Peter's Cross Station

Sleep when the bab...hey, wait a minute!

Twice tonight I had to go into the girls' room and take Nat out of Selina's crib. The first time, she was gently poking her awake, "hey, Seena! Hey, Seena!" and Selina was blinking in surprise.

The second time (about 20 minutes later), I heard Selina from across the house, laughing much louder than she typically cries. I found them sitting there, across from each other in the cramped mini-crib, playing pat-a-cake in the twilight.

It soon got dark enough that presumably, Nat couldn't find her way back across the room to climb into the crib a third time.

Poor Selina. She has a lot more trouble falling asleep than Nat. She's gonna be a grouch tomorrow. Especially if, as I suspect will happen, Nat gets into her crib again in the early morning to wake her up and play some more. (Selina goes down about 45 minutes earlier and usually sleeps at least an hour later than Nat in the mornings.)

Then again, if Nat and Selina would play for a while in the morning, maybe Cole and I could get some sleep...

By the way, Nat has started to correct herself in pronouncing Selina's name. She has said "Selina" instead of "Seena" several times in the past two days.

Sleep When the Baby Sleeps

It's all well and good with that first baby (and assuming you are not working a full-time, paying job), isn't it? But every mother of more than one knows that usually, when the baby sleeps, someone else (or multiple someone else's) are in desperate need of constant service and attention.

I have achieved that magical goal of overlapping naps, folks! Selina has lately decided that one nap per day is just fine for her, thanks, and believe it or not, this is a great relief to me. Now I can put her down at 11:30, put Nat down at 12 and they both sleep until 1 or 1:30.

This has been going on for three days now.

That means I have had a nap myself (even if it was only ten minutes on the couch) for two days in a row! It's amazing the difference ten minutes makes for an insomniac such as myself. All the difference in the world.

I don't know how long this will last. Nat is well over three now and is bound to give up napping at some point sooner rather than later. But I will enjoy it while I can.

Belated Third Birthday Pictures

Here's the cake I made for Nat's third birthday. For more, check out the photoblog!

Props to Nat

Nat sat still for two hours yesterday to get her hair done. That is champion three-year old behavior, if I do say so myself.

Her hair has only recently got long enough to put in a nice long-term hair style (for us, long-term is a week at this point). And I am glad not to be redoing it every three days like I had been for a year or two. But the long-term hair takes more time too.

Nat quite often pitches a fit on hair day. But we suffer through and get it done by any means necessary. Yesterday, it was like she just made a decision to try sitting still. Every ten minutes or so, she'd say "I'm sitting still, Mama Shannon!" and I'd congratulate and thank her.

So go Nat!

(Meanwhile Selina's hair is fast outgrowing its baby pass and I am going to have to start paying it some concerted attention. It's completely different from Nat's so it's a whole new learning curve.)

Hands

These are Nat's hands.

But I was noticing Selina this morning and thinking that I really love the stage of babyhood when they are still quite little, but their hands start working properly. Selina is getting increasingly dextrous these days. If she reaches for it, she tends to get it. If she aims for her mouth, she makes it. If she grabs for a crumb fallen from her rice cake, she can pick it up with a perfect "pincer" grasp.

I think it melts my heart to watch because the hands seem so ahead of the rest of the child. She's still more or less a helpless, completely dependent being but her hands are a little window into her future as a competent, independent person.

It's a reminder of the fleeting nature of this time when they so easily love me. Who knows what those hands will get up to when they're attached to a 17-year old?

Number Four

Technically, #1 came in second, but #4 was a close third and I am too tired to think hard enough to write #1 for you tonight.

So here are some cute girlie vignettes:

Selina still thinks Nat hung the moon. Nat has figured out just how easy it is to please her sister and just how fun it is to get her laughing really hard. Selina is such a little Buddha baby, her giggles are to die for. Nat can get her really worked up, just by playing peek-a-boo. Selina will laugh so hard, she'll fall over and laugh even harder as a result.

Nat also likes to get Selina "talking" by asking her to say "Big Sister Nat!" and coaxing "gagaga" and "dadada" and "bwahbwahbwah" out of her. (By the way Selina has started saying "mamama" but we aren't sure if she really means it yet.)

About half the time when Selina cries (which isn't very often), Nat will come running, kneel down by Selina and wrap her arms around her, cooing "it's okay, baby Seena! Don't cry!" and lo and behold, Selina will stop crying and start grinning. Big sister is a magic pill.

When we meet people, they will ask Nat her name and how old she is, and Nat will sometimes tell them these things, but she will always wave her arm in Selina's direction and announce "that's baby sister, Seena Babeena!" which always puzzles people. They catch the baby sister part, but after that, they're stumped.

Speaking of "Seena Babeena," Nat has started singing the "Name Game" song to Selina thusly: "Seena, Seena, Babeena, Nanna-Fanna Feena, Fee-Fi, Meena, Seena!" It's very cute.

Nat has her jealous moments, to be sure. When we are all supposed to be sitting down playing with cars or blocks or puzzles, Nat has a tendency to insert herself, bodily, between Selina and me--usually by sitting on me, whether there's room or not--sometimes, by sitting on Selina. She's also been known to "pat" Selina less than gently and claim to be helpfully burping her, or to deliver a board book to her sister by dumping it on her head.

But overall, there's still a lot of love.

So Many Posts, So Little Time...

I am strapped for blogging time this month. If I had time, here's what I'd be telling you about:

1. Stuff White People Think is Funny (or not) and Why (or not). (Topic requested by reader and jewelry patron, Martha.)

2. Lazy Home-Made Baby Food Shortcuts Discovered by Shannon the Second Time Around

3. Interesting Ways in which Nat is Beginning to Express Growing Understandings of Her Adoption

4. Cute Things the Sisters Are up to These Days

5. Pics of Nat's Birthday (more than a month later!)

6. More about the Big Freelance Writing Job and Why I am Asking for Your Help and Whose Help I'd Like Next

7. A Roundup of Books I've Been Reading Lately on the Topics of Race and Homeschooling (but not both together in one book)

8. Other (specify)

Please vote for your favorite! I'll try to get them out in order of popularity within the next month.

Air kisses!

Friends

Nat seems to be cultivating an "Imaginary Friend." Every now and then she will make a reference to "Robot." For example, she'll tell us "everybody's here! Cole-Mom, Mama Shannon, Nat and Robot!" We have to remind her that Selina is "here" too in these instances. The other day, she offered me some imaginary birthday cake and I imaginarily ate it and when she offered me more, I told her no thanks, I was full, so she said "okay, here you go Robot!"

There are robot toys in one of her books (but no information about what they are--it's just a big pile of them) and one of her episodes of Between the Lions features a robot, but not centrally (and again, with no real info on what a robot is), so I haven't been sure exactly where she got the idea or if Robot is an actual robot, or just some person or other entity called "Robot" because she likes the word.

Then today, we were discussing what we should have for a snack and she announced "Robot doesn't like to eat." I asked her why that is and she replied "Robots don't eat food!" So I guess maybe Robot is a robot, but I still, for the life of me, have no idea where she got this concept of robots and whether they eat or not. (Clearly this is a new piece of information, since he was eating imaginary birthday cake last week!) Maybe it's not robot information at all, but imaginary friend information?

Time to grill the babysitters, I guess. Maybe they're sneaking her Nova or something.

Make Yoghurt Not War

Nat and I made a protest sign and took it down to the five-year anniversary anti-war rally this afternoon. Selina came along for the ride. We met some nice people and waved at lots of cars. But we're tired of attending anti-war rallies. Here's hoping the next president gets the troops home asap.

Pre-home-school

Recently a virtual discussion of preschool came up in one of my Internet hangouts and it reminded me of the preschool comments I am starting to get in face-to-face life when Nat and I are out and about.

"So, (where) does she go to school?"

It has lately occurred to me that people ask this on the heels of Nat demonstrating her fabulousness in one form or another--perhaps being fairly calm and personable in comparison to same-age peers, saying something pithy, pointing out a word she recognizes or signing a phrase in ASL (or a couple of them in exchanges with me--a particularly handy thing to have available in church during quiet moments). So I think sometimes, what people are asking is "hey, where did she learn that?"

I always feel a little weird about it because Nat is still years out from compulsory school age and it didn't occur to me that I'd be facing the "why aren't you in school?" queries until she is 5 or 6. But at least in our college town, preschool--probably high-achievement preschool--is expected and the professors chat among themselves about which ones they like and why. So the "Oh, she stays home with me" response I give tends to shut down the conversation.

I am finding that people just don't know what to say when the subject arises. Maybe they are really thrown by it. Maybe it's like I've announced that I'm from Pluto--a freaky freak in their midst when here, they thought I was a normal person like them. Maybe they have horrible ideas about home school and are practicing saying nothing if they can't say something nice.

Sometimes people go on to inquire whether I have any special skills or abilities that allow me to keep my 3-year old at home and deprive her of "school." If I mention that I used to teach preschool (which I sometimes mention for other reasons) they assume that it's okay for my child to hang out with me, since I must know what I'm doing.

I just find all of it crazy strange. She's barely three! Since when does a child's own mother need special qualifications to govern her "schooling" at age three? What kind of backwards world is this? Three!

The thing is, I may indeed put her in a preschool or play school next fall, for a half day here or there--two or three days a week--if we can find something handy and affordable, but not because she needs "school," just because I need some time to work and baby sitting is pricey and Nat is an extrovert and would probably have a lot of fun in a group of kids.

But as far as learning stuff goes, well, we've got that covered. In the virtual discussion, there was a question of what kind of academic programs various preschools offer and what people make of them and whether people feel academics are important to little kids anyway. It got me thinking about how much "academic" learning Nat gets in a natural context every day. I lean towards the notion that academics-as-separate-from-life-in-general are a weird invention anyway, and that learning is best absorbed through such contextual experience. I thought I'd brainstorm here about how Nat's daily life experiences might fit into traditional academic slots, were we somehow required to prove she's learning. I plan to do this on a daily basis (not online) next fall, when I start thinking of what we're doing at home in a more formal schoolish way. I figure if I start this now, it will give me practice for a time in the future when I am indeed required to do it for a higher authority.

Math:

I can get Nat to clean up messes by asking her "how many blocks are on the floor?" and she'll count them as she deposits them in the block basket. Or I might say, "pick up all the green blocks" then blue, red, etc. She's very good at follow-on counting, which means she can count five blocks in one corner, move across the room and pick up seven more, counting them one through 12 in spite of the hiatus between piles (rather than counting a pile of five, then a pile of seven, separately). I know this is a good learning experience for her, but mostly I do it to get my living room floor picked up.

Whenever we eat, I ask Nat to think about how many people are eating and what they will need and how many. She can count out plates for each person, then forks, napkins, etc. She's getting good at doing this by herself. Part of it means running around the house and asking whoever's here if they will be eating with us. Extrovert that she is, that's one of her favorite parts of the job.

Nat loves to sort the flatware into the drawer in its little compartments--big forks, little forks, big spoons, little spoons, etc. When she finishes, she throws up her hands in triumph and declares "You did a great job! I'm so proud of you!"

Nat got some haba stringing beads for Christmas. I got her two identical sets and sometimes I string one set then ask her to copy my pattern. She will then string some and ask me to figure out how to copy her pattern.

We do "subtraction" in relation to eating. EG: "You have five bites of pizza...hey! You ate one, now you only have four!" etc. It isn't Montessori counting beads, but it has the same effect.

Science:

Properties of liquid are a daily project around here, as with most preschoolers. We have spills and cleanups and soap bubbles and pouring from container to container etc. ad nauseum, of course. Sometimes I give Nat a variety of unbreakable kitchen items, run some water and soap into half of the sink and let her "wash dishes" while I make dinner or otherwise work in the kitchen.

Nat is still quite into eggs.

Nat's fascination with eggs began because she really liked to eat them. Then she really liked to watch me make them. Now she is learning to break them (I still have to hold her hand so she doesn't just smash them to smithereens) and stir them with milk to scramble them. When you think about it, eggs really are amazing. They come in one form, break into another and cook into another. This whole process just intrigues Nat. She likes to watch them cook. (And she likes to go count up how many people are eating them and bring me the plates to serve them!) But she also knows "baby birds come in eggs!" as she used to say. Lately she's been noticing that other animals come out of eggs too. She has several books that feature eggs hatching and various creatures coming out of them. She returns to the hatching pages over and over and them turns them to find the penguin, chicken, caterpillar, cricket, robin, lizard that hatched, and asks "where's the egg???" In other words where does the egg go when the baby hatches out? I am hoping that when the weather lets up and our CSA starts its free-range (truly free-range, grass-fed) chicken production up again, we can go visit them and she can see eggs in nests and chickens sitting on them and make more egg connections.

Reading/Language

This is perhaps our least overtly attended area, because it is implicit in everything, all the time. We obviously do a lot of book reading, but I just draw Nat's attention to words and letters and how they work together all day in a thousand ways. She does the same, herself. She has started trying to read the signs she sees when we drive around town. "B-A-N-K" she announced a couple of days ago, "Bat!" I told her that was close, but it was actually, "bank." Today, on the way home from Selina's 9-month checkup, it was "A-R-T, rat!" I corrected her on that one too. But darn, that's close again.

Just in the last week or two, she's had a literacy explosion and will "read" repeated words in her books, when I read aloud and leave the word out, and point to it. She likes to do this with "hug" or "hat" or "eat" or other small, simple words. She also likes to learn (by sight) the words in her favorite book titles and read them out to us, pointing to each word as she reads (mimicking us, of course) "The. Skin. You. Live. In." she will show us, on the cover and again on the title page. She likes to turn any instructional attitudes we've ever taken with her around on us and point to the words she knows, asking us to "try to read it" and when we do, she applauds and congratulates us heartily.

I found the entire first season of Between the Lions (30 episodes) for $60 online and ordered it. She LOVES, LOVES, LOVES it. It has, sadly, usurped her audio-visual affections from Signing Time. She will ask me if she can watch "tween the lions and make words?" I tell her she can make her own words with her own books and she often does. But I often plop her in front of the t.v. while grabbing a quick shower, or feeding and rocking and burping Selina in the other room, so she does get to watch it a lot. It has really bumped up her interest in words and reading. I don't hate it. (I do hate a couple of other "teach reading" t.v. shows for kids, and Nat was all into one I really extra hate, so I am happy to see she is all about this one now.) One bonus nice thing about Between the Lions is how Afro-centric it is. The lions are African and most of the human beings on the show are African American. But I do think the phonics and other reading pedagogy used on the show is solid and Nat is too little to think the mix of "educational" and "entertaining" is lame, so more power to her.

I don't foresee ever having to sit down and teach Nat to read. All I see is sitting down and reading, giving her books and letting her read, etc. She is very self-directed about language arts. That said, dialogues like this one occur multiple times a week in the course of life:

Nat: "Look! There's a word!"
Me: "Yes, it's a word! What does it say? It starts with G, what sound does G make?"
Nat: "g-g-g!"

etc. for the next letters or if it's a long, hard word, I'll just tell her and she'll repeat it. SO yeah, I guess I am teaching her, but not like, sitting down for reading lessons every morning at 11 or anything like that.

She is still signing quite a bit, but I am afraid we are reaching a plateau. I can't find a good ASL curriculum near us that goes beyond what we already know. I am hoping that before too long I can find a true interpreter program and take it and keep her learning and just learn it better myself. We may also be able to find a deaf or otherwise ASL-fluent baby sitter one of these days. One of Nat's current baby sitters is a future speech pathologist and has maxed out on what the university here offers in ASL, which is three semesters. She says Nat knows more. But at least she can sign along a little.

We also still hope to find a French-speaking baby sitter one of these days too. No luck in that department this semester.

Nat is practicing writing and drawing which is really more a matter of fine motor skills than of language. Now that she is less prone to eating pencils, crayons and paint, I try to give her some practice with one or more of them daily. When her skills are developed enough, we can start the drawing lessons in the book I got last year. Meanwhile, we talk about the shapes that make up images and objects and she knows and can copy a vertical line, a horizontal line, a diagonal line, a circle and a dot (which is really also a math skill). Here's a picture she drew by following my instructions exactly, to draw various colors of circles, a vertical line, a horizontal line (it's the teeny one, crossing the sort-of vertical one) and some dots:

Using simple instructions and helping her connect the lines etc., I can direct her to write letters, but she gets bored with it quickly, so I don't usually push it too far unless she asks or shows an interest in writing something specific. She's getting to that little kid drawing stage of making big circles filled with various squiggles and dots to represent faces. Mostly, I just praise her for the beauty of these attempts!

This summer I plan to start an adults' reading group in educational theory and practice with a homeschooling group I recently joined. In the fall, I plan to start Nat in some formal activities including a martial art, Suzuki violin, the drawing lessons from the book I mentioned and a bilingual baby sitter (French or ASL) at least two days a week.

Also, in the fall, I plan to make large sweeping goals like "Get Nat involved in X,Y and Z three times a week" or whatever. I will revise the sweeping goals a couple of times a year, probably. I'll do the daily journalling to see how we do at hitting those goals without thinking too much about them. That's about as unschooly as I can probably get. I don't think I'll ever sleep again if I just let go of the whole thing completely and let the education fall where it may. I'll lay there all night, every night thinking "Wait! When's the last time Nat did blah-blah? Oh my God, I'm stunting her!"

And that's where Nat goes to school--for now.

It's Sunday Morning

Nat and I slept in instead of going to church today. I am hoping to use the time change to bump bedtime back by half an hour and thus hopefully, bump waking time up in turn.

Selina and Nat have been sharing a room for about two weeks now and it's mostly going swell. The careful placement of a screen and the judicious use of white noise have worked to cover each others' comings and goings during incompatible naps. I might be able to slip them onto a same-time nap routine when Selina decides to shift from two to one nap per day, but for now, I am just grateful that at three, Nat still willingly takes an hour+ nap every day. She certainly needs it. She's always been an easy and deep sleeper on a very regular schedule. Selina is a little less so, but not by too much. So hopefully the "sister room" as I'm calling it, will work well for them.

Big Home School post TBA. Watch this space!

Vignette

When I picked Nat up in the childcare room at church this morning to take her to communion, she signed "thank you" to the room, and declared, "thank you everybody, I am leaving now" and waved regally.

The child is not lacking in self-esteem, whatever else you may say.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The day we've been waiting for for three years has arrived! Mama Rose talked to our adoption agency director today and said she's ready to see all the letters and photos we've been sending since Nat came home with us. She said she thinks of Nat every day (I never doubted that) but wasn't ready yet for contact. Cross your fingers, Internets! We may get to see her sometime soon!

Time Flies When You Have Nat

Nat will be three years old tomorrow!

Yesterday at her well-child checkup she was 29 lbs and 35.75 inches. That's just under 30th %ile for weight and just over 30th %ile for height.

She also had her first injection to remember. They've added Hep A to the vaccination recommendations since she was born and we went ahead and got it. (We had a LilySea family member with Hepatitis at one point and we'd just like to cover our bases.)

She was fine with it, really. It's the nurse who gave it to her that got her all convinced it was a terrible tragedy to get a shot. I found this really annoying. I sat Nat on my lap and as the nurse prepared everything and Nat asked about it, I explained:

Nat: What's that?
Shannon: That's the medicine for you that the nurse will put in your arm.
N: What's that?
S: That's a wipie to make your arm clean so she can put the medicine in with the needle.
N: Medicine in my arm?
S: Yes, she will pinch your arm with the needle and put the medicine in.

This was all delivered in a tone of matter-of-fact, no-need-to-be afraid, routine-doctor-visit-stuff on my part. Meanwhile the nurse is going "oh, I'm so sorry honey, I have to give you an owie! It will hurt but it will be over fast, oh no, do you want a sticker? If you let me do it, I'll give you a sticker!"

Just a nervous wreck.

Then she gave Nat the shot, which Nat barely noticed.

Shannon: There goes the needle, see? The medicine is going into your arm!
Nat: Medicine in my arm?
Shannon: Yep, there it goes! All finished. Wow, that was fast, huh?
Nurse: It's okay now! I'm done! I'm sorry! I'm sorry, honey! You want another sticker? You want a lollipop? I'm sorry! Here's a bandaid*!

PAUSE

Nat (looking at nurse): ... WAHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This was post-bandaid and everything.

Her Royal Dramaness couldn't resist when she realized everyone would fuss over her if she made a fuss about the shot. And everyone did. She got a zillion stickers with Barbies and Shreks and Spidermans on them (none of which she has any clue about) and I had to decline lollipops twice. She got part of the Easter-themed decor of the office, which they tore off the wall to give her. She'd stop crying, see a new person, and start up again in THE fakiest way.

Thanks folks, now my kid knows to make a fuss about shots.

Bah.

* "plaster" for my non-American English readers.

Kid Updates

Nat has finally become more interested in putting art materials to paper than she is in eating them. She is still interested in eating them, but can be dissuaded fairly easily. Here is this morning's painting:

Rothko-esque, no?

Yesterday, Nat and I were writing with a pen. I made an "N" and took Nat's hand to show her how she could copy over what I wrote. I figured, I'd slowly start teaching her to write her name. She took the "N" and promptly shocked me by adding an "A" and a "T" completely unbidden. Who knew? Not me!

Here it is, Nat's first signature:

Nat's very verbal these days. If she has a time out (which probably happens once a day), she will despair, "this is just terrible! I am so, so sad! I'm really sad!" But her melodramatic verbosity pleases me to no end, because it means she hardly has tantrums. When she has them, they are short-lived and tend to be mostly verbal too. A lot of "this is terrible!" "Terrible" seems to be a favorite word. Hmmm... wonder where she got it?

Selina turned eight months old yesterday. She is completely unlike Nat at her age in the tummy department. She loves to wriggle and scoot on her tummy and can make it forward by an inch or two to grab a toy. (Nat used to reach for a toy and upon discovering she couldn't get it, would redirect her attention to some carpet fuzz well within reach and forget all about the toy.)

Selina is also a champion sitter-upper and will bounce herself up and down on her bottom and scoot herself forward that way too. Sort of a Tigger move. It's very cute, especially since she is grinning ear-to-ear, squealing and chuckling as she bounces.

She is now up to eating bananas, avocados, mangoes, sweet potatoes, white potatoes, carrots, broccoli, oats, rice, millet, tofu, yoghurt and self-fed rice cakes. I'm also putting spices in her food such as ginger, cinnamon, thyme and dill. So far, she loves it all.

She is about the happiest baby ever. She is totally content and cheerful about 95% of the time. The other 5% is right before a bottle is due or right after nap time has passed. She hated baths up until her last two baths, which she loved. She is now splashy and delighted with bath time. I'm relieved. I was starting to worry she would hate water forever.

She is still totally enamored of Nat and loves absolutely nothing more than any attention from Nat whatsoever. Nat is mostly nice to Selina though occasionally she accidentally-on-purpose steps on her, knocks her over or holds her hands a little too hard. To all this treatment, Selina responds with loving coos and giggles.

Let's just see how long this last!

Jamari

Nat got this doll for Christmas. His name is Jamari and he is "anatomically correct." According to Cole, when Nat discovered his anatomy, she declared "look! poop!"

Yet another story for the wedding toast...

For more recent photos, check out the photoblog!

It's Not Bragging if They Aren't my Genes, Right?

I have a confession.

Nat is scary smart.

She will be three at the end of February. She is starting to read phonetically. Not with skill and ease and not with comprehension or consistency, but still.

Caveat: I have no interest in having a 2-year old who can read. In fact everything I've read says woe unto the early reading child and woe unto the early-reading-pushing parent. They burn out. They all catch up by age 6 or 7 anyway and earliness in reading provides no lasting benefit for later intellectual development.

But Nat is just a fan of letters (and numbers, I'd add--she can count like the dickens and is nailing about 25% of the skills in a kindergarten math curriculum book I bought--again, by my casual assessment, not because I've been "teaching" her). She is also a fan of a new Sprout show I intensely dislike because of what I consider bad music, bad animation and bad pedagogy. But it's one of those "teach-little-kids-phonics" shows and it's seems to be, er, um, teaching her phonics. You know, along with Sesame Street, Reading Between the Lions and other "educational" kids programming. Because like I said and will say again, I'm not "teaching" her to read myself.

Nat likes more age-appropriate language activities too, like pretend-reading books she has memorized (which includes "reading" her favorite memorized story out of any gosh-darned book at hand). Before nap or bed, I read to her, then she takes the book and "reads" back to me. We focus a lot on what's going on in the pictures. We focus a lot on how fun books and reading are. There is no pressure.

See how defensive I am about it? I am really defensive about it. I don't care if she doesn't read until she's ten!!!

But gee whiz, she seems to be kind of picking it up at two. And I can't help but go "wow" a little. Just a teensy bit down in my heart of hearts.

I started to realize this only in the last week or so. I didn't know she knew all the phonemes of the letters, but lo and behold, she started picking refrigerator magnets off of Donita's refrigerator at a play date and announcing "Letter T! t-t-t! Letter B! b-b-b! Letter S! ssss...." and on and on and pretty much on from A to Z. Now she will announce, "let's spell [fill in the blank]" and tell me the beginning sound, then the beginning letter of the word. She will go (with a little encouragement) right on through all the sounds of a word as I write the letters until we've spelled it together. And she can reverse this process by pointing to letters in a word, announcing each sound and "sounding out" the word.

Sometimes, she guesses a word kind of close in sound to the right one and gets it wrong. Like the label on our sink. "K-O-H-L-E-R!" she'll declare excitedly, "Cole-Mom!" Um, darn close, there, kid.

She named a stuff dog someone gave her a month ago "Kika." This was a weird mystery because she never names anything. Her babies are all called "baby" or "doll" and her animals are "elephant," "cat," "bear," etc. We told her her bedtime pal was "Baker" having named him ourselves after a woman who owns a dog-biscuit bakery gave him to her. But when someone asked her the new dog's name, "Kika!" she said with absolute certainty. Later I noticed the dog has a prominent I.D. tag around his neck that reads "Ike." I started to wonder...could "Kika" be a sort of anagram for "Ike?" Had she tried to read Ike and come up with Kika?

Maybe.

Cue Twilight Zone theme here.

So homeschooling Nat is beginning to look like it's going to consist of throwing books her way and waiting to see what will happen. Sure, I have started to say, "yep that's a big letter P, what sound does P make?" when Nat points out the public parking signs in town. Sure I follow her interest casually. But I am not about to sit my two-year old down and make her study hooked-on-phonics or whatnot.

And yet.

Wow.

Nontoxic

When I finally pulled my head out of the sand and read up on plastic (beginning with the Leery Polyp's terrific linkage), at least three concerns merged in my mind: economic justice issues, the health and well-being of my kids and a more shallow, but still important dislike of clutter in my living space.

For years I've thought to myself "I really should stop buying things made in China." But I was seduced every time by that low, low price. And I have been a starving (nearly literally) grad student for so much of my adulthood, that I have often felt I had no choice. I didn't buy much of anything in my student days, and what I did buy had to be cheap.

But the expense of these things has to be paid by someone, somewhere, and I knew good and well that when I bought a sweater on sale for $4.99, I wasn't paying, the company selling it wasn't paying and having seen and read plenty about what globalism-gone-mad does to actual workers, I knew that most of the time, a young Chinese girl in a factory somewhere was paying.

I am not proud that it took a bunch of recalled lead-tainted toys (and whatnot) to actually get me to change my habits. Even after marrying into tenure and a comfy middle-class lifestyle, I still bought the cheap stuff more often than I should. But between all the recalls and a bit more education about plastic, I started feeling like the karma bus was headed my way for buying all that slave-made swag.

The toys at Oompa.com and other nifty toy stores/catalogues cost at least three times more than the ones I might have bought before, but that means that I am paying my share of the expense that goes toward paying a worker a living wage and benefits. It also means we can only afford about a third as many toys around here. But that in and of itself is appealing. As for the plastic issue, everything I read about plastic toys said it's okay if children play with them, as long as they aren't putting them in their mouths. But Nat still puts everything in her mouth, so that's no help for us. Wood it is.

I can't say I was sad to just toss a lot of brightly colored plastic nonsense that was overrunning my smallish living space. (We have about 1000 square feet.) And Nat has yet to miss a single thing I got rid of. I think she'll love the dollhouse and some of the other little things headed here for the holidays, and since there will be less stuff, she'll actually be able to find it!

We also recently replaced about a dozen plastic sippy cups with two stainless steel ones. I have been wanting Nat to start using a regular glass for most drinking. But I still wanted something for the car, or to put by the bed at night or to take to the park. So far, two have been enough for those purposes and Nat is getting great at real cups. I am thinking pretty seriously about skipping the sippy stage with Selina and going straight to real cups. But maybe I'll buy another one or two of the stainless steel sippies when she's bigger and they both need them. It will still beat a dozen plastic ones rolling around my kitchen.

I'm not going to claim that I'm completely slave-labor-free in my purchasing these days, but I do feel better and "cleaner" about many things.

Maybe Not...

But here's the dollhouse Nat is getting for Christmas, with a white doll family and a Black doll family, a bathroom, kitchen, dining room and bedroom. (No flat-screen t.v. and couch, thanks!)

Isn't it nifty?

I like the website. I also ordered several things for Selina to chew on that are probably not toxic, though these days, you never can tell...

Learning

I have four house guests, two of whom are under seven, so this will be brief. But wow, thanks for all the music feedback and ideas!

Here's what we have done so far, music-wise:

- I started singing to them both immediately, including singing the scale in pitch syllables (do-re-mi)

- I bought toy instruments that resemble real instruments as closely as possible. Nat has a ukelele, a toy piano with black and white keys that sound by touch (not electronic). They aren't hammering strings like a real piano--I think it's more like a xylophone in there (it's shaped like a grand piano, but toddler-size) but they do respond via percussion. I stuck clear stickers with the note names (A,B,C etc.) on the keys (there are about 2.5 octaves). I haven't spent any time teaching Nat about the keys and the note names, they are just there on the keys. Nat also has a plastic recorder that was mine as a child. I plan to get her a wooden one, but this one has real fingering at least, and I can play the scale on it (and that's it). She also has some bells to shake. She's getting bongo drums for xmas.

- We play the instruments with the ipod shuffling my 5000 songs of vastly differing genres.

- I danced with Nat and now dance with Selina. (Nat dances with us under her own power.) I actually try to either two-step or waltz (the limit of my dancing knowledge) and we count out loud as we dance much of the time. Sometimes we clap along to the rhythm while counting.

- We sing a lot, including lullabyes every night. Nat's also recently become interested in hand-clapping games and likes to try those.

That's about it. I am going to look into some of the stuff you all recommended. I don't know exactly what kind of learner Nat is yet, but so far she is pretty darned verbal and literate. But then, she's very numbery too. I am so not-numbery that I don't even know the math-speak equivalent of "literate." Nat can easily and accurately count objects up into the twenties (the developmental charts all say that she should be able to count three or four objects 4 months from now) and she has moved from letter recognition to phoneme practice and trying to sound-out words (in imitation of t.v. like Sesame Street--and don't worry, she can't really do it "right" yet, but she is very interested in pretending to).

So I think the number and letter parts of music will really get her attention. But she also loves, loves loves to dance. She imitates dancing she sees on t.v. and she's not half bad. So there's that aspect of music too.

I guess we will see what we will see. I think Nat is going to be one of those people who is quite good at a number of things. I wonder if she'll pick a particular one to be passionate about or if she'll browse among them all?

Thanks! Binkie Update, and Another Question

Wow, thanks for all your great suggestions. Keep 'em coming. This is going to be a really fun class.

Selina is peacefully binkie-free now and has discovered the joy of sucking her two first fingers and drooling like a fire hydrant. I can't tell you how great it is to put her down, sleepy, but awake, without worrying about how well she's swaddled or if I have enough pacifiers clean for the night. I don't know exactly what Nat was up to at this age, but I think I gave her another month more with the binkie before I got to this point. Since then, Nat has been a great sleeper, so here's hoping Selina follows in her footsteps.

And now, anohter question for you:

You know how there are a zillion charts and books and pamphlets from the doctor's office with lists of developmental milestones to watch for? You know, they have language ones and number ones and gross and fine motor skill ones. And they are always giving you tips on how to encourage or facilitate this or that. Well, is there such a thing somewhere, as a chart of musical skill development milestones?

I ask you because with my little babies, I have started singing the scale to them ("do, re, mi, etc.) and dancing to music and trying to draw attention to the difference between a 3/4 count and a 4/4 count in whatever music we're listening to, but I don't know if there might be other ways to encourage music skills or what such skills properly are at different ages.

For months, Nat's "singing" has been pretty much just monotone rhythmic speaking, with occasional volume changes at points of significant pitch change. That is, for Nat, volume was standing in for pitch, until recently. Recently, she's been much more tuneful and making actual pitch changes that come pretty close to correct for whatever song she's singing. So she's learned to hear pitch better and copy it better.

Is this just a natural process like going from cooing to babbling to imitating speech to speaking with sense? I know people can be taught to hear and mimic pitch when they are older, but I am curious about the naturalness of this as a developmental issue and wondering if any of you out there can point me to a site that might discuss this.

Mostly, I'm just curious. But I'd also like to encourage my children's musical skill development just like I encourage their gross motor, or speech development (or, with the help of this book, like I've been encouraging Nat's visual art development even before she can really control a writing instrument well). We plan to start Suzuki method violin for Nat next year and I know that follows a "mother tongue" type of learning style. But I wonder if there's anything less intense that I could do with them on a day-to-day basis.

Pop Quiz

Here's the answer:

What's the question?

A) Are rubber bands adequate for toddler-proofing the kitchen drawers?

B) Is a toddler-height drawer a good place to store the powdered baby formula?

C) Is Nat ready to sit quietly in front of Blue's Clues while I take a ten-minute shower?

D) All of the above.

Not by Bread Alone!

Selina had her first taste of "solid" food this week. It was just boring old rice cereal, but she loved it. Nat started to get really agitated while I was feeding Selina and finally, after Cole got the camera out to memorialize Selina's first meal, she said, "I feel sad!"

I put the spoon down and told Nat to please let me feed Selina for a minute longer and when I was finished, I'd show her a movie. After Selina was all full and drowsy, I handed her off to Cole, took Nat to the computer, and showed her this.

She was so happy, she hugged and kissed me repeatedly, hollared "Cole Mom, come nook!" hugged and kissed her, and then wanted to hug and kiss Selina too.

I guess the movie worked. Sometimes it's hard to be a big sister.

Comic Relief

Nat has been honing her sense of humor these days. Back in September, when we were in Philly, my mother-in-law got all excited about teaching Nat to say "happy!" when she (Grandmom) spelled out "h-a-p-p-y." Last week, Nat suddenly started saying "h-a-p-p-y: grumpy!" and then laughing her head off. I think it's a much better trick.

Last week, when I was driving the girls to Kansas City, Nat started a litany of endearments with me in the rear view mirror.

"Hi beautiful girl!" Nat said.

"Hi beautiful girl!" I answered.

"Hi sweetheart!" Nat said.

"Hi sweetheart!" I repeated.

"Hi garlic!" Nat said.

"What?" I asked. "Do you mean 'darling?'" I said.

"Oh, hi darling!" Nat corrected herself.

"Hi darling!" I answered.

A couple hours later, Nat started the game again.

"Hi beautiful girl!"

"Hi beautiful girl!"

"Hi sweetheart!"

"Hi sweetheart!"

"Hi darling!"

"Hi darling!"

Pause.......

"Hi garlic!" then gales of laughter from the carseat in back.

Since then, she comes up every now and then, and declares, "hi garlic!" and falls over giggling.

Bodes Well for a Sibling Bed

Yesterday, we all drove up to Chicago to see Aunts Nancy and Laurel (of the beautiful wedding) who flew in to visit us and meet Selina for the first time.

On the way home, the girls, both exhausted from all the excitement and being up past bedtime, fell asleep in the backseat, holding hands across their respective carseats.

Awww!

Nice While it Lasted

Everyone said Nat would love Selina until Selina got big enough to steal her toys and crawl around in her space. But Selina isn't that big yet and Nat is already taunting her by putting a toy up for Selina to grab, then, if Selina touches it, grabbing it back and saying "No Selina, it's my turn!"

Tonight we were all cozied up in a chair together, watching the news and Selina's foot brushed Nat's leg. "No Selina, that's my leg!" Nat chided her. Then again in reference to her elbow and her arm. I told Nat that if everyone was going to sit on top of Mama Shannon at the same time, some touching would be inevitable.

sigh

But Nat is still sweet with Selina a lot, too. She calls her "Seena Babeena" and "Baby Sister" and "Sister." The other day, Selina was doing a baby stand-up on Cole's lap and holding her head up quite proudly and Nat applauded, "Good job, sister!" When Selina cries, Nat will say "Aww, what the matter, sister?" A few days ago I left the room for about 45 seconds and when I returned, Nat was trying to spoon-feed Selina some cashew butter left over on a plate from Nat's breakfast. I had to deliver a stern reprimand about only grown-ups feeding the baby after rushing Selina to the kitchen to swab out her mouth with wet paper towels and pray she wasn't allergic to cashews (no reaction--not that time, anyway). But I think Nat meant well. I think. While I was busy swabbing, Nat turned her attentions to a doll whose face was covered with cashew butter when I returned.

When Selina came home, I had a chat with Aunt Nancy about how now I would find out more about what "babies" are like, versus what Nat is like. I realize it's kind more that I'm finding out what Nat and Selina are like, but the similarities and differences are still interesting.

So far, Selina, like Nat, loves to be held, slung, wrapped, Bjorned and otherwise carried. Like Nat, she prefers to sleep with people, but unlike Nat, she is not settling happily into sleeping alone in her hammock on a predictable time schedule. By this time, Nat was on a fairly regular sleeping and eating schedule and by six months (Selina is about 4.5) she was on an unshakable one. Nat would eat exactly 4 oz exactly every four hours. She took a 10 am-12 and a 2 pm-4 pm nap every single day without fail. She did that until well after she started solids, until I forcibly night weaned her by refusing the bottle at 2 am when she was ten months old.

Selina is pretty unpredictable. She sometimes eats 4 oz of formula. Sometimes she polishes off a 6.5 oz. bottle and I wonder how much more she would have wanted. I never know how to fill them for her maximum happiness and the least waste. She sometimes naps and sometimes doesn't. That is, of course she sleeps during the day, but often it's in snatches here and there and almost never in her hammock, though I got lucky a couple of days in a row here. Sometimes she wakes to eat at 11 pm or 1 am and sometimes she eats at 7:30 pm, goes to bed and sleeps soundly until 6 am. (That would be a good habit to get into, of course, but she only does it occasionally.) Basically, she's guaranteed to take a good long nap only if I wrap her on me. And then she'll do the two-hour morning nap or the two-hour afternon nap. But in her bouncy seat or the hammock, it's a crap shoot. Nights, if she does wake up in the middle, she's done sleeping on her own. I can fight it and keep getting up every 15-45 minutes to bounce the hammock and stick her binky in her mouth or I can kick Cole onto the couch and put Selina in bed with me and she's happy until 6 or 6:30.

What I like is the "happy until 6 or 6:30" part. I don't like sleeping with her because I just don't sleep well with her in the bed and Cole has to go on the couch because the bed just isn't big enough for me not to lay there all night worrying that we're going to smother her. Fortunately, Selina doesn't insist on sleeping on me. She's happy enough to sleep beside me. But still. I don't sleep so much like this, myself.

But all this is really just to say that as cuddly as Nat was and still is, Selina is, if possible, even cuddlier. I think that's just dumb luck, though. I don't believe all babies are this cuddly. I do think all babies probably prefer to stick as near to people as they can though.

I am starting to think that maybe we will not use a crib for Selina like we did for Nat when she outgrew the hammock. I think I might just get another twin futon and put it on the floor in what will be the girls' shared room. Then they can crawl into bed with each other if they like. As long as Selina is big enough and mobile enough by then to get away from Nat if she wants to, a sibling bed might work well for my cuddly girls. Anyone out there do a sibling bed?

Speaking of crawling, that's another difference. Nat loathed tummy time. She would not tolerate it for 2 seconds and screamed bloody murder the whole time. Selina had 30 minutes (!) of tummy time today, next to me on the floor while I worked on the laptop beside her. She kicks and coos and grins and laughs at the toys hanging just over her head out of reach and tries to move from here to there. Nat never crawled until long after she walked. Until she was eleven months old, I could sit her in the middle of a floor, run to the bathroom and return to find her right where I left her. Selina is going to be a crawler for sure and possibly quite soon. She is itchin' to crawl.

Selina also loves to sing. Nat is just now starting to sing along with me when I do lullabyes at night (or "bedtime songs" as we call them). Selina is already singing along. Her face is all smiles and round little toothless "oh!"s in various musical pitches while I sing "Amazing Grace." It almost doesn't work to put her to sleep because she's so worked up and excited about singing. But I keep doing it anyway, because, duh, how cute!

Last week was the 4 month check up and Selina came in at 13lbs, 14 oz, up to 50th %ile for weight from last month's 12th. She's still low--in the 6th %ile--for height. The doctor told me she would need to catch up in height or we should worry.

"Oh, she's probably just going to be short" I blithely answered.

"Oh no, she can't be this short," the doctor tried again "at this rate, she'd only be about five feet at adulthood." (Mind you, the doctor is only about 5'3" herself.)

"Yes," I said, "her mother told us she was five feet tall, but when I met her I was thinking she was probably closer to 4' 10". And Selina's father is only 5'7".

"Oooooh..." said the doctor making a note (perhaps: "all adopted babies are not completely unknowable biological mysteries from nowhere.").

Ha! My girl is perfectly healthy. If just about perfectly round. She's a little round ball of baby sweet enough to eat up with a spoon!

Summer Sneaks

For more, including Selina's pretty baby smile, head over to the photoblog!

Light at the End of the Tunnel

Selina slept from 8 pm to 6 am last night!

Nat slept from 7:30 to 6:30.

Now that's more like it! May they keep it up!

Osmosis

Nat and Selina's Uncle Dan moved away for the greener pastures of Camden, New Jersey last spring, selling him condo below us to a professional violinist from Iceland. I haven't had a chance to meet him yet. He only moved in last month and he is only living here part time. Whenever I catch a glimpse of him, it's his back, jetting off to play the violin someplace more important than here.

But when he's home you can hear him practicing in the mornings. The music floats right up through the floorboards and makes me wonder if I left a radio on somewhere, until I remember the neighbor. Once I start to listen closely, I hear that he is playing scales, then difficult spots in the music over and over. It's a wonderful experience to hear a musician of that caliber learning a piece of music. I want to start Nat in Suzuki violin classes next fall, and it's nice to have a year for her to listen to the process of working on the instrument.

A friend of David's who used to know the people who lived in my building before it completely turned over to the people who live here now said that the whole building was given over to musicians at one time. He said my own living room used to be all but filled with a grand piano. (I love to picture it! as my living room is currently full of board books with chewed-up corners and naked doll babies.) If we knew we'd be living in a particular place and that place could hold it, we'd have Nat do Suzuki piano. But since we aren't sure where or what kind of spaces we'll be living in the future, we decided a violin was a good starter instrument for size and portability.

But I like that our building is haunted with music and there's now a soundtrack for it, too.

Selina Might Be Teething + Toddler Sleep Habits: help!

Anyway, Selina is certainly slobbering a lot more than usual lately. She is nearly four months old. How the heck did THAT happen? The month-to-month baby advice book (don't worry, I rarely take its advice) says to start thinking about solid foods (again, don't worry, it ain't gonna happen for another 6 weeks at least) which, however misguided, does make me realize how fast this is going.

I am sort of glad, because this baby stuff is really hard on me. And then when I feel glad, I feel guilty because I don't want to wish away such a sweet period of time that is already fleeting enough as it is.

Selina is such a cutie. She is a lot like Nat was as a baby, in the sense that she is a bit behind the curve on motor development (by her birthdate, not her adjusted date--she's somewhere between them, really) but right on, or ahead of it in social skills. She has only started sort of accidentally-on purpose finding her hands this week. She will bump them into each other, but then kind of go "oh, cool" and play with her fingers a lot. She's more tolerant of tummy time than Nat was, but that's not saying much. She will raise her head, arms and legs off the floor and squirm around with her tummy on the ground, trying to figure out how to get from Here to Somewhere Else (which Nat didn't really do much--Nat was always pretty content to just stay Here).

But she has started scouting rooms of strangers for someone whose eye she can catch for a little back-and-forth flirting. She will talk and coo and smile at the slightest provocation. She sometimes tries to chat with me after a middle-of-the-night bottle and I'm thinking maybe she'll be up with me when she's older, having tea at the kitchen table in the wee smalls.

She is not much of a napper. She definitely needs naps but she is loathe to sleep anywhere but on a human body (aka my body most of the time). Since I can't wear her at the moment, and I have a toddler to chase too, this is trying. (I rememebr Nat being this way, but I'd just read my way through a pile of books while rocking her in the chair. Can't do that with Nat running around).

The only place I can sometimes get her to sleep is in the bouncy seat, outside at the top of the stairs. If I sit her where she is looking through the wrought iron rails and the leaves of the Boston fern David hung there, and there's a slight breeze and some ambient noise--maybe the wind in the trees mixed with a little faint construction sounds from down the block--she will maybe be happy long enough to fall asleep on her own and stay asleep for an hour or almost two. I can take my laptop out there and sit in a lawn chair and give her a bounce with my foot every so often in the late mornings, if Nat is having her nap then, too.

But as for afternoon naps (which Nat doesn't take) we're stuck. I can't get Selina to be happy away from us and Nat is too active around us for Selina to get much lengthy sleeping in. So she dozes on and off in my arms/the bouncy seat. I really hope I can wear the wrap again soon, because she'd sleep through a hurricane in there, and we could use it for afternoons (and mornings when it's too cold to put her outside).

Nights are getting better, though. She's happy in her hammock from around 7 to around 5:30 with two wakeups between that vary in time depending on how late she had her last bottle before bed. She'd probably sleep until closer to 6 or 6:30 but she can't stand a messy diaper and she can't stand to hear Nat cry or sound upset (eg: have a tantrum) so when Nat rises at 5 or 5:30, announces "I'm awake" and then fake-cries when Cole-mom doesn't instantaneously appear at her side, Selina wakes, realizes her diaper is wet, and is completely done for the night.

This is why Cole sometimes goes to bed as early as 8pm and takes three-hour naps on the weekends. I wish I could take a three-hour nap. Cole would be happy to let me, but I can't sleep during the day.

"But hey, wait a minute, why is Nat getting up at 5???" you ask?

Beats me. It's still dark here at 5. I have no idea why she does it. Sometimes, if I'm feeling gracious and am awake anyway, I'll go to Nat at this ridiculous hour and tell her it's still night time. She'll usually go back to bed for another hour if I do that. Cole is her morning person, so if it's me, it must not be morning yet to her mind. I told Cole she needs to convince Nat it's not time to wake up until the sun is up (at least) but she is usually too sleepy to remember her own name, let alone start some complicated parenting task. So 5:00 it is. Maybe 5:30 if she's lucky.

I think Nat could be convinced to sleep until 6 or 6:30 under rpesent circumstances. But I also think she'd sleep until 7 if she was going to bed closer to 8. Right now we're kind of stuck in an early rut because she's wiped out by 10 am and it's all I can do to keep her awake until 11 for a nap. Then she's up from her nap at 12:30 or maybe 1 and wiped out by 6 pm at which point we force her to stay up until 7. But even when we're out or something and she misses her 7 bedtime, she will be up again at 5 the next morning.

Any ideas? Yes, I'm asking. Lay 'em on me.

A Many-Gendered Thing

A lot of gender thoughts have been popping up in my head lately and I thought I'd share where we are on the topic since I wrote this.

Recently, someone asked me if we selected girls in our adoptions. No. Our agency doesn't allow gender selection.

I read a poll in an adoption publication a few months ago that suggested most adoptive or prospective adoptive parents think they should be allowed to choose the gender of their adopted child. I don't know how scientific that poll was, but I was surprised. For the most part, I don't think adoptive parents should get to choose gender. Why should they? People can't choose when they get pregnant. (One responder to the poll said that because she couldn't get pregnant, picking her child's gender should be offered her as some kind of consolation. That's the kind of entitled narcissism that gives adoptive parents a bad name if you ask me.)

I can imagine discrete scenarios in which selecting gender would make sense. If current children in the family had certain kinds of abuse histories, one gender or the other might be the only healthy option. But for the average couple seeking their first (or second or third, for that matter) healthy newborn, I can't see any reason that they should go ordering up the gender of their choice. If adoption is about finding homes for babies (and children) who need them, gender shouldn't usually come into it.

All that said, we were mostly glad when Selina was a second child of the same gender as our first. (Cole was a little misty about giving up her dream of a boy, but I reminded her that one of our girls might yet grow up to be a boy, so all hope need not die!) In our case, a second child of roughly the same gender means indefinite years of room-sharing, clothes-sharing (hopefully) and thus a less strained budget. But we are also the legal guardians of two small boys, so it was not a make-or-break deal for us. We could end up parenting kids of all kinds before we're through.

Sometimes I catch myself thinking Selina is girlier than Nat. but actually, she's just quieter. So there's a little peek into my psyche. There is still really no telling what kind of girls our girls will be. The jury is out on Nat. At the moment, she's wearing a lot of tee-shirts and shorts and as recently as tonight was mistaken for a boy. I buy her shorts from the boys' section of the store, because no 2 year-old needs to be wearing Daisy Dukes and the boy shorts are about four inches longer. The tee shirts mostly having surfing themes, as they were bought in preparation for, or while on vacation in, Hawaii. And she has some distinctly girlie white shoes and some sneakers from the boys' department (I don't like bubble gum pink sneakers, okay? Sue me!) so often enough, she is entirely cross-dressed to play outside and run and climb and whatnot.

She has dresses too, but for summer playgroundwear, we have mostly stuck to shirts and shorts.

If I ask Nat what she wants to wear, she usually picks the last choice. So if I say "do you want a shirt and shorts or a pretty dress?" she'll say "pretty dress!" If I say "do you want to wear a pretty dress or your zebra shirt?" she's all over the zebra shirt.

She likes me to put lipstick on her when she catches me putting it on, and she likes to wear my shoes, my hats, and my lotion, but so did my ex's son when he was this age and spending lots of time with me. It feels entirely like "I want to be like Mama Shannon" as opposed to any real expression of her true soul.

I don't think she's really registered gender difference yet, in terms of categorizing Cole and me and she and Selina in one group and David and Rob and her granddaddies and uncles in another. She doesn't use pronouns very often and when she does, often as not, she uses the wrong gender for the person she's identifying. I suppose this is due to not hanging out in daycare or preschool. Nobody has told her she can't play with the trucks because she's a girl or that she needs to keep the boys out of the dollhouse.

So Nat's a mystery still, even at two-and-a-half.

Fourth Trimester Down

Today, Selina is three months old and judging by that book about babycare that we all love to hate, she's about on target for her birth date already. She's small, I suppose. They say gross motor skills are the ones that remain slow for late preemies, and that will probably be true for Selina as it has been somewhat for Nat (who doesn't let it impede the enthusiasm of her dancing, mind you).

Selina's personality has really been emerging lately, though. She still loves to be held and holds onto you right back. She is quiet. Her cries are so quiet I need to use the baby monitor a lot more than I ever did with Nat. That doesn't mean her crying isn't insistent when she has a complaint, though. She's sensitive to dirty diapers and will fuss if you don't change her right away. She has a good appetite and will sleep most nights from 8pm to 2am, though she reverts to wanting to eat every four hours the rest of the night and day.

She is cooing with mixed vowels and consonants, smiling and gurgling and half-laughing. I say she can "chuck" but she can't quite chuckle just yet. I can make her wave her arms and legs with glee and open up a huge smile and sort of squawk (she really, really wants to laugh!) by playing little sound and peekaboo games with her. She watches Nat like a hawk and is completely enthralled by every move or sound she makes.

She's very empathetic with Nat and if Nat cries or otherwise expresses distress, Selina starts to cry. It's amazing to me. She is really sensitive. Nat is still doing well with Selina herself, if not always so well with the attention I give to Selina. Nat likes to say things to Selina, then pitch her voice really high and pretend to be Selina answering her back. I think we did this once and she picked it up. So now it's "hi baby Selina!"--voice change--"hi Nat!" and occasionally the excruciatingly cute, "I love you baby Selina!"--voice change--"I love you Nat!"

I have two daughters. How fabulous is that???

Stream of Nat

Nat is moving so fast these days I forget half the things I want to remember within hours of mentally noting them. Her language is busting out all over the place. Suddenly she's making language work for her, if you know what I mean. She is all about expressing herself spontaneously as opposed to going over rote phrases to achieve a goal. Though she's getting better at certain rote things I want her to learn like "I'm fine, thank you, how are you?"

Speech-wise, she is cleaning up mispronunciations quickly and I want to remember how she substitutes "n" for "l" and says "nook, Ma Saninn, nook!" when she sees something exciting. Or "I nike it!" enthusiastically about my shoes. Recently, I was trying to teach her to hear the difference between N and L when she asked to "sit nap!"

"Do you mean lap?" I prodded.

"Sit nap!" she agreed.

"Look, Nat," I showed her the fingerspelling and said "L-A-P, 'l-l-lap.'"

"L-A-P" she signed and spelled back, "N-n-nap!"

Then for a while whenever she wanted to sit on my lap, she'd fingerspell it and say "nap!"

She has a spatula just like mine, except with a broken tip. I gave her my old one when it broke, to put in her kitchen play drawer. When I was making us some eggs the other day, she pulled her spatuala out and said "Nat has one. Mama Shannon has one!"

I asked her what it was and she said "this!" and held it aloft.

I told her it was a spatuala.

This morning when I made the eggs, she dug into her drawer and came out waving her spatula proudly. "Nat has pat-oola, Ma Saninn has pat-oola!"

She is very much into imaginative play lately. She plays with her Little People pirate ship. She plays dress up in a tutu (that is way too big for her) given to her by a friend who sells dancewear and she plays baby dolls a lot. I am shocked by how much she plays baby dolls, because I never liked dolls at all when I was a kid.

But Nat loves to feed and burp and bounce and rock and wrap and sing to her dolls. If I'm doing it for Selina, she wants to do it for a doll. Yesterday she got the biggest, proudest smile when I tied her baby onto her chest with a piece of fabric. "Like (nike) Baby Selina and Mama Shannon!" she gushed.

She also likes to pretend to be a baby. I will rock her and talk to her like I do to Selina and call her "Baby Nat." I asked her recently if she wanted a binky (she is quite taken with Selina's binkies) and she opened her mouth. I pretended to pop in a binky and ten minutes later, she asked me, "more binky?" So we did it again.

Today she was all about pretending to be Cole Mom and go to work. She would pick up a bag and some books, put them under her arm and walk to her bedroom door. "I gotta go!" she'd declare, "see you later ('nater')! Be back soon. Gotta go to the office!"

Then she'd close the door almost all the way and peek through the crack to watch me. I'd just sit and wait. She'd open the door again almost immediately and say "you're home! I missed you!"

We're going through the motions of sitting on the potty and have moved all diaper productions to the bathroom (and switched to pull-on diapers) but so far, she just likes to sit there and read books. She is taken with Everyone Poops (and who wouldn't be? It's a favorite of mine too) and reads it aloud for anyone who'll listen.

I have made no progress on finding a French-speaking babysitter. I may have to step up my efforts a notch and call the foreign languages department. She is already interested, because I've been reading her some French board books and she has learned the French words for various emotions from one of the books. She is particularly fond of "triste" and likes to make a pouty, bottom-lip-protruding face as she says it.

She's also stepped up seeking negative attention. She is constantly testing to see if all of my rules still apply when I'm holding Selina. They do, it just takes a bit longer to enforce them. And it's always a fine line for me to decide whether putting the baby down to take Nat to time out is actually rewarding or disciplining her. I try to call them as I see them, but sometimes I clearly get it wrong and time-out is a win in the Nat column. So both she and I are cultivating our ability to ignore or pretend we didn't hear or see each other in certain circumstances...

Yesterday we were looking at photos my father sent on cd's on the computer. I told Nat she could only look and not touch the computer screen. I told her this over and over as she touched the computer screen over and over. Finally I said "Nat, if you touch that computer again, it's a time out."

Don't you know she reached her tiniest pinky finger straight out and touched the teeniest tip of it to the very edge of the keyboard, while staring me down defiantly?

So: time out.

But, OMG, what kind of teenager is this kid going to be? We are so doomed!

Some Highlights

You all knew I was born in Honolulu, right?

Until now, I hadn't been back to Hawaii since age two.

With my babies in tow, it felt a bit like stepping into one of my father's old home movies, in the role of my own mother. There's my toddler, chasing a Hawaiian local child through the park with her tongue hanging out to feel the breeze. There's my baby getting petted and fawned over by local mamas and grandmamas at every turn.

It was a great vacation, but it was also just really cool to stand on the ground of this place that has taken on mythic proportions in my psyche for the past 35 years.

Nat loved the ocean. Loved. She went running headlong into it at every opportunity. We stayed at Anini Beach on the North Shore of Kauai (if you know it). It's a long, long, long reef that makes for really shallow, calm water about a half mile out from the beach. Nat just assumed that the Pacific Ocean was one big wading pool Granddaddy conjured for her benefit. It kinda was.

We stuck Selina's toe in the water but she hated it. She is still a pre-bath-loving newborn and doesn't like getting naked or wet, so she mostly hung out in slings, wraps, bjorns and plain old arms the whole week. Fortunately, 5 adults besides myself were queuing to hold and feed her so I got a nice break from lifting and carrying, etc. (at least while in Hawaii, if not en route).

Cole and my brother and sister-in-law all took a surfing lesson while I sat on the beach with another class member's grandparents and cheered them on. They weren't terrible. Cole especially wasn't terrible given that she just hit that mysterious 0 birthday and has a half-paralyzed left knee from an old lacrosse injury (these aging butches and their sports injuries!). You better believe there will be a photo up here of Cole surfing as soon as I get the disk.

I also dragged Cole along to ride a horse. If you go to Kauai and are planning to ride a horse, go for the worst review in the ultimate guide. The people who wrote that guide don't know beans about horses and I could tell from the bad review that the Princeville Ranch was actually a great place as far as rent-a-horse outfits go and I was right. They did a fabulous job for that sort of thing (ie: letting anybody and everybody ride their horses regardless of experience level) and Cole loved it. I sold her on horse back riding enough that she wants to learn more.

My father dragged us all over the island to look at beautiful stuff and more beautiful stuff. It was chock-full of beautiful stuff, including a waterfall of family legend where my mother allegedly pulled the car over and washed herself off after I allegedly threw up on her. (I should add that Selina carried on the throwing-up-on-mothers-in-Hawaii family tradition commendably.)

We had a noon to 10 pm layover in Honolulu on our way home and we drove around a bit downtown to get a feel for the city, then hung out at Waikiki and watched surfers and chatted with locals. In the evening, we found a ramen place in a mall (even the malls are nice in Hawaii) and Nat had a grand time eating one of her very favorite foods ("noodles"). We liked Honolulu a lot, as we are sort of urban people but also like pretty nature. Honolulu has both things going on at once. Wow.

Now I'm reading Dismembering Lahui to get, as I told my father, the cynical stuff. Really, the real stuff about post-colonial Hawaiian history. Did you have any idea that in the last quater of the 19th century, the Native Hawaiian population declined by 92-95% depending on whose numbers you think are most accurate??? I didn't. Hello genocide.

But Hawaii has this really cool political/cultural feel to it, like the Native Hawaiians don't take increased luxury hotel development sitting down, like gay rights are a big no-brainer to them, like adoption is an obvious way to increase your family, like all the children belong to everyone. I loved the sense I got there.

Even the Hawaiian Airlines propoganda magazine featured a cover story about traditional Hawaiian kinship adoption (Hanai), which is informal, but strongly rooted in history and culture and is open by definition. There was even a woman in the article, who, having grown up with Hanai values, but without anyone in her circle to give her a baby, adopted an African American boy from Arkansas and now he's some kind of big deal on the Hawaiian traditional music scene. Apparently, in Hanai children are sort of redistributed. If you have lots of them and you know someone who wants one and doesn't have any, you give them a baby. Just like that. Your uber-fertile sister-in-law is no longer an annoyance at holiday dinners, but the birthmother of your baby. Also, hanai was used to maintain strong traditional culture by giving firstborn sons and daughters (one each) to the grandparents or another member of the grandparents' generation to be raised into late childhood/adolescence. Also, it was used to attach families to other families higher up on the social scale by placing children with nobles. But these children were to always be raised exactly the same as biological children in those families and there were heavy formal consequences for failing to do that.

Anyway, that's what the airline magazine said and it made me feel like I was on my way to the Land of Adoption or something. It is worth a look, but their online version isn't current, so the article isn't there yet. Maybe when a new hard issue comes out. I took a copy and am going to put it in Selina's book.

Speaking of babies, my BFF, Karen, of two failed IVF's and brief consideration of donor eggs (from moi) and a decision to adopt from China right before China became Hard To Adopt From, had her baby via scheduled c-section on Tuesday. His name is Carl and he was conceived the old-fashioned way through dumb luck. He's a beauty. My idea of what newborns look like is so skewed by my two low-birthweight preemies that he looks like a 6 weeker to me, but her was only 7 lbs 10 oz (which, I guess is average? a bit above average?). Anyhow, I am ecstatic for Karen, her husband Rob and their whole family.

And on that note, I'll leave you to catch up on blogs I've not been reading for the past two weeks (um, or maybe to grade my papers--maybe).

See Nat

See Nat dance...