can’t imagine that’s what she was actually saying (though it was pretty clear), but I certainly reinforced it and encouraged her to keep saying it.

I’ve been Lennie’s porter this evening. On the way home from an evening session of a singing and dancing thing she goes to pretty regularly, we stopped to get her a smoothie, and when we got home, she was very intent on my holding it for her. Mleeka had gotten a puzzle out and was holding it for her while they did a puzzle on the bed, but when I came into the room, Lennie insisted that I hold it for her: “Daddy hold it.” A couple of other times this evening, she insisted that I hold things for her, a sock once, I think, and then a cloth she had been using as a baby wipe for her doll.

Lennie has quite a music collection. The songs I’ve been listening to most frequently with her of late are as follows:

• Victor Vito (who eats spaghetti with Freddy Vasco)
• I Know a Chicken (Lennie dances like crazy to this one and sometimes shakes an egg noisemaker)
• Monster Boogie (nuff said)
• Elvira (by the Oak Ridge Boys; it’s campy and awful and great, and I had it on a 45 when I was a kid, so I got it mostly for my own nostalgia’s sake, though what made me think about it in the first place was hearing it on one of those kitschy music compilation TV ads, upon which hearing Lennie did cut a rug otherwise unprompted)
• Gold Digger (yes, the Kanye West song. I know, I know, we’re bad parents for exposing our child to such lyrics, but it’s a darned catchy tune.)

That’s it for this edition.

I’ve been eating soup for lunch pretty frequently over the last couple of months, and I frequently share it with Lennie. (Plug: Progresso has some really quite yummy soups that also happen to be low-fat.) Today, I had a nice thick bowl of hearty tomato soup, and of course I shared with Lennie. It turns out that she doesn’t pronounce initial “s” sounds too well yet, and she tends to substitute a “p” sound. So when her bowl of soup started running low, she looked up at me and cooed “mato poop.” Another manifestation of this phenomenon appears when she talks about sleeping. We’ll tuck one of her dolls or her favorite stuffed animal (Jem Dog, a Boyd’s Build a Bear creation) into bed. She’ll catalog the necessary accoutrements — blanket, pillow — and then say “baby peep” or “doggy peeping.”

Her childcare impulses extend beyond the bedtime routine, though. I can’t even remember how or when it started, but at some point, it became a thing for her to sit on one of our knees when we read to her. She’d approach, turn around with her back facing us, and back slowly up until she was in a position to sit on one knee or the other to be read to, and plop down. Now it’s less of a step-by-step approach and more of a fluid motion. I usually wind up shifting her to the middle of my lap into the little nest that my crossed legs make because it’s easier to read that way. Anyway, at some point, she began to ask for books (besides saying “book, please”) by bringing a book over and saying “up on knee.” When she decides to read to her baby dolls, she’ll grab a book and a baby, sit down with the baby beside her, and say “up on knee,” trying her best to manage both a book and a baby in her lap. When she saw her cousin Kate recently, she chased her around and around with a book, all but shouting “up on knee.” (Which is only fair: When Kate was tiny upon their first or second meeting, Lennie tried to ride her like a pony; so a little sitting-upon reciprocity is in order whenever Kate’s ready to take her turn. To Lennie’s dismay, Kate was not ready for her turn during the recent visit.) When playing with Ella in the last couple of weeks, Lennie has also tried to entice her to sit on her knee and be read to, but the best that’s come of it so far has been the two of them reading “Brown Bear, Brown Bear” together.

Chasing Kate around and chanting “up on knee” is but one form of protest Lennie has engaged in of late. A couple of months ago, I made a passing reference to the fact that Mleeka’s got a mole Lennie likes to twiddle. (Since I’ve written about my bulba, I hope not to get into trouble for blogging about Mleeka’s mole.) Her love for that mole is a deep and complex thing. It’s a little weird, her obsession, but it’s also sweet. Rather than being comforted by ribbons sewn onto the edge of a well-worn blankie or by some other inanimate soft thing, she craves an outcropping of her very mother’s body. Tender as she feels about the mole, she’s downright militant about her rights to twiddle it. She’ll raise holy hell if denied, literally kicking and screaming (we predict that she’ll be of the plate-throwing ilk of fit-pitcher when she’s a little older). A couple of weeks ago, I was in the office, and I heard a faint chant coming from the bedroom. As I made my way through the house, the chant resolved into “Share mole! Share mole!” Ah, baby’s first protest. As good as she is with a crayon, it’ll be no time before she’s making signs and picketing.