Little EC likes a song—this one—that goes through the somewhat interminable process of reciting each letter, a word that begins with that letter, and the sound the letter makes. I’ve played it for her during the last year or two, just to see if she picked up on anything in it or any of the other “educational” songs on the album. This particular one strikes her fancy.

The other day, she left the kitchen while it was playing, went to her play area, and came back with a book that I had found in someone’s trash—a handwriting practice book for first graders. In the front of the book is a chart with all of the letters and pictures of objects that start with those letters. She wanted to follow along. So we sat for awhile while I pointed to each letter as the song said it. But she was hugely frustrated that the pictures in this chart were not the same as the words being used in the song…and no amount of explaining that many words start with each letter could make her feel better. I promised I’d make her a chart with pictures that correspond to the song.

Three times this happened. Finally, I got around to making a chart—this one—and I printed it out for her. Today at lunch we sat with it and listened to the song, pointing to all the right pictures and letters. At dinner, she sat by herself and did all the pointing on her own…and would even reference the chart to answer my questions about what word starts with what letter. All in all, a pretty clever performance on her part, and maybe on mine.

In other news, a neighbor loaned me a baby seat to install on my bike. After a few trial runs around our neighborhood this past week, the two of us took off on the 8-mile, almost entirely cycle-path, trip to the airport. (Because that’s where the cycle path goes…) Like a little princess, she sat behind me, eating snacks and watching the world go by while I burned off 900 calories of my body weight getting her there. We saw airplanes landing right above us from the path, and we even parked and wandered through the airport, looking for planes and riding on luggage carts. I stopped to ask an attendant where I could find a bathroom. She then asked the attendant for money. (Where does this stuff come from?)

And of course, she had wet underwear once we found the bathroom. So what to do? I was at a loss as I undressed her, until I heard someone drying their hands…with the air blower. So in about 15 minutes, I had rinsed and blow-dried her underwear amidst the airport bathroom foot traffic, while she ran around in just shirt and socks. Then it was back onto the bike, a coffee-shop muffin in hand, for the 8-mile trek home.

Some other time, I’m going to write about her obsession with volcanoes.

With too much crazy going on every day, it’s been impossible to sit and make notes on my observations of little EC. Even now, I’m sacrificing some sleep to do it…but every day there’s something new to observe and, not wanting to lose track of it all, I’m going to get it out.

• A few weeks ago, she was sitting at breakfast, contemplating her feet. (At some point in February, after loaning her seat to a neighboring baby, we just never put it back…so she sits cross-legged on a regular chair now.) After awhile, she started saying, “It’s eye!” Again and again, “It’s eye!” We questioned her what it meant, and got nowhere for awhile, until she turned and said, “I want milk!” Since then, the use of “I” has been infiltrating her speech more and more, and now it’s equivalent in frequency, if not slightly more used, than “you” when referring to herself. Also making an appearance are “mine”, “me”, and so forth. So despite the fact that we gave up long ago on trying to correct her, she figured it out from herself, by staring at her feet.
• Yesterday she walked up to me and said, “If you eat all your enchiladas, you can have ice cream!” Confused? Yes, me too. I didn’t remember ever discussing enchiladas with her. But after awhile, I remembered that we took her to a specialty enchilada place in Mexico City in January, where she refused to each the enchiladas. So when we stopped for ice cream later that evening, we didn’t let her have any. And the lesson appears—much later—to have stuck. I should note that she is always good natured about those things…once we explained why she wasn’t having ice cream, she didn’t complain one bit. But what should happen if next time we have enchiladas, there’s no ice cream??
• She has, in the last two weeks, learned to pretend, and she does it in a big way. Her most favorite thing to pretend is “taking a trip”, where we sit somewhere that she designates to be an airplane or a bus, and we pretend to hear the captain tell us to put on our seat belts, and we make engine noises, and we eat pretend snacks and take pretend naps, and then pretend to arrive. Where are we *always* going? New Mexico. I think that girl really just wants to go back to Grandma’s and Grandpa’s house. After all, when I told her that the movers would be coming in a few months because we were leaving our house, she immediately declared that we would be moving to Grandma’s and Grandpa’s house. Watch out, Grandma and Grandpa.
• When we returned from our vacation at the end of January, jet lag was as bad as it’s ever been. Oh well, I guess there’s no getting around it. The problem, I think, is that our flights leave in the morning from America. She therefore doesn’t get around to sleeping until just before we get back home…and it’s bedtime when we land. On the other hand, when we went to Australia (also heading east) in September, the flight left at night, she slept almost immediately, and she had very little jet lag problem. Make a note for future trips: try to leave at night.
• Who knew that a stuffy nose could back up into a baby’s small sinuses, and cause an infection that swells the eye shut? I didn’t. But I have witnessed it myself. Now going on day three of the seven-day antibiotic regimen. Oh, and toddlers don’t like eyedrops.

There’s definitely more, but I can’t steal any more sleep from myself to get it out right now. I have too many other things willing to steal my sleep instead!

Yesterday, after five days of wet underpants and cleaning up the floors, I decided that the diapers were going to go back on little EC and she was going to have a break for awhile, until she got better at controlling her impulses. I made the decision while she napped.

When she woke up, I saw that her diaper was dry, so I thought, what the heck, one more try. Off came the diaper, and with all the underpants downstairs, she ran around naked upstairs while I took care of a few things. And all of a sudden, she stopped…turned…ran to the bathroom…and sat down on her potty, peeing. She snatched a diaper reprieve right at the last moment.

And in the ensuing day and a half, she’s been on fire, getting about 70% of all output accurately directed. That includes several times telling me she needed to go, and then making it all the way to the finish line.

Someday I will look back at my inner impulse to wax poetic about poop and pee, and think I’m being rather silly. But the difference that a day makes is really something. With any luck, this might turn out to be no-diaper November.

Two days ago, little EC started really climbing. There is a rope net in the playground here, and she’d contemplated climbing it before, without success; but that day she just started from the bottom and didn’t stop till she reached the top.

That was a good trick, but what came later was a relief to my back, if also a stab to my heart as I realized how big she’s getting. I had unlatched her carseat straps, but gotten distracted with something else for a second. And she decided to take advantage of that by climbing down out of her carseat by herself…and then jumping out of the car by herself too. Later on, she repeated the feat by climbing into the car and into the carseat on her own.

And now that she’s discovered she can push her hand-washing stool from the bathroom to any other room in the house, nothing is safe and I need to move on from hiding objects from her to teaching her how to look, be gentle, and put things back when she’s done with them.

In other news, real potty training day 1 score: 3 wet pairs of underwear, 0 successful peeing trips to the potty.

EM was taking little EC up the stairs tonight for a bath…at least, she was trying to; but it didn’t seem to be working. I was head-down in the kitchen, chopping something here and hitting buttons on the microwave there…dinner for adults comes after bath time and bed time. EC had been a little difficult today, refusing to follow directions to walk on the sidewalk, let EM wash her hands or put her in her chair, and had served a time-out for being particularly intransigent just before she ate her dinner. So I didn’t much pay attention to the difficulty she causing about getting up for her bath.

But it got very loud, and tears were flowing…so I looked out the kitchen door at her, and started listening. She was yelling something through the tears, which was nearly impossible to make out, but after a few repetitions I got it: “Nose bumps, kisses, and hugs!”

She was listing off the signs of affection we share before she goes to bed. Then I understood: she thought that she was being sent to bed, and that EM was denying her the chance to say a proper good-night to me. And, in a heart-warming moment, I realized that she was fighting, and fighting hard, to show me affection. Missing out on even one good-night hug was unacceptable in her little toddler world.

With that cleared up, she gave me five hugs and lots of extra kisses, and went happily off to bath and bed. And I was much happier all night too.

After we introduced little EC to the concept of pottying some months ago, it was a hit-and-miss thing whether she’d give us the chance to see that she needed it before it was just diaper-changing time. We even gave it up entirely in September while we were traveling, because who needs that drama? But having returned home and to a relatively normal schedule, we gave it a try again.

From the beginning we had used the strategy of sitting her down at the first sign of “necessity”, reading her books, and otherwise distracting her until she actually pooped. This was only marginally successful, because she would eventually tire of sitting there, or declare she didn’t need to go, or we’d get tired of yet again reading the same books over and over while waiting for her. That was just too frustrating all around. So instead, when we got back, I just started taking her clothes off at the first signs, and otherwise letting her continue running around—on the one condition that she stay off any absorbent surfaces like couches. It turns out that she has a fairly good sense of when things will go down, and for one reason or another (our previous disappointment a couple times that she’s let drop on the floor?) knows that she has to be properly positioned for the event. So after four or forty minutes—I never can predict—she’ll start panting, dancing, and running for the bathroom…and you know how the story goes. A couple times she has peed on the floor—she hasn’t figured out that part of the package yet—and once she only half made it (“hovering” already, at age two), but otherwise she has a clean record. And as of now, I haven’t changed a dirty diaper in a week or more.

So in a case of “second thing’s first”, we seem to be getting this part down, and then we’ll move on to number one. The training pants just showed up in the mail today.

Little EC has a fun game that she likes to play almost every day at lunch. She spells out the rules for me:

Baby says “Meow”, and Daddy says “What!”

So we play. The game goes just as you might imagine that it would. Until she changes the rules:

Baby says “What!”, and Daddy says “Meow”

And so we play that way too.

I think one day she must have, unprompted, said “meow” to me, and I responded with an incredulous “What?”. She cracked up at the tone of my voice, and said it again…and I, enjoying her laugh, repeated myself too. And now, it’s our own little game.

I’ve always observed older kids play with one another, and marveled at how they spend so little time playing, and so much time spelling out the rules or the script by which they will play whatever game it is that they’re going to play. And I can see that in this house it’s starting now, at two years old.

Tonight we came home from dinner after dark, and as we always do in these cases, little EC and I walked out into the street in front of the house to look for the moon. The moon doesn’t rise right now until well after her bedtime, so it wasn’t in the sky. I told her the moon still wasn’t up, and she insisted that she’d go inside and see the moon.

All the way in the house, and through the taking off of shoes and dropping of bags, she was very intently trying to tell me something about her room and the moon, but in her excitement couldn’t really get it out. And I couldn’t understand much of it anyway, until she said, quite clearly:

“You go to sleep, dream, see moon!”

I asked her, “So when you sleep, you dream of the moon?” “Yeah!”

I wouldn’t have thought that the concept of dreaming, and seeing particular things in dreams, would be one that she’d understand and be able to express already. But…she said so!

So sweet dreams, little one. Say hi to the moon for me.

Two days ago, I walked out into the foyer (“foy-YAY!!”, as little EC calls it) to a little girl who had two shoes on her feet…entirely without my intervention. She’s been taking her shoes off by herself for maybe a month now, but this was new. After we both shouted hooray! a few times, I pointed out that the shoes were on the wrong feet and that I could help with that. I think I earn major Dad points for noticing.

She now is putting her own shoes on reliably. She’s 50% (imagine that!) on getting them on the right feet, but no matter: every time she does it, right or wrong, she jumps up yelling hooray!! and running around with glee. Now here’s a little girl who loves doing things by herself.

Speaking of things that make her shout for joy, pooping is top of the list. Specifically, pooping in the toilet, which we introduced to her probably sometime in July, as a casual “think about it, let us know if you feel like it” kind of thing. Since then, she’s been hot and cold on the idea, but when she’s hot…she’s hot. Today, I greeted her after her nap, and she greeted me with “poop!”. After confirming that said poop was not in her diaper, I offered her the chance to go use the potty. Very happy with that idea, she let me take her diaper off and then bounced into the bathroom, sat on her little potty; got up and down a few times; and finally, feeling it coming, pranced back to the potty, sat, pushed, realized that she had done it, and jumped up with joy so quickly that she brought all that she had produced up with her! I of course praised her efforts even while cleaning up the floor. She was so overjoyed by her success that, when we brought it up to Empirical Mom this evening, she was breathless while trying to recount the tale.

Her favorite part of this story, of course, is how she gets a cookie after successfully doing it.

We’re not too close to dropping the hammer on real potty training yet. We have travels coming up and want to wait at least till after that, and maybe until after Christmas if she’s not 100% on board yet. But really…for a girl who can ride a bike, almost read her own name, count to 30…maybe she’ll be able to poop controllably before the rest of us are ready for it.

Now if I could just get her to stop referring to herself as “you”…

It’s been a long time since I wrote anything down, which has everything to do with how busy I’ve been keeping up with little EC and keeping up with work. In mid-June, Empirical Grandma came to visit for a couple weeks and we were all delighted by how quickly EC warmed up to her…hardly had we walked in the door from the airport when she yelled, “Grandma, play!” A few days of me being gone didn’t dampen her mood either. Maybe I’m not entirely replaceable…but mostly.

Two new skills have popped up in the last month that either I have to note or I’ll forget all together. About two months ago a neighbor loaned us her daughter’s “balance bike”, which is a toddler-sized bicycle without pedals. The idea is they sit and push themselves along, having fun transporting themselves and learning to balance at the same time, no training wheels needed. It’s a lady-style bike, meaning the crossbar descends from the handlebars to the seat, making it easy to step across it. It took EC a few days of messing around with it to figure out how to stand and hold on so that the whole thing didn’t come falling down; then a little while longer until she could straddle the bike and walk along. At that point, she declared herself to be “riding”. I gave her pretty constant encouragement to sit on the seat while walking, but for a couple weeks that was too much and she wouldn’t do it.

When she was fast enough, I started taking her outside and, having pulled my bike out of the storage closet where it sat for the last two years, I rode with her on our street. She’d amble along, and I’d ride circles around her. We did a couple of long walks—one block or so—that took an excruciating amount of time, and usually ended up with her getting tired and just wanting to be carried home. But after awhile, either because she just figured it out or because she watched me riding, she started sitting and pushing…and by the time Grandma was here, she was just beginning to get the rudiments of balance. Now, about two weeks later, she’s even further along with the balance, though she’s not cruising yet. But she’s fast, very fast. If she puts her mind to going somewhere, I have to give chase.

Her second recent skill is an adoption of pronouns. I have read that it’s good practice to avoid using pronouns with babies at first, because it can be confusing. I’m an avid ignorer of good practice, so I’ve been talking to EC in plain English since day one. As a consequence, she’s recently picked up on the fact that I call her, interchangeably, “baby”, her actual name, and “you”. She’s used “baby” for awhile, she started using her own name a month or two ago, and in the last couple weeks, she’s started calling herself “you”.

Once I realized what she was doing, interpreting her speech was straightforward. “You go downstairs”, “you read the book”, or “you eat it” are clear. If I’m not paying too much attention, though, I may at first think that she’s giving me commands. Only today did I start trying to correct her, which I’ll start doing more actively now. She just figured out how to put her front bike wheel up on the curb, step herself up, and pull the rest of the bike with her while straddling it, and she’s very proud. She did it again and again, shouting “you did it!” each time. Eventually, I got her to say “I did it!”. I’m pretty sure, though, that she knows now that she can play a game with me by using “you” when she knows she should use “I”.

“You riding the bicycle!” She turned 21 months three days ago.