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?
Sophia loves to put her shoes on, and she will happily put them on upon request. It means we get to go somewhere. While she may not like change and new places she does like to leave the house to explore playgrounds and even go grocery shopping. She’ll even hint at times that she wants to go out and at other times she just wants to wear her shoes around the house.
Usually Kurt and I don’t wear our outdoor shoes inside, but we never applied that rule with Sophia because for the longest time she didn’t do much walking on dirty outdoor surfaces. I have a pair of slippers for her but they’re a pair of Robeez shoes. I think they’re too hard for her to put on herself so we allow the outdoor sandals. But because she climbs on the couch by flinging her foot on top of the cushion and then pulling herself up, we decided to insist that she take them off prior to sitting on the couch.
We only had to tell her once and now she very obediently sits on the floor to remove her shoes. Such a good girl. She has also gone as far as to apply the rule to climbing on the chairs at the dining table. It really isn’t necessary. They’re just wooden chairs that are easily wiped down, but why stop her?
On Friday we all went out to Baskin Robbins after dinner. I helped Sophia pull the heavy chair from the table before sitting in my own chair, then I looked over an noticed she wasn’t climbing up yet, “What are you doing?” At first she was trying to take off her shoe while standing, but then she sat on the floor tugged at her sandal. Kurt came to the table with his cone, “What is she doing?”
“She’s taking off her shoes before climbing up, of course.”
I crave it on rare occasion, so Sophia and I shared a meal. Who knew it would promote bathing? The bath time push isn’t an official one therefore no equipment is supplied, but I think the responsibility is implied when certain meals are advertised for children. McDonalds BBQ sauce should come with soap and towel!
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.
My little Mellow Yellow
No, Sophia doesn’t have jaundice nor has she been smoking dried banana skins. Not that I know of anyway. She has been incredibly mellow for the past couple days though. Mellow, even for her.
The day before yesterday I spent the morning running errands. Sophia became frustrated with getting in and out of the car so I took her to the park to burn off some energy before doing some grocery shopping. She went to the play equipment excitedly but once on it she just stood there like a bump as kids made their way around her. She would wander around the park a bit, then climb on the equipment again, and just stand. I chalked it up to not being fully recovered from her cold. We didn’t stay very long.
Yesterday morning she woke up crying as she did everyday that she was sick. After about five minutes, she went back to sleep for an hour then cried again. I got her up at eight, gave her milk, and made breakfast as usual. She didn’t touch her breakfast.
It was supposed to be my cleaning day so I zoomed up and down the stairs gathering stuff together. Sophia got upset because she could keep up with me so I sat with her and read one of the books she always carries with her. After the third time through the book I told her I had to go clean the house. She wasn’t happy.
It was only 10am and she looked tired. Her tantrum seemed to me like a cry for a nap. I picked her up and put her in her crib with her book. She protested for about five minutes and then either sat quietly plotting my demise or fell asleep. It was completely silent until about three, but even then, I only heard a couple tiny sounds that didn’t seem like a fully awakened toddler.
I had left her there all day with the assumption that she must have needed the sleep, but at Kurt’s urging I got her up at four thirty so that she would still sleep at night. I opened the door to a fully awake toddler, laying on her back, and reading her book. She cuddled with us the rest of the evening. She wasn’t interested in playing at all.
Moms are snot gross!
Everyone knows that babies are messy and that upon becoming a parent there will be drool, vomit, pee, and poop with which to contend, but I don’t think anyone considers the snot. Maybe it’s because babies come from the hospital complete with a nasal aspirator and one assumes that with that no one has to touch a single snotty thing. One would be wrong.
Sometimes babies sneeze and snot flies forth like projectile vomit. Sometimes while they sleep, snot gets rubbed all over their face and sometimes their sinuses get so backed up it coats their eyelashes. Sometimes toddlers like to multi task. At around fifteen months, Sophia discovered that when she sucks her thumb her index finger only need to be extended and it fits perfectly in the nostril. She would pull out little boogies and not even know it sometimes.
A few months ago at dinner Sophia had a boogie just above her top lip. Kurt was eating when he noticed and called it to my attention. I hadn’t sat down yet so I went over and without hesitation picked it off her face with my fingers. “Eeeww, mom’s are gross!” Kurt said. I went to the trash and flicked it off then washed my hands before sitting down to eat. What’s the big deal? After being shit on a little boogie is nothing.
I guess Sophia noticed that I picked a boogie off her face because a few days later she came up to hand me something small from between her fingers. Usually I get bits of paper so I took it without any thought. It was a little baby boogie. I’ll treasure it always honey…Where’s the trash can? Don’t worry the trash doesn’t go out for few days.
Sophia is getting over a cold she had last week. The first night as always, we didn’t think to turn on her humidifier and the next morning we had the snot face to contend with. Unlike her colds last year, this year Sophia has REALLY long hair. She had the ends of a thin lock inhaled into her nose and over the night her mucus membranes worked overtime to seal the lock in place. When she was younger, I would simply use a washcloth and warm water to loosen up all the dried snotty goodness. This time I gave the hair a tug and out came the snot cork. Getting the snot out of the hair and keeping it out is a completely different story.
Everything creates a learning opportunity for a toddler from taking things apart in order to learn the inner workings to watching mom and dad. In this case, congested Sophia applied knowledge gained from Dad’s constant sinus infections. Our mimicking little monkey learned to blow her own nose today, granted she doesn’t blow quite hard enough.
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.
Old Coot Dirty Talk
This was our conversation on the way to dinner:
Kurt: We’re old…mostly you.
Me: Really, you were born in 72 and I wasn’t even alive yet.
Kurt: Ok I’m old and you’re a young whipper snapper. Coot.
Me: My cooter isn’t a snapper.
Kurt: I beg to differ; it’s a Penis Fly Trap.
We went out for Chinese food and Sophia played with all the tea cups as if they were stacking cups. I suppose they do stack nicely. Kurt poured tea in ours and Sophia insisted that she also get some. Hers received a complimentary ice cube. She promptly and purposely dumped it all on the seat just as she dumps the water out of the toy watering can at swimming; only the Chinese restaurant wasn’t in the middle of a pool.
After Kurt finished his tea Sophia had two cups, two saucers, and an extra plate meant for us to share our food with her. We did give her some of our food to try and she did try it in a manner of speaking. She tried using a fork to put the rice in a tea cup, and she tried tipping the tea cup to empty the rice back into the dish. She also organized the dishes. The cups fit neatly in the middle of the saucers and she organized them this way. She then stacked the cups together, and in a separate pile she stacked the saucers together. Kurt and I were impressed by her categorization. Of course after dinner we loaded her into the car and she began chewing on her books. Not as impressive.
My fortune for the night, “Remember three months from this date. Good things are in store for you.
“I’ve stopped taking my birth control pills.”
“Oh, you guys are trying?”
“No.”
“Ha! Well unless you stopped having sex, you’re trying.”
“No we aren’t.”
“Uumm yes you are.”
“We’re just letting it happen.”
“You’re trying.”
*Audible sigh*
*Three months later*
“I’m disappointed that I’m not pregnant yet.”
“I thought you said you weren’t trying.”
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.
