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.

I’m not the worst father in the world, but I sometimes feel like it because my priorities don’t always line up as they should. Lennie turned 20 months old yesterday and I’ve done a lamentable job of documenting her life. The Learn Houston trio was enjoying a Saturday morning cuddle in bed today, and when Lennie got down off the bed and ran into the living room to play for a few minutes, Mleeka said something about how weird it was that our child was old enough to go away and play of her own volition. And boy is it. Partially in preparation for making a DVD of Lennie’s life so far for my 90-year-old grandmother, whom we visited last weekend, and partially out of nostalgia, we’ve been watching a lot of old videos of Lennie lately. It wasn’t so very long ago that we were having to tell her how to play and in many cases to actually operate her hands and feet for her. How did she get from there to where she is now without my documenting every last detail? How could it all have slipped by? Maybe I am the worst father in the world.

Whining about it’s not worth very much. Let’s move on to some recent high points.

On our trip to see my grandmother last weekend, Mleeka and I tried to name as many of Lennie’s words as we could. We wrote down 168 that we felt pretty solid about including, and we’ve thought of more since then. There are some that might have counted that we just didn’t feel fair about counting. In any case, she’s up around 200 words, and she mixes some of those up into short, meaningful sentences. She knows how to ask for things, and it’s easier and easier to communicate with her.

When I last wrote, she had begun telling us when she had pooped. She hasn’t made a whole lot of progress on that front, though the Dolly Parton Imagination Library (incidentally, if you’re aware of and eligible for the Dolly Parton Imagination Library program and aren’t taking advantage of it, you should be publicly flayed) just sent us a book about pottying, and I’ve started sitting Lennie on her potty to read it to her. The other night, shortly after we started reading (she was standing, however), she started grunting and got all red in the face, and sure enough, she had crapped when we went to check things out.  She’s taken careful note in recent months of the diaper changing process and frequently does diaper time with her baby dolls. I sat idly by one Saturday morning while she wiped for 20 minutes or more at the subsequently no doubt raw diaper region of poor pink Polly. The only doll she calls by name is Fernanda (a Cabbage Patch doll kindly given to her for Christmas by Ashley, Fleda, Terry, and Bo). She can’t quite get out the whole name, but when she’s distressed to be without her baby, she’ll plaintively cry "Nanda, Nanda!"

Lennie continues to be a dancing fool. Her favorite singer now is Laurie Berkner, her favorite dancing song probably "I Know a Chicken."  Lennie swings her body side to side more rapidly and enthusiastically than you might expect a toddler to be able to during parts of this song, and she always reminds me of an energetic choir member getting down during a lively gospel song. She doesn’t just dance, though. She can sing several lines from the song, among them "I know a chicken," "she laid an egg," and "oh, my goodness!"

Her eating has been uneven in recent months. She’ll down 10 or 12 animal crackers at a sitting if you let her (I’m finding them irresistible myself), and she eats all the carrots out of the Progresso chicken and rice soup I favor. She’ll eat a lot of the chicken out of that as well. But there’s not much else she’s keen on usually. Peas, occasionally, and baked beans of late. She’s decided she likes to eat sandwiches if she can hold them. So when I offered her a bite of my barbecue sandwich today, she pushed it away, but when I gave her the last little bit of it to hold herself, she took it happily. When you’re eating a sandwich and she wants to hold it, she’ll say something that sounds more or less like sandwich and then hold her arms up, joined together at the wrists with her fingers outspread in a pretty good sandwich cradle.

Zac and Ella spent the day with us on Monday, and I took the day off work to help and just because I thought it’d be fun. And fun it was. Mleeka made flubber and playdoh with Zac, and we all made playdoh animals and shapes. Ella demonstrated that she’s fond of sandwiches too, eating probably a quarter of mine (luckily, I also had soup, though someone had eaten most of the carrots and chicken out of it). During naptime for the girls, I took Zac out and we got a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie and a corresponding Playstation game, and we had fun playing that and some downtime while he watched the movie. It was a fun day, and it’s neat to see Lennie socializing with other kids. Yesterday, Ella spent most of the workday with us, and Lennie’s little friend Lowen came over for a couple of hours. I had to work and missed it all, but I gather the three of them got along famously. Tonight, we go over to Dave and Karen’s to celebrate Ella’s second birthday a week late.

Mleeka took Lennie to the zoo this week (with Lowen and his mom), and for the first time, she was really engaged. The last time we went, Mleeka was home sick, and Lennie and I met Karen and her wingnuts with another friend and her infant. It was chilly and stressful, and I turned out to be coming down with something myself, and Lennie didn’t seem to care much about being there. But this week, she loved the gibbons in particular, she got to see an elephant pee and poop, and she reportedly saw the neon urine stream of a rhino. We have video of her in the petting zoo kissing a big goat and brushing its hair, occasionally bending at the waist to look into the kneeling animal’s face and say, "hi, goat."

The other day, I tricked Lennie into kissing me a half a dozen times in a row by hiding the fact that she was kissing me in a facial feature identification game. Can you kiss Daddy’s nose? Can you kiss Daddy’s eye? And so on. It was wonderful. The best thing she does right now from my perspective is that sometimes, when I’m holding her, she’ll pat my back and hug in very tightly. She’s napping on the floor with Mleeka right now (how she does so through the racket of Mleeka’s shooting up enemies on the Playstation I don’t know). Just a few minutes before I handed her down there, I was holding her and said "Pat Daddy’s back." She did, and she gave me a squeeze, and I melted and told her I loved her and that she was my favorite little person. I tell her that a lot, and I don’t think it’s the sort of thing you can really understand the meaning of until you’ve got a cute little niblet of your own.

Wikipedia’s entry on vulva includes the following explanation: "In common speech, the term "vagina" is often used improperly to refer to the vulva or female genitals generally, even though strictly speaking the vagina is a specific internal structure and the vulva is the exterior genitalia only. Calling the vulva the vagina is akin to calling the mouth the throat."

The female genitals have many colloquial names, and parents find different names acceptable to teach their children. Some stick with the timeless classic "pee pee." Others go with the anatomically inaccurate (when it comes to the parts involved in diaper changes, at least, unless I’ve been doing it wrong) "vagina." Mleeka knew someone once whose kid called it a yoni. Mleeka has encouraged Lennie to call hers a vulva. It’s accurate, not offensive (we could have gone with snatch or another vulgar colloquialism, after all), and not terribly difficult for a 20-month-old (as of yesterday) to approximate in speech. Lennie’s got it pretty well down. Now, when she reaches down there with both hands during a diaper change and tugs (and I mean tugs), she can call it more or less by its proper name. "Bulba," she says.

So she’s got the vocabulary. All she needs now is to apply it correctly. Sometimes when I step out of the shower (let me pause for a minute and say that if you’re choking over the fact that my 20-month-old daughter sees me naked sometimes, just grow up and get over it; it’s not like nudity is bad or in any way unnatural, and it’s sure not as if I’m doing a pole dance for her or anything), she’ll point to my butt and say "Daddy booty" (why we’ve chosen a colloquial term for that muscle and have insisted on something more clinical for the old naughty bits I’m not sure). Then she’ll sometimes point to my junk and say "Daddy bulba."

So. Yes. I seem to have a vulva. I’m a little hesitant to teach her that what I have is called penis because the same people shocked that my young daughter has in fact seen my penis as I’ve stepped out of the shower will no doubt call child protective services if they hear of her saying "Daddy penis."  Daddy bulba will do for now. As her pronunciation improves a little, I can perhaps feel somewhat safe in the likelihood that people who may hear her speaking for whatever reason about my genitals will think she’s in fact talking about my durable German car.

I did my first podcast this week. It took me hours to produce a 13-minute piece. A lot of the time was researching and selecting creative commons-licensed music for bumpers between segments, and a substantial part of it was finding and learning to use some audio-editing software (Apple’s Garage Band sucks for this, but there’s an open source program called audacity that’s pretty easy to use and does exactly what I need it to do. Still, to compile it and all its dependencies on my laptop today took an hour or two. Anyway, the podcast can be found here with all its warts and boils. It’s a dull work podcast, so don’t get too excited unless you’re interested in what I’m doing for work. Getting up to speed on all of this was rough, but from here on out, I think it’ll be easier, and it’s a somewhat more lively medium for delivering content than blogging is. While I think I can communicate more clearly and eloquently in written words the things I want to say, it takes me a while and loses some of the tonal nuance I hear in my head as I write things. And if you don’t overproduce it, I think podcasts stand to be a quicker way of generating off-the-cuff content, if a less polished way for microphonophobes like me. I’m thinking very hard about supplementing portions of this blog with podcasts. It’ll be easier for me to record a quick 30-second blurb about Lennie than to sit down and dread having to stitch together a month’s worth of updates. I’ll feel less self-conscious about producing a mediocre podcast than writing a mediocre post, perhaps because the podcast is more transitory and less open to scrutiny. My ever-discriminating audience is more likely to forgive a vocal blunder than a written one. There are some things I’ve written in particular that I’d like to capture vocally, as they’re definitely more alive in my head than they are on the computer screen.

I started back to work yesterday after 11 days in a row off work. I think I may have had 13 consecutive days off when Lennie was born and thanks in part to an additional hospitalization on Mleeka’s part, but that was hardly a relaxing break. This holiday season wasn’t altogether relaxing, but it was very nice.

We stayed pretty busy, going on a trip to the aquarium with Zac and Ella and family and going to a couple of holiday parties. Then we unloaded Lennie onto her Aunt Abbey for a day while we did some cleaning up around the house (our bedroom closet now looks like something off a home enhancement show). Then I spent the better part of a day shopping for and buying and returning (a defective) TV and buying a replacement and getting that installed. We now watch our 10 basic cable channels on a glorious 32-inch screen rather than the postage-stamp we had been accustomed to viewing. What a waste, huh? We also got a Playstation 2, having enjoyed hours of fun playing Andy’s (sorry, Mike, I know you recommended a modded X-box, but I just didn’t see myself doing all the work to mod it and I’m not into pirating games, so I figured I should get the same system several of my family members have so we could swap games, have big ass-whipping tournaments, etc.). So Mleeka and I spent a fair amount of time over the last week beating (almost) the 007 game we bought.

The best thing about the break was all the extra time I got to spend with Lennie. I’m pretty well accustomed by now to getting her up between 8:00 and 8:30 and hanging out with her until 9:00ish, trying to get some breakfast in her while watching cartoons together. But the last week or so, I had just hours and hours more time with her, and now that I’m back at work, I miss her. Even when I wasn’t actively playing with her, it was nice to watch her toddling around getting into various things and chattering about various usually unintelligible things.

She seems to me to be on the verge of a language explosion. She’s learned possessives, for example (the concept, if not the grammar). She’ll say “Daddy juice” when she wants some of my drink. And she keeps picking up new words (I bought some Wheat Thins this week, and she’ll run over to the counter where we keep them, saying “cacker”). She’s long said “up, please” when she’s wanted to be picked up or lifted over one of our gates, but now she says it (though she’s actually trying to say “help, please”) when she wants help with something like wiping her hands (she’s very picky about having clean hands). There’s lots more that’s not coming to mind, but she’s definitely getting more and more intelligibly verbal, and it’s fun to watch.

Last night, I was sharing some of my beverage with her, and we spilled it all down the front of her shirt. She immediately got up and ran into the kitchen and pulled a towel out of one of the drawers so she could dry herself off. It was a first and was very funny. She’s getting a sense of at-homeness, I think. She knows where things are and is starting to figure out how to take care of some things on her own. Similarly, when she’s got a booger, she’ll tell us now. The other night, when she kept dipping her fingers in some mustard (which she now favors over ketchup) and asking us to wipe it off her hand, I finally just gave her a napkin and showed her how to use it, and she made a pretty good go of it. Now she tells us when she’s pooped. She’ll come up to me and say something that sounds like her version of “apple” (which if you think about it, “diaper” and “apple” are pretty close linguistically) and then lead me into her room and lie there calmly while I change her. She’s not always so calm about diaper changes that I initiate. The next step will be to start getting the little potty out when she does this to help reinforce that association.

In other brain development news, she’s slowly getting her colors, and she’s pretty good at shape sorting and stacking. We got her one toy that’s four colored pegs on a little board. For each peg, there are different numbers of shapes in the corresponding color. The first time she played with this toy, she started putting the right color shapes on the right pegs. She continues to be a very good colorer and an able musician (she can now play the harmonica, the keyboard, a little xylophone, her drum, various shakers, etc.) and seems to have a pretty good sense of rhythm. We think we may have a little artist of some sort on our hands.

That’s it for now, I guess. Have to get back to work, which is unbelievably hard now after such a nice time off. Maybe I’ll go out today and buy a few hundred lottery tickets. Or maybe a philanthropist will venture across this post and decide to fund the further development of my obviously bright child by giving me enough money to sustain my family and play a more active role in her rearing. Here’s hoping.

In weight loss news, after a couple of weeks of pretty lousy adherence to the low-fat diet and a week off from the gym, I figured I’d be up 5 or 10 pounds, but I’ve held pretty steady, weighing in at 191 today. I’ve recently modified my workout so that hopefully my body will burn fat more efficiently. This should get rid of the remaining spare (bike) tire I’ve got and some other less than firm areas that I’ve had limited luck toning to date.

What a couple of weeks. Last Monday, I caught a 5:00 a.m. flight out to San Francisco to spend a few days with the crew at work. I spent four full days out there and then caught an 11:00 p.m. flight to Charlotte on Thursday. Dad picked me up at 6:30 a.m. at the airport, and I went to his house, to which Mleeka and Lennie had driven while I was out of town. From the time she saw me, Lennie very desparately wanted to be with me. I’d head upstairs to grab something and she’d shuffle over to the gate and dolefully cry “Daddeeeee, Daddeeeee” up the stairs until I came back. It was heartbreaking because I felt that she now maybe worries that when I leave, I’m not coming back, but it was also validating and nice.

While we were there, Mleeka got sick (a stomach bug that’s going around Knoxville). We came home Sunday afternoon, and I spent all night Sunday night throwing up and spent most of Monday in bed. On Tuesday, I got back to work. Periodically, Lennie would come to my office door and bang on it (as she sometimes has for months now), but now she adds to the equation her doleful “Daddeeeee,” which it’s just impossible to resist. To top if all off, she’s gotten sick as well. She had a high (103+) fever on Tuesday night and has been up and down for the past couple of days. She threw up a couple of times on Wednesday and was droopy for much of yesterday but appears perhaps to be coming out of it now. While she was sick, there were times during which I was her sole comfort, though. A couple of days this week, she’s lain prone on me for a half hour or more at a time in the middle of the day, and she’s been clinging to me (and recoiling from Mleeka) in a weird reversal of the usual routine.

Now Mleeka gets a glimpse of what it’s been like for me for 18 months, though really, it’s worse for her because, while I’ve been sort of resigned to it and expected nothing different, it’s a new change for her. I’ve been shunned and have found being occasionally wanted to be a nice surprise; she’s been wanted and is now being shunned. I’m sure that once Lennie figures out that I’m actually not leaving for good or anything, her disposition toward Mleeka and me will shift back closer to its normal ratio. In the mean time, it’s nice (if not terribly pragmatic from the standpoint of having to actually get work done) to be wanted.

We’re cosleepers. That is, we let our baby sleep with us in bed. It’s pretty nice for me because I get the nice feeling of knowing that my baby’s near at hand, but it’s rough on Mleeka, who generally spends the night either nursing or being climbed upon. Lennie is an acrobatic nurser, an acrobatic sleeper. She’s been known to nurse standing up on Mleeka’s lap and bent over at the waist, mostly asleep. She’s nursed nearly upside down. It’s crazy. She also used to be a big pincher, and Mleeka’s got one mole that Lennie likes to twiddle and tug on. This, we’ve decided, is hereditary, and I figure it’s just payback for all the bumps Mleeka’s picked at on me all these years, often in spite of my loud and spastic protestations.

In the last couple of months, we’ve actually been able to put Lennie down in the bed in her room (I say “the bed in her room” rather than “her bed” because our old queen bed is on the floor in her room, and we can put her down in it but not in her own bed, which has pretty much never been used). She’ll sometimes sleep in there for hours at a time, and it’s been a big relief for Mleeka, who can get a few hours in until Lennie wakes up at 3:30 in the morning to begin the slugfest. I suppose we could be hard-asses and let the kid scream, do the whole cry-it-out method. That seems to work for many, but it’s not something we’re comfortable doing, though we know perfectly well-adjusted kids who’ve cried it out.

A few weeks ago, I woke up in the morning with no recollection of having heard Lennie crying but with a dim dreamish memory of having woken up to find her walking through the living room and having brought her to bed. A few nights later, I woke up to a tiny rapping at our bedroom door, and when I got up to see what was up, there stood Lennie. She broke down as soon as she saw me, flopped onto the floor, and started crying. This was sort of a big milestone. She knows that we’re around when she wakes up, and she knows that she can come find us. She’s done this a couple of other times as well. Last night, I heard her crying in the living room and went in to scoop her up.

We’re careful now about keeping a living room and a kitchen light on so that she can see her way to our room. While this is a very cool milestone, it’s also a little scary. I can see her waking up, not feeling especially tired or clingy, and playing in the living room by herself. When she’s under even peripheral observation, her playing more or less alone is fine, but her doing so with both of us dead asleep in the other room freaks me out a bit. The other day, she climbed up and stood up on her little play table, for example, and she sometimes crawls up onto the coffee table or stands on the couch and bounces. Unpoliced, she could hurt herself. For now, she’s usually too groggy to do any of these things, I think, but that may not always be the case.

All worries aside, we’re very pleased that our little girl has demonstrated this new trick and feels enough at home to make her way to our bedroom. It doesn’t surprise us, but it does please us to know that she feels secure that we’ll be where she expects us to be.

It’s been too long since I’ve posted a baby update. I suck. Lennie’ll be 17 months old in a couple of weeks, and it’s impossible to imagine her as a squirmy little baby anymore. She speaks in sentences now. She expresses herself in reasonably complex ways. She plays games and recognizes (and tries to provoke) humor. To use the old metaphor, she’s a sponge.

For example, Mleeka often says “No, ma’am” when being emphatic about telling Lennie not to do something. So now, when Lennie’s expressing her displeasure or disagreement with something, she’ll do so emphatically by saying “No, ma’am” in a clipped sort of tone.

It’d be futile to try to list all of the new words she’s picked up since I last wrote about her, so I’ll go with some of my favorites. There’s “booger” (pronounced “booder”). She’s very boogery right now, especially from her eyes. When I tell her she’s got eye-boogers (and they’re so huge and crusty when she wakes up that I’ve best described them to friends as being cornflake-like), she points to her nose and says “booder.” Then there’s “color,” which she pronounces “tohtah” or something similar that can’t really be rendered using anything but linguistic symbols. She usually says this while pointing frantically at where we keep her markers. She likes to make coloring a team sport, insisting at the least that you watch her color and often handing you markers to help her color with. If you write something (anything) and ask her what it says, she peeps “Lennie.” And lately she’s taken to doing a writing-like stroke, pointing at it, and saying “Lennie.” This stems I guess from the fact that her little red chair has her name embroidered on it, and we’ve always pointed at it and said her name.

She’s got a few phrases now too, the cutest being “c’mere” and “let’s go,” which she says when she sees us getting ready to go somewhere. She’ll head for the back door and wait there impatiently, saying “let’s go.”

For a while, she was doing really well with her shape sorter and her puzzles, but she’s put those aside for now in favor of the keyboard. She remains a big dancer and seems especially fond of R&B.

One of my favorite things in the world right now is our morning routine. I sit here in my big chair working, and when she’s awake, Mleeka helps her down from the bed, and she sort of meanders into the living room, rubbing her (of late very boogery) eyes, still sort of sleepy and dazed. She catches sight of me and I coo at her and talk to her and she grins. We usually play or read a little bit, and I’ll turn on PBS Kids if they’re on, and I’ll try to get some breakfast in her. She’s pretty keen on eggs, and I need to get better about just making it part of the every day routine to make her an omelette. Usually, it’s not terribly long before she’s ready to go back in and wake Mleeka up, but on pretty much a daily basis, we have these few little minutes of good daddy/daughter time.

Of course, most of the rest of the time, she’ll have nothing to do with me lately. That’s not entirely true. I’ll take her out to play at the bookstore or we’ll just dance around and play in the evenings most nights, but she’s very much a mama’s girl lately. For a while, she had been sleeping in her own bedroom for a few hours a night, but she’s insisted on being on Mleeka most nights lately, and if I try to comfort her, she squawls and squirms as if I’m jabbing her with sharp things. It’s all very demoralizing for me and frustrating for Mleeka, who naturally would like to have a little personal space sometimes. This has been going on through what must have been a bad teething bout and lately a cold. Hopefully as she gets over these things, she’ll be a little less clingy with Mleeka and a little more comfortable with me.

I guess that’s it for now. There’s so much I’ve missed reporting.

So I put these updates off with the intention of weaving a nice tapestry describing all the things she’s done. I always want to make these posts tributes to my little daughter, who’s more like a real little person every day. But I never quite manage it, and by the time I figure out that this round of updates won’t be the prose masterwork fitting for Lennie, too much has accumulated for me to do any of it any justice in the time I have. So once again, here’s a quick run-through of the last month or two’s worth of neat new things. This is mostly ripped straight out of an email Mleeka sent me reminding me of some of the things Lennie does.

There’s a parrot in the house. She said “sit” one night recently when I said “shit.” She mimics us more and more, trying to repeat pretty much anything we indicate we’re trying to get her to pronounce.

She is following simple directions.

• Give Mommy a kiss.
• Hold my hand.
• Sit down.
• On your booty
• Have a seat
• Bring it here.

When we say one, she says two. She also mimics the ABC song. She tries to keep up with the motions to “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes.” She loves “Wheels on the Bus,” and sometimes when she hears music, she tries to sing along (with nonsense syllables, but roughly mimicing the rhythm).

She kisses and hugs.

She smells flowers.

Words she says (there are no doubt dozens more):

• up, down, no, dat un (that one), der(there)
• water, cheese, apple, (ba)nana, peach
• bird, kitty, doggy, duck, mama(monkey), horse, pink piggy, fish, turtle, camel
• baby
• moon, tree, book, flower, thank you, bye bye, hi,
• Mama, Daddy, Ella, Zac, Abbey, Ash(le)y, Bo-Bo, Deda, Moby (the dog)
• nose, eye, belly button, booby
• ball (and the question “Where’s your ball” directed at the dog)
• shoes, hat
• bite, sip

Words she knows (among many others that don’t spring immediately to mind):

• hand, foot, chin, cheek, mouth, tongue, ears, head
• star, breeze

Animal sounds she knows:

• cow– moo
• pig– snort snort (she actually sort of clicks her tongue because she can’t do the sound, but she knows it’s something going on in the back of your mouth sort of near your nasal passages)
• bird–t(w)eet t(w)eet
• chicken– bock bock bock
• doggy– woof woof
• mama (monkey)– who who who
• snake– sssss
• donkey– hee haw
• horse– neigh (sounds like a laugh when she does it.)
• sheep– (b)aaaaa
• bear, lion–roar
• elephant — holds her arm out vaguely like a trunk and vibrates her lips while making a high pitched sound; I don’t know what this sound is called; it’s sort of like a raspberry but without the tongue

She’s recently started feeding herself with forks and spoons, and she’s pretty good about asking for what she wants. She’ll point to apples and say “apples,” for example, or she’ll point to something else she doesn’t have a word for and say “bite.” Occasionally, she’ll bust out and sign “more” for something.

She can climb into the chairs at her little table and onto the couch and my chair. Yesterday, she climbed into her car seat unassisted for the first time, though when she got there, she wanted to celebrate by turning around and looking out the back window and was not at all pleased when I started trying to strap her in.

Karen gave her her first real haircut this weekend (Mleeka did a little trim a few months ago), and it makes her look so much more like a little girl than like a wispy-banged little baby. She and Ella played really well this weekend for what seems to me like the first time. Usually they’re aware of each other and interact a little (often hugging and kissing), but there was a real connection this weekend. They were running up and down the hallway chasing one another and giggling.

Lennie is very strong-willed, and it worries us a little. She’ll insist on pushing buggies when we’re at a store, for example, or she’ll have a melt-down if we don’t let her walk. We’ve started trying to work around this sort of thing by adding closure. This doesn’t work for things like the walking (which is inconvenient if you’re in a hurry), but for example, we can say “bye bye buggy” as she clings to a buggy for her life, and if we get her to start waving bye bye to it and to realize that we’re moving along without just ripping her away from it, she handles it pretty well.

Guess that’s it until next month, when I’ll no doubt have another disjointed progress post.

It seems as if it’s been a while since I did a Lennie update. Even this week, she seems to have learned so many new things that I know I’ll one day regret not having catalogued them all as soon as they’ve happened.

One of my very favorite things she does now is to scrunch her face (often when given the command “Scrunch”). A scrunch includes the squinting of the eyes and either the pursing of the lips or the pooching out of the lower lip. It adds to her impishness. I don’t have a good picture handy or that’d be the image displayed here.

She’s been singing for a while, saying “la la la” along with Mleeka. Lately she’s picked up hand motions to go with the “Wheels on the Bus” song. She’ll raise and lower her arms for “up and down,” she’ll sort of rotate her hands around one another for “round and round,” and she’ll put her finger to her lips for “shh shh shh.” Just tonight, she started doing the side-to-side hand motion for “swish swish swish.”

Lennie loves birds. If she spots one outside, she grins and enthusiastically points to the sky, saying “boolrh,” which is her rendition of “bird.” If you then ask her what a bird says, she’ll sometimes say “twee twee twee.” She’s also gotten pretty good at pointing birds out in books. She’s known ducks as ducks for a long time and has recently picked up chicken (which says “bock bock bock”), but she doesn’t recognize either of these as birds as far as I’ve seen. She recognizes pigs now, calling them “pink pigs,” which comes out more like “pubpub,” but she’s consistent about it, so we know what she means. When she spots a kangaroo or a horse in one of her books, she identifies them as dogs, which is pretty far off but which isn’t really terribly bad. When she sees the various monkeys in her books, she calls them “mama.” This is no reflection on Mleeka but is an example of Lennie’s difficulty pronouncing second syllables different from their first syllables; it’s much the same as how she still says “bah-bah” for “baby.” It’s slightly off topic, but she recognizes flowers pretty well and has even identified abstract paintings of flowers as flowers.

She loves to dance (as she always has). Sometimes in the car, she’ll rock her whole little body side to side in her seat in much the same fashion that Ray Charles often rocked on his piano bench. Sometimes she does this weird little sumo maneuver (not in a dancing context necessarily) in which she just stomps very hard in place. It’s not an angry stomp or anything; she’s just trying out the old legs. Other moves she’s gotten good at include kissing, hugging, and patting babies, waving like the queen (or actually more like the queen doing sort of a palm-up wave), pushing carts in pretty much any store we go to, asking to be picked up or lifted into a chair (saying “up” with a very plosive “p”), and shaking her head no pretty vehemently.

Speaking of saying “no,” she’s learned to call my laptop a “no,” and she’s fond of approaching it with an outstretched finger, looking at me sort of indignantly, and saying “noonh.”

She loves to sit in the chair I got her before she was born, and she also likes to be lifted into the glider and be rocked. Sometimes she’ll try to rock herself. Last night, she got up into my chair unassisted and promptly climbed over toward the end table to see what havoc she could wreak there.

Lennie’s picked up some body parts this week. She’s known “nose” for a long time and for some reason always points at the sheep’s nose in one of her books. But she can identify her nose and noses on other people and animals and dolls. This week, she’s learned eye, cheek, chin, and ears, though I’m not sure she’s consistent about identifying all of them.

She can now drink out of an uncovered cup and loves drinking from a straw, always with supervision, of course. She likes ice cube slivers, and when we give her orange juice, she lets just the teensiest taste in and then backs away and grins because it’s so tangy. She likes foods with strong flavors. Onions and dill pickles are near the top of the list. She also likes salami and swiss cheese.

Every day, I find myself begging her for kisses. I tried to bribe her tonight, offering a dollar per kiss. She gives them away pretty freely to Mleeka and to the dog. She’ll also kiss Uncle Andy when he taps his cheek. Sometimes she’ll then tap her own cheek in response. It’s very rare for her to kiss me, less rare for her to pat my back.

Some saps say that the day you first meet your child is among the happiest days of your life. For me, it wasn’t. I was running on empty, having gotten very little sleep. Mleeka had hemorrhaged during an unplanned C-section. I was overwhelmed and unsure of the precise nature of my feelings toward this little loud squirmy baby. Oh, I knew I’d love her and that I was embarking on a fun trip, but I couldn’t have known how fun it in fact is to be a parent. There is absolutely nothing better in the world than watching your happy baby. It makes the frog in my ribcage jump for joy to see Lennie laughing, discovering things, scrunching her face, communicating. When she’s tender with me, offering the rare kiss or other show of affection, there’s simply no describing how it feels.