One day about a week ago, we saw a neighbor’s kid about two months older than EC open his front door to go inside. “Whew,” I thought, “I’m glad she can’t do that yet.” We have lots of stuff behind closed doors to bathrooms, etc. that are “not for babies” and we’ve not had to worry about cleaning them up.

The next day, she opened her first door. Within another day, she was opening every door in the house. Time to clean up!

When she wakes up from her naps, she sometimes makes like she wants to climb out of the crib. She’s not close to succeeding yet…but just in case, I put padding on the floor where she’d fall, and we’ve started closing the gate at the top of the stairs at night. Because one day, she’ll get out and I don’t want to celebrate that with a fall down the stairs.

A neighbor loaned us a push bike that their daughter doesn’t use yet. It’s a miniature bicycle without pedals, to give kids a chance to learn balance without having to learn pedals at the same time. We brought it home yesterday. By today, little EC is straddling the bike and walking, pushing it in front of her. I wouldn’t be surprised if she figures out sitting and pushing in another day, and if balance comes soon afterward.

On the toilet front, she now sometimes will correctly identify when she needs to poop. She’ll open (!) the bathroom door, go in, and wait for me to get her ready. But she rarely has patience to sit on the potty long enough, so I end up putting the diaper back on and changing it shortly thereafter. Maybe that’ll form a bad habit. But I don’t want to discourage her from running to the bathroom by making it a fight to keep her seated until she goes. Tradeoffs…

Given the right conditions, she can recite the numbers 1 to 20. She can also sometimes recite from 10 to 100 by tens. That’s all recitation at this point…I can ask her how many monkeys are jumping on the bed, and she’ll poke at the page with her finger like she’s counting…but she’s not counting.

I’m also working hard at getting her to recognize land masses on the globe. So far, she’s hit and miss with Africa and Australia, with mostly confusion on all the rest.

Little EC has been doing so many new things recently, it’s tough to keep track of them all. She’s also so active that it’s tough to find any time to sit and put fingers to keyboard. But to summarize:

• Over the weekend, she used the toilet successfully for the first time. It’s a matter of catching her when she’s ready, but has not yet started…and because she’s quick, it hasn’t happened again.
• She finally got over whatever mental block was keeping her from opening the drawers in the kitchen…so all the knives and other sharp objects were quickly relocated.
• She’s repeating phrases with great facility now. “Happy Birthday” and “Happy Easter” weren’t even a stretch when their appropriate times came. Almost anything that we ask her to repeat, she’ll make an attempt at, and for three syllables or fewer, she’ll get it right (within her limitations) almost all of the time. (Her limitations still include, for the most part, non-existent “r” and “l” sounds.)
• She moved, suddenly one day about two weeks ago, to a one-nap schedule. It took about a week after that for her to realize that she needed to sleep for more than an hour during that nap in order to be a functioning toddler.
• The number of letters and numbers that she reliable recognizes has been increasing. We play a computer game where letters fall from the top of the screen, and she names them. She can repeat after the computer voice that names them 100% of the time, and there are several characters that she can reliably name herself.
• She also can mostly reliably name a couple colors: “purple” and “green”, for whatever reason, are the ones that she does best with. Yellow and red are both non-existent to her, it seems.
• She clearly has an intuitive grasp of both numbers and colors. While she plays with her blocks, I’ve noticed that she likes to make stacks of blocks that all have the same number of units (one-, two-, or four-bump-long blocks). And she color-codes them more often than not.
• She’s discovered the fun of throwing balls down the stairs. I’ve discouraged her from throwing other things down the stairs.
• She also has a proclivity for certain routines. Today I was washing some grapes and offered to give her some while she was standing next to me in the kitchen. She ran out, and with great effort and a not-insignificant amount of complaining, extricated her high chair from where I had left it in the dining room (while I cleaned the kitchen floor) and pushed it back to the counter where it belonged, then demanded to be put up. I would have given her the grapes and let her run around with them…but who am I to argue?

There are so many other little observations that are significant but that I can’t remember all in one sitting…I really must get better at making notes more regularly.

Today I had a video conference for work in the middle of the day, ideally when little EC would be napping. But she hasn’t been on the right schedule for that in awhile, so I don’t know what I was thinking when I agreed to that particular time (1:30–2:30). So at first I kept her in her high chair eating lunch, and I introduced her to my colleagues and away we went.

She, however, has been teething recently and her appetite wasn’t great today. She also somewhat resented not being in the line of sight of the computer’s camera (thanks to all the chats with Grandma and Grandpa, when she’s always the center of attention…). Combined, this meant that she very quickly insisted on being done and getting down to play. So I put her down.

But being put down to play alone is never what she wants to do. She always has me to play with. When she realized I wasn’t coming with her, she got very upset, very quickly. I told her to go play by herself for a little bit, I gave her some Play-Doh and tools on the kitchen floor, but she was having none of it if my attention wasn’t part of the package.

Fortunately, at this point I was listening to a presentation and could have my microphone muted. So when she stood by my chair for a good 10 minutes crying, I could gently tell her to go play but otherwise ignore her, on the theory that she’d eventually get tired of crying and entertain herself. But soon I knew I’d have to be talking again, and I picked her up and put her in her toy area, and told her to go play by herself for a little while.

She cried some more, but it was in the distance and I could function while it went on. Eventually she got quiet, and very quiet at that. When I once again was in listening mode, I got up to go peek at her, and saw her sitting on the floor, a teddy bear in one arm and a stuffed dog in the other, sniffling and looking toward where I would show up, if I were coming for her. She saw me and I waved at her, but then went right back to my conference. She called me a couple of times, then went silent again.

Only once more did she cry, when she decided to come back to the kitchen and get me, but I turned her away and she went back to her toys. When my conference was finally over, I found her lying on the floor, her bear by her side and her dog in her arms, clutching an un-wrapped crayon that she found who knows where. Then I explained to her how she did a good job being by herself for a little while, and that sometimes she needs to do that, and gave her some good attention. By the time she insisted that we go for a walk and “swing, high” (her words) on the playground, she was feeling better again.

Only now, late at night as I’m about to go to bed and the house is quiet, do I realize that I’m a bit haunted by that image of her sitting alone on the floor, stuffed toys clutched tight for comfort, tears in her eyes, watching and waiting for me to come. I know it was really no big deal, what happened today…but as I think on that image, I pray that nothing ever happens, that I’ll always be able to come get her when she needs me; always be able to wipe the tears from her eyes; always be able to comfort her myself in place of mere empty things.

Little EC last week that it was time to expand her repertoire of prepositions. Up until then, she had been referring to everything preposition-like as “off”…maybe that’s a fun word for babies. But “off” is a little limiting, so last week she startled me by first doing “off” and “on” for a headband that she was trying to wear (or not to wear…I can never tell if she likes those things…). Like with most things she does, she practiced again and again: “off, on, off, on”. Then suddenly, as if to demonstrate that she grasped the new word, she started to refer to lights as “off” and “on”…they had previously always just been “off”. Then it was “in” and “out”…Pooh is in the house, Pooh is out of the house, the sticks are in the cup, the sticks are out of the cup. She’d been doing “up” and “down” sporadically for awhile, but not reliably. That changed last week. And one day, out of the blue, she was playing with a piece of scrambled egg, folding it and unfolding it, and chanting: “open”, “close”, “open”, “close”.

At breakfast at the beginning of this week, she decided that she didn’t want food on plates anymore. She wanted her food “in the bowl”. It was her first article. It’s still her only article. If Pooh goes in the house, it’s “Pooh house”. If milk goes in the cup, it’s “milk cup”. But when food goes in the bowl, it’s “in the bowl”.

Another fun word she’s learned: “sit”. Or as she says it: “deets!” She’ll go to her play area, and shout “Mama, deets!” When she wants to play, you’re not allowed to say no.

She’s been running a low fever (around 100) for a few days, and has been tired but not sleeping well. A little rash has appeared around her mouth. She’s been sucking on her fingers. All the signs are there…and so are the teeth. I’ve seen two molars and two canines so far, and there may well be more. She doesn’t like to let me look in her mouth. (Note: she doesn’t like anyone looking in her mouth. The pediatrician tried back in January and she forced a vomit to prevent it.)

Conversations with her are fun now. They go something like this:

Her: fussy.
Me: “Do you want a nap?”
Her: “Nap! Yes.”
Me: “Let’s go”
Her: Heads for the crib.

or…

Her: fussy.
Me: “Are you hungry?”
Her: “Eat”
Me: “What would you like?”
Her: “Cheese!”
Me: “Would you like some olives too?”
Her: “Yes”
Me: “How about some chicken?”
Her: “Bock, bock, bock”

Last Saturday, we left the US to travel across 10 timezones back overseas. This is the second time that we’ve done that with little EC, and the first time the jet-lag transition was awful. It must have taken two weeks to get her back on track. This time, I came up with a strategy to reset her internal clock, which involved slowly moving what she thought of as “nighttime” from the middle of the day to the middle of the night, in few-hour steps each day for a week or so.

It didn’t work well. Apparently I was too aggressive, not giving her enough time to sleep in the early days, and she ended up so exhausted by the third day or so after we got back that she really didn’t want to sleep at all. So then I had to deal not only with the time displacement of jet lag, but an exceedingly unhappy baby too.

Here’s how she slept, starting on the day we landed:

• “Nighttime (Saturday)”: 7:00 am – 2:00 pm (7 hours, woke up on the airplane during landing)
• “First nap”: 8:30 pm – 11:00 pm
• “Second nap”: 5:30 am – 7:30 am (2 hours)
• “Nighttime (Sunday)”: 9:30 am – 2:30 pm (5 hours, woke up by me)
• “First nap”: 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm
• “Second nap”: 8:30 pm – 10:30 pm
• “Nighttime (Monday)”: 01:30…false start…woke at 2:00…kicked around until…4:45 am – 12:15 pm (7.5 hours, woke up by me, turns out she had pooped)
• “First nap”: 1:30 pm – 4:30 pm
• “Second nap”: 5:30 pm…fail after 30 minutes
• “Nighttime (Tuesday)”: 9:30 pm – 10:30 pm … followed by intermittent kicking and screaming until … 12:30 am … I change her diaper, her pooping schedule must be off. More screaming … 1:00 am she throws her security blanket on the floor, I give it back, she does it again, and then the screaming really starts … 2:00 am she falls asleep sans blankie. I replace blankie in the night. Sleeps until 11:15 am (9 hours, woke up by me).
• “First nap”: 1:30 pm – 3:00 pm
• “Second nap”: 4:30 – (failure…she pooped and then cried)
• “Nighttime (Wednesday)”: 7:00 pm – 9:45 pm … poop, cry, clean … kick around until … maybe 12:30? I dozed off … slept until 8:30 am (10.5 hours all together? woke up on her own)
• “First nap”: 10:15 am … didn’t work, just cried and rolled around … got her up, put her back down at 12:30 pm … cried and rolled around until 2:00 pm. Woke at 2:30 pm. That was it.
• “Nighttime (Thursday)”: Down at 6:00 pm. Cried until 7:00 pm. (Her final whimpers before drifting to sleep: “Dada…Mama…Pooh Bear…”). Woke up just before 8:00 pm. I changed her diaper (nothing) and “protected” her against future pooping at 8:15 pm. Fell asleep at 11:30 pm? Slept until 10:00 am. (10 hours maybe, woke up naturally)
• First nap (Friday): 12:00 pm, cried until 12:45 pm. Slept until 1:15 pm.
• Second nap (Friday): Took a drive. Slept in the car from 4:00 pm to 4:30 pm.
• Nighttime (Friday): Down at 9:00 pm. Sat in the room reading until she fell asleep, at 10:00 pm. Not much crying. (I don’t know if this constitutes success or failure.) Woke up at 11:00 pm. Cried, asleep again by 11:30. Awake naturally at 7:00 am.
• First nap (Saturday): Down at 9 am. Sat reading until she slept. Asleep by 10 am. Awake at 10:40 am.
• Second nap (Saturday): 1:40 pm – 2:20 pm.
• Nighttime (Saturday): Down at 8:15 pm. Fell asleep at 10:30 pm. Up at 7:45 am.
• First nap (Sunday): Down at 11:30 am. Asleep at 12:00 pm. Up at 12:30 pm. Gave her the chance to go back to sleep for 45 minutes. She didn’t bite.
• Nighttime (Sunday): Down at 7:00 pm. Asleep by 7:15 pm. (Way to go, EM.) Awake at 6:00 am. (11 hours!)
• First nap (Monday): Down at 10:00 am. Asleep immediately. Awake at 11:15 am
• Second nap (Monday): Down at 3:00 pm. Up at 4:00 pm.
• Nighttime (Monday): Down at 8:00 pm. Asleep by 8:30 pm. Slept until 6:00 am.
• First nap (Tuesday): 8:30 am – 9:15 am
• Second nap (Tuesday): 11:30 am – 12:15 pm
• Nighttime (Tuesday): 6:15 pm – 6:15 am (12 hours!)

And with that, I’ll declare that it took 9 days all told to get her back “on schedule”. She’s not quite back to where she was. She’s waking up at 6 am instead of 7 am, and she’s only sleeping in 1 hour increments instead of 1.5 hours during her naps. So she still has a little bit to go but she is back to being happy and not too tired on a regular basis.

Half the problem (or more) was that Empirical Mom was gone on business for several days just after we got back. Little EC’s routine didn’t settle properly until EM returned. I think there was a healthy dose of separation anxiety thrown in to the mix for awhile there.

Next time, I won’t try so hard to get her back on schedule. I’ll let her sleep all she wants when she wants, and make very gentle nudges back toward normal schedule. It seems to me that she can’t possibly take more than 9 days to get back on schedule no matter what, and I’d much rather be dealing with a rested and not-unhappy baby during that time.

Lesson learned.

The unfortunate moment arrived yesterday, the one I knew was coming but wished would never come. Little EC, not wanting to eat her carrot, picked it up, looked at me, and threw it behind herself, punctuated with an emphatic “No!”.

So I told her lunch was done, and put her on the floor. She didn’t think lunch was done, though, and let me know that in no uncertain terms. But lunch was done.

The carrot was waiting for her when she came back for dinner. At the end of a lot of crying, protesting, and pleading, she finally ate what fraction of her carrot had not yet made it to the floor. I won the fight, but it wasn’t any fun.

So now I suppose I’ll have to start expecting “no” for other things. Just like for the carrots—which only days ago she was gleefully scarfing down—I’m sure those other things will be completely unexpected. And like in the case of the carrots, I expect to win, but I don’t expect that it will be fun.

Oh…and for lunch today…carrots!

Little EC continues almost daily to add to her repertoire of verbal communication skills. Some days, I notice this because she recognizes words that I say in a way I hadn’t noticed before; other days it’s plainly obvious when she blurts out some word that she’s never used before. Some recent examples:

• “Home”: she understands the concept of going home when we’re out somewhere else. During the day, that’s usually accompanied by “Mama”, whom she think’s she’ll see when she gets home. Yesterday, she was tired of the playground, and wandered over to the stroller by herself, saying “home, home, home”.
• “Ouch”: I hurt my hand recently, and when she pointed to the bandage (and poked it hard) I said “Ouch”. She repeated “ouch”, and from then on anything that might somehow be related is “ouch”. When she taps her head on the wall because she wasn’t watching where she was going, she looks at me, points at it, and says “ouch”. I confirm her suspicions that the wall is, indeed, “ouch”.
• “Car”: I hear that one a lot as we walk down the sidewalk, as you might suspect.
• “Whee”: not technically a word, but her indication that she’s either having fun (sliding down a slide in our play room), or she thinks she should be having fun (trying to slide down the slight incline in our brick driveway). In the latter case, the “whee” is somewhat half-hearted.
• “Ball”: This is among her favorites. The other day we were at a park, and a number of families had soccer balls. Whenever she saw one, she’d run after it shouting “ball, ball, ball!”
• “Apple” and “[Ba]nana”: This girl likes to eat. I’ve already noted that she will say “cheese”. Now she just says it very loudly whenever I open the refrigerator for any reason at all.
• “Yes”: I’m not sure what she thinks this means, but she’s been walking around all day today saying it.
• “Toes”, “Ears”, “Eyes”, “Nose”: she doesn’t say them herself yet, but she knows just where to find them when asked.
• “Pooh”: Her favorite friend. His name can be heard shouted from across the house.

And my favorite: “Babies”. For awhile she has recognized herself as “Baby”, and point to herself while saying it. But “babies” (plural) is different. Ever since she has become mobile enough to get into things she shouldn’t have (trash can, smartphone, Christmas tree…), I’ve been keeping her from them by gently pointing her away and saying “Not for babies”. She recently made the connection: if she can’t have something that’s not for babies, then she can have things that are for babies. So if she wants something, she’ll point to it, or grab it if it’s in reach, and declare “Babies!”. Sometimes, like when the object is a steamed carrot, I’ll agree with her. Other times, like when it’s a kitchen knife, I’ll disagree. But she and I understand each other: we now have to negotiate and come to an agreement on every item…for babies, or not for babies?

One delightful piece of evidence that little EC is understanding both (1) concepts and (2) our words for those concepts is that she’s begun to respond to verbal commands, and not just simple ones. In just the last two days, she’s listened to and followed these:

• “We need to change your diaper. Lie down.” And down she went.
• “Go find your remote. It’s in your pot in the kitchen.” And off she went, from the living room, into the kitchen, to the little corner where we keep her pot, where her toy TV remote was waiting for her.
• “It’s bath time!” She walked to the stairs, climbed them, went straight to the bathroom, and tried (unsuccessfully) to climb into the bathtub.
• “It’s bedtime.” She walked to the stairs, climbed them, and toddled to the bedroom, where she tried (unsuccessfully) to climb into the crib.

I didn’t follow her around repeating these commands. I just said them once, while I had her eye contact.

Fully aware that she will soon discover that she can refuse commands too, I plan to enjoy this while I can.

Sometimes I think I understand what she’s thinking, and other times I’m completely baffled. I had put some Cheerios in her pot (yes, the same one that hosted the remote earlier in the day) and expected her to eat them. Instead, she decided they had to be transferred to the tablespoon that she had bummed off me earlier. Instead of bringing the tablespoon to the pot, she took the Cheerios—one by one—from the pot to where the tablespoon lay on the floor, on the other side of the kitchen. No explanation for that.

Her walking is quite good now, though falling is still a normal part of the routine.

In the past three weeks, since about the time that little EC took her first steps, I’ve been progressively beginning to delegate tasks to her that I used to do myself. To wit:

• I’ve started giving her large foods and letting her break or bite them into pieces herself. Apples, bananas, bread, cucumbers, peppers…she’s gotten the hang of a lot of different kinds of food. I’m later at doing this than many parents around me, partly because most other parents have more than one child and therefore they already have on their hands two things that I didn’t: experience, and messes. Now, I’m gaining both!
• I’m letting her make the decisions about where she wants to go. I’ve stopped doing quite as much encouraging to play with this or that toy, or go here or there, but instead just kind of watch where she goes and what she does. Again, I now have more experience and more messes.

Little EC has also started to “talk” much more, with a collection of words of which she’s particularly fond: “Mama”, “Dada”, “Light” (pronounced “ite-ah”), and much more trying on new words when prompted. She also makes sounds for tigers, elephants, cows, pigs, and chickens. She does sign language for “more” reliably, and “please” much less reliably. And finally, she just makes a LOT. MORE. NOISE. than she used to.

After a brief (two-week) stint of jet lag and some kind of (undiagnosed) illness after we got back from vacation, she’s back to a regular and normal sleep schedule again.

And, of course, there’s the walking. For the longest time after those first steps, she showed no inclination at all to repeat them. Two weeks ago, she started trying here and there, mostly failing after a step or two. By one week ago, she was trying in earnest and could get out four or five steps before falling. And as of today, she can walk back and forth across our living room carrying bottles of water, and not fall over if she’s concentrating hard enough. She usually does fall, though, because she’s always unstable and usually easily distracted.

There have been quite a lot of milestones on this vacation of ours. New words and sounds. New eating habits, like weaning and starting to bite big pieces of food. (She’s almost maniacally fond of peanut-butter sandwiches, it turns out.) A few more that I can’t think of just now, because it’s late.

Today we were at Barnes and Noble, and she was pulling books off the shelf and putting them back on. There was one she liked in particular, and she turned and handed it to me. I was pretty far away, so I leaned over to grab it and went back to where I was. Then, she wanted the book back, and since she was already standing up…she took four steps toward me and fell down.

It was too fast…Empirical Mom didn’t have time to get the camera ready, so we didn’t document the occasion. But it’s official: we had first steps!