Maddie will be 17 months in five days, and her mama has been really bad about updating. I promise to be better. We are living la vida loca, and it has left little time for blogging. Seems like my regular followers have practically given up getting any type of Maddie update, sadly.
But so much is new! This is an incredible age. She is doing so much and saying so much. Our weekends and my "Maddie Mondays" are so much fun now; she has transitioned to one nap which means our sole purpose is to tire her out so she'll sleep well in the afternoons. The past few weekends we've been to the Oakland Zoo and the Lindsey Wildlife Museum (we are now proud members). And we ran into a woman at the farmer's market a few weeks ago, herself a mom of two little ones, who shared all her favorite toddler parks with us, so now I'm a big fan of Willow Park in Berkeley and Frog Park in Oakland, which have small slides. Maddie likes to slide by herself. She's easily the youngest and smallest kid at these parks, and yet, she loves to climb up the steps, scoot herself to the edge, count to three ("uh, eh, teeeeeeeeee!") and slide almost to the bottom, when overprotective Mama catches her. It is easier with two parents because one can "spot" her on the climb up and one can stay at the bottom and catch.
She is now the owner of her very own plastic pail and rake (there was a shovel too, but ... well, thanks a lot, Bentley ... we don't have that one anymore). I am a certified mother now, because after our first outing with the pail and rake I wrote Maddie's name on both in Sharpie marker. (I used to think it was so funny that my mother wrote our names on everything, but now I understand why. A plastic pail in the park attracts toddlers like moths to the flame, and before you know it we're ready to leave and five 2-year-olds are in the corner of the sandbox building a small city with our 99-cent Target bucket ... and it's not like I have the heart to tear it away from them, so Maddie and I hang out and wait for them to lose interest.
In terms of words, she's saying a lot of things on her own and repeating a lot of what we say to her. She asks for her "ba-ba," "agua," "book," "bana" (banana), "apple," and "chee" (which can mean cheese or Cheerios, depending on the context). She knows what all the animals say: cow ("moo"), horse (a high-pitched "eeeeeee"), cat ("Mew!"), dog ("erf, erf"), sheep ("baa"), crow or bird ("caw caw"), chicken ("cuck cuck"), duck ("cack cack") and lion, tiger, bear, alligator and monster which are all the same ("Rarrrrr!"). She can point to her body parts (hair, nose, eyes, ears, mouth, teeth and tongue, and of course, the ever-popular belly ... she shows you hers, then demands that you show her yours). She hears a truck outside and says "tuck!" then makes a truck noise ("rrrrrrrr"), and also says "choo choo" when she hears or sees a train.
We all just got over a bout of stomach flu, and Maddie picked up "poo poo" pretty well this week. Whenever she would have an icky diarrhea poop (one night she pooped six times from bedtime to morning), she would cry and when we walked in to get her she would declare, "Poo poo!" Luckily she didn't seem upset by it, just matter-of-fact.
We also love to sing, and she's now singing along to a few favorites. When I sing "Winnie the Pooh," she kind of fakes the words but joins me in singing the "Pooh" parts. During "Itsy Bitsy Spider" she works her fingers together like I do and sweeps her hands to the side when "out came the sun." She touches her head and shoulders during "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes," though she has a hard time keeping up because it moves so fast. Also, during the ABCs, she sings along, pausing at all the right places and making the inflections in her voice as if she's actually saying the letters!
We just started a new nanny share with a 3-month-old baby, and spending time with baby Tzipporah makes me realize how very far we've come ... and how fast it's gone, even when it felt like time was crawling early on.
Evan is good at announcing "poop" and giggling, although sometimes he waits until we're already on the changing table. I've tried to explain that I already know at that point, but he's just happy to say it.
We've been watching videos of Evan over the last few weeks, and the ones from when he's a little baby just astonish me. I thought that he was so interesting and active, and yet when I look at the videos now he was doing absolutely nothing. Oh, how far we've come!
It was great seeing her last week (or was it the week before?) because she's so hilariously interactive now. We definitely need to get the kids together to wreak a little havoc as a pair. We have a sand pit at the park and you have a pail... sounds like a match made in heaven!
Posted by: Alisa | March 14, 2008 at 03:19 PM
It's great to have a Maddie update! She sounds like so much fun!
Posted by: Sarah | March 17, 2008 at 01:55 PM