Growing Vocabulary

Yesterday I spent a long time with Fiona repeating the words "door" and "wall" as she slapped her hand against each one. She already knew how to say "door" ("doe"), but wall was a tricky one, and it was fascinating watching her watch me repeat the word while she tried to figure out how to make the sound. Eventually she hit upon something that sounds like "all" and another word was added to her repertoire.

Some other recent additions:

• If you hand Fiona an apple, she'll say "apple." If you hand Fiona a pear, peach or banana, she'll say "apple."
  
  
• When Fiona wants to be picked up or helped up onto the couch she can now ask "up?" Or, more accurately, "up up up up up up up?"
  
  And on the topic of up: yesterday Fiona discovered that by removing the pack of diaper wipes from her changing table (yes, she can reach that high now) and placing the wipes in front of a chair, she can then stand on the box to boost herself up so that she's on the chair.
  
  
• I'm not sure if I've written about this before, but Fiona asks for juice ("Joo?"), responds when asked if she wants milk ("mal?") and has (finally!) gotten very clear about pointing out Mommy ("mama!") and Daddy ("dadadada!")

She Hears More Than You Realize

Over the weekend Fiona found a photograph from her parents' wedding that featured her Grandma, Gigi and (Great) Aunt Fran. As with any photo, Fiona wanted to spend a lot of time pointing at various people so that I would tell her who they are (alternated with me asking where somebody is in the photo and Fiona trying to pick that person out; she has about a 70% accuracy rate). So we sat together on the chaise. I asked her where her Grandma was. Fiona pointed to Aunt Fran, and I corrected her by saying, "No, that's Fran."

Fiona looked at me for a moment in confusion, and then pointed up at the ceiling fan. Fran, fan -- I'm sure the difference is difficult for a 17 month old to detect. I'd pointed the fan out to her before when she saw it whirring, but I didn't realize she knew the word.

More Star Wars

Last night I sang the first phrase of the Star Wars theme to Fiona. She finished the tune by singing (or at least shouting) the final four notes.

Enjoying the Gen-X kick of having your kid discover Star Wars, I then threw on the beginning of Attack of the Clones, which was showing on TV just before bedtime, so that Fiona could hear the real music. She was only marginally interested, but for those who suffered through Episodes I and II of the new (old, whatever) trilogy, an important question concerning one character’s species has been resolved. When Fiona saw Jar Jar Binks appear on screen, she pointed at him and said "neigh!"

So there you have, Lucasfilm fans: Jar Jar's a horse.

Musical Jedi

Fiona's bath towel has a hood on it for drying her (ever-increasing) hair. When she has the hood on and is wrapped tightly in the towel after her bath, she looks a little like she's wearing a Jedi robe and cowl. Sometimes we hum a few bars of the Star Wars music--not the main theme, but the… well, I don't know what John Williams calls it. The Jedi theme, perhaps (it's what plays when Yoda levitates Luke's ship at Dagobah in Empire).

Anyway, as you might have heard somewhere, the final Star Wars movie is opening this week; I think you might be able to find it at your more obscure art theaters. So with space epics on the mind, I hummed the usual Jedi theme as I dried Fiona last night (and she screamed and cried because she doesn't think bathtime should ever have to end). Andrea and I then segued into the main Star Wars theme -- da da da dum DUM da da da DUM dum. Fiona smiled and laughed at the silly, overblown martial music.

And then she started to try to sing along. The "D" sound is an easy one for her to make, and she enjoys modulating her pitch where the music suddenly jumps up a fourth. I tried it with her again this morning, and she's definitely doing her best to echo her favorite part of the theme.

So for those of you who were wondering what her second song would be (after E-I-E-I-O), it appears our Padawan child has provided an answer.

CORRECTION: For those geeky enough to care, the theme we sing to her when she's wrapped in the towel is Obi Wan Kenobi's, not Yoda's.

Pooh Bear in Motion

Fiona has her first DVD, and fittingly it's The Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. We laugh at the deep attachment Fiona has to her Pooh dolls given that she's never seen him on TV. Of course, she also learned to like Grover from reading The Monster at the End of This Book long before she ever saw an episode of Sesame Street.

We'll see how long it is before Mommy and Daddy can recite the entire DVD from memory. So far Fiona's only seen a few minutes; naturally, she exclaimed "Pooh!" when the bear made his first appearance.

Ambitious Parents

Fiona's changed her sleeping habits (again). She now stays awake all the way through the morning and goes down for a nap between 12:30 and 1:00. That nap can last for up to three hours, which is heaven for us after dealing with multiple 45 minute naps for quite a while (we'd spend the first 15 minutes wondering if she was actually asleep and then the remaining 30 minutes desperately trying to get stuff done that we couldn't do with Fiona around).

She's also pushed her bedtime back to about 7:45 (it was 7, then 7:15... you can figure out how the progression worked). We've been in the habit of eating dinner after Fiona went to bed, but a 7:45 bedtime meant dinner wouldn't be until about 8:15, which meant that by the time dishes were done we had less than an hour to spare before we had to think about going to bed in case our daughter planned on exercising her lungs starting at 6am.

So we've started trying to eat dinner with Fiona at around 6:30 or so. It means we have to plan some sort of finger food dish for Fiona to eat while we eat, since Fiona is still figuring out self-feeding with a spoon. On the bright side, we have an early dinner, one of us gives Fiona a bath while the other does the dishes, and when 8:15 does roll around we look at each other in shock as we realize that the child is asleep, dinner is done, the dishes are clean, and we actually have an evening ahead of ourselves. A little slice of heaven.

This trick is a little more difficult on days when I'm at work, Andrea's at school, and Fiona is in day care. But we're committed to staying with it on the weekends.

A Little Tumble

From the It-Was-Bound-To-Happen-Eventually Dept.: Fiona fell down the stairs on Tuesday. She normally climbs up them without difficulty while we bring the stroller upstairs behind her, but this time it didn't work so well and our child went temporarily head over heels.

She had a small bruise beneath one eye, but mainly she was scared. And in a show of resilience, and a demonstration that the fall wasn't serious, Fiona was off and running again within a few minutes.

That Baby Loves to Get Clean

Fiona usually hits a wall between 6 and 6:30 every evening. She's been running around all day, she may not have napped since noon, and all she wants is to be held and drink her evening milk. But there's one way we can still get her to spring into action: ask her if she wants a bath.

As soon as we ask, Fiona shouts out "bath!" and jumps down off the couch and runs to the bathroom door. We have to race to pull out the infant tub and set everything up for bathtime.

Fiona's main interest in bathing, actually, isn't bathing. It's the chance to splash water. She's splashed half the water out of her tub (fortunately it sits inside the larger tub, so we're not causing any water damage to the floors) and let the water temperature plunge to cool and she'd still happily stay in the tub to splash out the rest. It'll be interesting to see how she responds when we get her back in the pool on our next trip to San Diego.

Toddlin' Along

Having recovered from her asthma attack, Fiona's walking has really taken off. She now walks pretty much everywhere she wants to go and has mastered the hallway between her room and the living room. She's particularly interested in the art of carrying things through the hall. At first it was her juice cup (the essentials always come first). Now she likes raiding her sock drawer and marching around waving her socks, or finding a book that she likes and carrying it around.

For some reason, she's recently become very fond of a knit cap that is several sizes too small for her (and that she used to hate when she was 3 or 4 months old and the right size for it). She brings the cap to me and asks me to put it on her. She also has found a small shopping bag that she likes to carry around. The sight of Fiona wearing an ill-fitting old knit cap, carrying her bag, wandering around with no apparent sense of direction and shouting out incoherent babble leads to one inescapable conclusion: we're raising a bag lady.

Health Woes

Obviously there hasn’t been any blogging going on lately, which isn’t to say that things have been quiet on the Fiona front. Actually, it’s the sheer number of things that have been going on that have kept this blog from being updated.

As is typical for a one-year old who is in her first year at day care, Fiona has had a lot of colds throughout the winter and early spring. The colds were usually accompanied by a hacking cough, which we didn’t pay any special attention to until mid-April when the coughing started getting so violent that Fiona was unable to hold down food. A trip to the doctor led to us taking Fiona in for a chest x-ray (not a fun thing to do with a 16-month old) to eliminate the possibility of pneumonia. The good news was that the x-ray was clear. The bad news was that the doctor believed the most likely diagnosis was asthma.

We put Fiona on albuterol and pediatric prednisone to fight the inflammation, and within a few days her coughing subsided and her breathing returned to normal. We were very glad to be done with the prednisone, since it has a side-effect of turning the taker cranky. When a thirtysomething asthmatic (like, oh, say, Fiona’s father) is taking prednisone, you can at least point out what’s going on in an effort to calm the hostility. With a baby, you’re stuck with her hostile moods.

With the attack over, we’re now keeping Fiona on management meds, which means she has to take an inhaler a few times a day (and, yes, her day care providers are able to give her the inhaler). Thankfully, we don’t have to wake Fiona up to give her any doses. We do have to monitor any colds she gets because we have to up her meds at the first sign of a cough.

Now, as to whether or not Fiona really has asthma: it’s impossible to know for sure in a child under three years old. Her father has it and she lives in a city with a fair amount of pollution, both of which would argue for the possibility. On the other hand, sometimes young children don’t grow in perfect proportion, so Fiona’s lungs could be trailing behind the rest of her body, and certain types of childhood asthma can disappear as early as the age of three or four (though it isn’t true that childhood asthma almost always wanes in adulthood). We have to treat her as though she’s asthmatic, but thankfully modern medicine has advanced enough that it’s not like Fiona’s being sentenced to a sedentary lifestyle. Not that she has any interest in being sedentary, as anybody who’s met her knows.

So her health kept us so busy I didn’t really have time to blog. And then in a second slam, once Fiona’s health started improving, I wound up coming down with pneumonia myself (my chest x-ray wasn’t so clear) and taking to bed for a week. Big props to Mommy, for picking up a lot of extra slack around the house while I was infirm, and also to Grandma, Grandpa and Aunt Kathy for stopping by on the weekend to help out and picking Fiona up from day care on days when Mommy couldn’t. Support networks are essential.