So, Clair is something like 22.5 months old now. I am never organized enough to sort out an organized update on her developmental milestones (if I even knew what they were), but she is healthy and normal according to her 2 years check up so I’ll trust that doctor that there is no need to worry.
She seems to be as socially awkward as her mother. She kid of goes off on her own if there is a crowd of people, but she usually has a good time playing with one or two friends at a time. I am still, pretty much, like that. My mom said it was the same when I was little. At the moment, I am still her favorite person. Depending on her mood, daddy is usually a favorite too. Though, sometimes she has anti-daddy moods and pushes him away. When she is in that mood, she freaks out if he tries to do ‘itsy bitsy spider’ with me. She smacks his hands away and yells ‘Nein!’
She has a fun vocabulary and fills in sentences with random word sounds. Same goes for singing. SHe is learning so many words right now that I can’t keep track. She surprises me with new ones often, and she parrots us sometimes only to never repeat the word again. Some of her favorite words at the moment are ‘Gack!’ (AKA Duck - she always proclaims it and ALL birds are ducks), Cookie, ‘OK (AKA her only version of Yes), dink-dink’ (AKA ‘may I have a drink please’ ) and Ganky (AKA ‘donkey’ which means that she wants to watch Shrek where Donkey is her favorite character). When her tired pregnant mama needs a break, Clair watches Shrek, and she even laughs at most of the physical comedy. Then she turns around laughing and telling me what happened. She laughs a lot, often at her own jokes. She makes lots of faces and thinks that she is pretty funny when she does it. She talks and sings almost all the time when we are home or alone together. She is quieter when others are around until she gets used to them.
She still doesn’t like to do any kind of crafty things that involve sitting and making things pretty colors. Mostly she likes to run around screaming, jumping, climbing, hopping, and kicking things. At her friend Oliver’s birthday party over the weekend, she mostly ran up and down the hall hitting the chain of balloons hanging from the ceiling (while making a war cry the entire time). Oliver joined her sometimes and the two of them also had some quality time on the patio putting sand EVERYWHERE and managing to drag quite a bit back in the house. She kind of stayed out of the room with all of the people in it when she wasn’t sitting with me to eat (not a big party girl, like her mom).
She plays hide and seek with us (see if you can find her in one photo below), and she is actually starting to figure out how to hide. Mostly she just thinks it’s hilarious to look for us. She also likes to go ‘night-night’, which means she crawls up next to me in bed and pulls to covers up. Sometimes she does this at random times of the day and takes the book on my night stand to ‘read’ to me. She also does this before bed when we read her books. ‘Night-night’ is all fun and games until we tell her it is time to actually go to bed, and then there is usually a bit pf protest. Unfortunately, she thinks running away from us is also a game, and we haven’t been able to get her to stop using our voices. This is something that stresses me out just for fear of her running into the street (possibly the only emotional scar of my own childhood car accident).
One of the big blessing of having Clair is that the girl likes to sleep! She usually sleeps between 11 and 12 hours without interruption (or at least, without waking us up). She often protests going to bed, but once we lay her down, she is quite. Sometimes she talks to herself or sings, and sometimes, apparently, she is just lying quietly in her bed. Until I peak in to check on her an hour or so later, I don’t even know she’s awake. Once asleep, she doesn’t get up until 8 or later most mornings. I love that!
My tired brain can’t think of anything more at the moment though there are certainly a thousand other things that this new little person is doing for the first time. I am not tired from lack of sleep. This pregnancy just makes me sleep a lot and the least little bit of exercise wipes me out. I think it is also making me clumsy and stupid. In the past month, I have dropped my keys down the elevator shaft, lost a parking ticket for a garage, and dented the car (in my defense, that pole came out of nowhere!). I have enough energy to do almost half of what I used to be able to do in a normal day, but if I do that much, I am totally useless in the evening. If I try to do more than that, I feel like I want to puke - so I don’t usually push myself. We have adapted to my decreased participation in the work that needs to get done at home; we would both like things to be cleaner, but as neither one of us can manage it at the moment, we do what we can and prioritize. Usually, that means the kitchen and laundry get dealt with and the bathroom becomes more and more filthy. We’ll live. I’m working on training Clair to clean, but so far, she is not very useful yet.
. This month, schools, kindergartens and day cares are closed so everyone with kids is either on vacation or trying to figure out how to entertain the ones who are home. I am still trying to figure out what there is to do with kids around here.
