The heat came back. Sleeping attire was tossed aside at least for this night. Fans turned on, a necessity for slumber.
In the morning I opened her door. I looked upon her still half-asleep on her tummy. Sophia took her diaper off sometime during the night and slept in the buff…to wake on wet sheets.
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My Grandpa took his whole top row of teeth out to brush. They looked real. “How do you do that?” My four-year-old self asked him.
“Oh don’t worry,” he said, “you’ll be able to do it soon.” Thinking he meant it was something that required practice, I kept tugging at my teeth. He just laughed.
Flash Fiction Friday is hosted by g-man.
This morning I made breakfast and finished before Sophia, of course. I don’t eat the parts I like best and then use the rest to paint the table, but that’s just me. *glare at the toddler* I let her have her fun at the table, but in order to do that I have to leave the room, so I started on the dishes.
Sophia slid down her chair as soon as she realized I was putting the dishwasher dishes away. I didn’t even realize it until I turned around and saw her holding up a dinner plate by the top of the rim with both hands. Thank you honey, you’re such a big help. If I had to bend over that extra five inches to actually reach the plate I’m sure I’d break in half.
She gave me each and every dish until the bottom of the dishwasher was empty. She then ran back to the table to finish her breakfast, minus the icky apricots of course. Everyone knows apricots aren’t for eating. They’re for painting tables orange with gooey slime.
Sophia and I ran several errands including going to have my last name changed at yet another place. I completed my tedious list of tasks, which put Sophia to sleep in the car, and ventured to new experience. After several missed streets due to missing signs because of road construction and subsequent u-turns, I finally made it to a U-pick blueberry farm at noon.
Sophia loved it and I knew she would as putting little things into cups, buckets, bags, and boxes has been her long time favorite pass time. She took to it like a fish to water, though she was a bit over zealous. She didn’t just pick the blueberries she also picked the green-blueberries. *sigh* I guess that’s the price of cheap labor.
Here is Sophia on her union mandated milk-break:
We didn’t stay at the berry farm very long, but we did collect 3.5 pounds of blueberries of the blue variety. Since I didn’t get to the farm at my anticipated time I also didn’t get to make my anticipated dinner, so at dinner time it was off to Boston Market we went.
We went there specifically because Kurt wanted pizza and I didn’t. After some thought to the selection Kurt called a waitress over. He asked her the sizes of the pizzas. As she rattled off the diameter of each size, Kurt used his hands to give an approximate visual. The waitress left our table and Kurt continued with his decision. Then I hear him mumble, “four squared times three point one four.” OHMYGOD, seriously? I gave a concerned look, “are you trying to figure out the area of each pizza?” He smiled and I rolled my eyes. I can’t believe it.
As if knowing the area of the pizza helps in figuring out the amount that fits in his stomach. If he knew the volume his stomach could hold, and how low it was currently running, along with how thick the pizzas run at Boston Market he could be onto something. But area, useless. I mean I could eat two square feet of soup if it were spread out thin enough. Oh crap! He’s infected me. Shit.
On the way home, Sophia began to whine. Her forty-minute car nap on the way to the blueberry farm wasn’t quite enough to last her the day. She had dark circles around her eyes. Kurt casually said to her, “If you don’t stop I’ll run us into a tree.” All fussing discontinued. Who knew idol death threats work on toddlers?
I don’t know if it was originally a bug bite that was then scratched into an open wound or if Sophia was rubbing her hand on the textured wall her crib sits against at night. I doubt it was the second since knockdown is fairly smooth, but it was one of the theories. Either way I noticed a round wound on the back of her hand one morning, weeks ago. It was bleeding when I first saw it, so I washed it off and gave her a kiss. She never let the damn thing scab up. By the end of the day, I had to wipe the blood off her hand again. I kissed the back of her hand again. At the end of the second or third day, she was lifting the back of her hand to me in a slightly closed fist for a kiss. Later it progressed to kissing her wounded then unwounded hand as well and a kiss on the lips. At least she has finally learned to kiss with her mouth closed.
Her hand has healed and only a scar remains but Miss Princess, at random times, will still give me her hands to kiss.
If yelling can cause air molecules to vibrate faster, thereby making the air warmer, I think Sophia’s screaming every night for the last few weeks is to blame for the record temperatures in the Seattle area. All right fine, the math doesn’t support that theory.
I hear the Earth is getting closer to the sun.
Flash Fiction Friday is hosted by g-man. You may also visit Flash Fiction Friday 55′s, a blog dedicated to hosting 55 Flash Fiction Friday posts.
I told Kurt about my recent post citing an article about the bell curve of the toddler language explosion and how he’s encouraging a dramatic vocabulary increase. I reminded him of telling Sophia her blanket, “Friend” must stay home because he’s agoraphobic.
Kurt laughs, “He’s not agoraphobic. He’s angora-phobic. He’s afraid of fuzzy open spaces.”
Flash Fiction Friday is hosted by g-man.
I attended the same ‘living with baby’ class at the hospital a few months after leaving my job that I had gone to while on maternity leave. There was a mom there with a set of fraternal twins, girl and boy. They were about a month older than Sophia who was about eleven months. Their mom mentioned how much they loved story time and that they would sit intently listening to stories. I was hopeful that Sophia would soon act the same. Then she mentioned that they had been that way for quite a while. I didn’t feel as optimistic.
Finally, about three months ago, at nineteen months, Sophia began to show interest in books beyond spreading them all over the floor. 
At first there were two that she carried around with her everywhere, one called “Happy Baby Words” by Rodger Priddy that is in English and Spanish and another called “Helping” published by Berryland Books. The second one is supposed to come in a pack of three or four books but Sophia picked this one out at a secondhand store. It’s all of four pages and very cute at first. After several hundred readings, it begins to drag.
Days later Sophia added two more books to her carry everywhere collection. The letters “S” and “T” from the Baby Einstein box collection were not to be left out of anything. I don’t know if it’s the shape of the letters or the little animal pictures on the front that draw her to these two particular books, but I’ve shuffled them within their box and she always picked the same two books out of the bunch and it shows. Those are the stickiest and most worn two books in the box.
Two weeks ago, on July sixth, I attempted potty training her for two hours. Kurt and I had heard some special news report where the doctor said the child is ready/can start being trained when he or she starts hiding when they go potty and starts showing a preference for being dry. I was excited. I am so tired of diaper changes and having her kick me the entire time I try to change her.
I put a gate up in our downstairs, blocking the rest of the house. I read the two potty books I bought at Half Price Books weeks prior, “Once Upon a Potty” by Alona Frankel and “Sara’s Potty” by Harriet Ziefert. I showed her the potty that we’ve had sitting in the main bathroom for weeks. I asked her to sit on it, and she did. I thought, “Wow this’ll be a piece of cake.” I changed her diaper, let her run nekkid from the waist down, and set a timer for twenty minutes. I figured I’d have her sit on her potty and read the potty books to her regardless of whether she had to go or not.
She peed before the timer went off. I expected that, really I did. I cleaned it up and set the timer again. Again she peed before the timer went off, so the next time I set it for ten minutes. She wanted to eat so we went upstairs, half nekkid, and she went again before the timer. She peed on the chair and it spilled onto the hardwood floor. I moved her to a different chair, cleaned up the mess, and then she went again on the second chair. I hadn’t even reset the timer yet. I moved her back to the first chair, cleaned up the mess, and reset the timer. After she finished eating, we went back downstairs to the tiled floor where she promptly peed again this time slipping on the tile. I was done. Clearly this wasn’t working. I simply couldn’t get her to the potty on time and she had no clue what I was wanting.
After all that she dropped the letter books for the two potty books. I view this as a sign that the experience didn’t scar her for life. Unfortunately, she’s using the books to scar me. Her favorite seems to be the one that annoys the crap out of me, “Once Upon a Potty”. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to read it, probably twenty times a day. It’s pure torture.
I like some of the ideas used in the book like naming some of the body parts other than the potty focus, but the names used for the private parts and elimination are irritating. I mean who the hell calls a vagina a pee-pee? And this is a book specifically for girls. I may not use the more medial terms, urinate and defecate, for elimination but I also don’t use wee-wee and poo-poo. Those are silly words. I changed the words that I read and had to tell Kurt what we will be using.
Kurt reading the potty book: …And just like you, Prudence has a body, and this body has many nice and useful parts: A head for thinking…
Kurt calling to me: What are we calling it?
Me: A VAH-GUH-EYE-NAH!
Kurt back to reading: A Vaahhh-gu-EYE-Nuh for making pee
The board book version of Mr. Brown Can MOO! Can You? By Dr. Seuss has also made her list. Someone told me that animal sounds count as words, so I’m crediting this book with adding two new words to Sophia’s limited vocabulary, “Kopp” and “Biz” (Klopp and Buzz). “Kopp” is of course the sound of horse feet and “Biz” is the sound that bees make. She only uses these words when reading the book herself. She doesn’t use them on the correct pages, but they’re associated with this particular book. This brings her total number of words (including signs) to a whopping thirteen. Not very impressive.
Her current signs are: milk, more, eat, apple, and banana. Her actual spoken words consist of: daddy, hi, cheese, cat, bye, momma, and now klopp and buzz. I’m waiting for that vocabulary explosion I keep hearing about. According to an article I found in Scientific America Kurt is enabling this explosion by telling Sophia that “Friend” must stay home because he is agoraphobic, so I should be hearing an explosion of words by her second birthday…in two months.
McMurray says. But “to explain the big picture, it’s much, much simpler. … Anytime you have more difficult than easy words [the learning curve] will have this property.”
I’m going to blame Sophia for my not blogging for a few weeks. I know. I know, “Sure, blame the poor kid.” Well it is her fault. I usually get my down time in the evening after she goes to bed, but for the last three weeks, she has held screaming sessions in her crib for hours after lights out time. I’ve tried to switch my quiet time to the morning before she gets up, but instead of sleeping in the darling angel has also began to wake up an hour earlier. Due to the lack of sleep, I’ve been catching up at her nap times which have been unaffected so far. Yay for naps!
Bed time for the midget is eight. She usually goes down without much fuss. Normally she will stay up for up to two hours talking to herself and hitting the walls with her feet. For the last three weeks, she has gone to bed and lay quietly for an hour, then start crying, and then screaming as if something is killing her with a dull spoon. Why a spoon? Because it’s DULL, you twit. It’ll hurt more. Sophia screams until eleven or midnight and then wakes up at six thirty. It’s been hell!
The first couple times it happened I assumed that she had been asleep and woke from a nightmare. I didn’t *rush* to her rescue but did calmly go in, pick her up and rock with her. Her screaming would stop as soon as she was picked up and she would lay her head on my shoulder. I sat with her for a few minutes and then put her back to bed. She would remain quiet for ten or fifteen minutes and then the lamenting and gnashing of teeth would begin again.
She now has all her toddler teeth, so we don’t think it’s teething. It could be growing pains, but generally, those don’t go on EVERY night for weeks. Kurt thought maybe she’s been getting too much sleep with her two to three hour naps and started putting her to bed at nine. It worked the first night, but I think that was just a fluke. After a couple weeks of these antics, something had to give and she would eventually have to make up for the lost sleep. I’m still waiting. The next night she went to bed at nine and presumably to sleep. Screaming commenced at midnight and lasted until four in the morning. I was not amused.
We’ve had some very hot sunny days around here and our bedrooms are on the third floor. On the hot days we turn a fan on in her room and have tried that to combination with a cool bath before bed. That hasn’t been a consistent success either. The only other thing I can think of is that she’s vying for night time attention. The most she gets anymore is a stern, “Sophia GO TO SLEEP” through the door. Stubborn little shit. This will end eventually, right?
