She's a Comedy Star

Fiona's started figuring out how to make up her own jokes. Granted, it's nothing that's going to get her her own HBO standup special any time soon, but...

Her new favorite game, which started over Christmas weekend, is to have us ask her questions with the wrong answer. For example, we'll ask where Papa is and then point to Mommy and ask "is that Papa?" To which Fiona replies, with an exagerrated shake of the head and drawn out voice, "noooooo." We continue pointing to other people and objects in the room so that Fiona can keep replying "noooooo." She always seems a little disappointed when we point to the correct person and the game ends.

By yesterday she was doing the setup herself. So she'd point to me and say "is Mommy?" And then instantly reply "nooooooo."

One of her Christmas gifts from Grandma and Papa was a counting toy (counting being another popular theme for a two-year old's Christmas gifts) with stacked shapes in various colors--for example, for the number 5 she had 5 blue pentagons, for the number 4 she had 4 red squares, etc. The poles that the shapes go over are color coded to help out (the game also works well for color identification, which Fiona has been mastering lately--even though she hasn't figured out the word "color". You can ask her to point to blue, and she'll do it, but if you ask her what color a blue object is she just looks at you with a confused face).

Anyway, after playing a little bit at putting shapes on their correct pole, Fiona soon discovered that she could put the shapes on the wrong pole too. She thought it was hysterical to see a red shape where the yellow one should go, and played with the toy that way for a while.

Like I say, it ain't quite Eddie Izzard. But it's fun to see Fiona figure out how to do something designed to get a laugh.

Presents!

I think it's safe to say Fiona figured out Christmas--at least the presents part. We started with Nana & Pop's loot on the 23rd, then she got Santa and Mom, Dad, Papa & Grandma and Aunts Kathy & Meredith on Christmas. By the end of the 25th she was opening presents like a champ. Of course, come the 26th she was ready to ask for presents again. Her birthday falls two weeks after Christmas, which means more gift opening; hopefully she won't be too crushed by the 350-day wait before her presents build up again.

The hot items for two year olds are apparently a) stuffed animals and b) bath toys. Suffice it to say I'm not worried about Fiona rejecting bathtime any time soon, not with her car wash, fish, Sesame Street and Winnie-the-Pooh characters at the ready for aquatic entertainment. She also has enough Fisher Price gear to build a small town; we're loving watching her play with the Fisher Price Little People and seeing how much her imagination has taken off.

Unfortunately, we're also dealing with another cold; such is the lot of having a toddler in the northeast during wintertime. But Fiona's appetite is good and she has a lot of energy during the daytime, so here's hoping the usual meds do their trick and we have a cough-free toddler back sometime soon.

Pre-Christmas Catch Up

I haven't posted much lately since I've been more interested in figuring out how to get to and from work than blogging about the kid. But all that's over now, so I'll just give some bullet point catch-up on what Fiona's been up to:

• It was barely covered in the media so you might not have heard, but New York had a transit strike this week. Andrea very kindly drove me to the Queensboro Bridge each morning, where I proceeded to hitchhike into Manhattan (cars needed 4 passengers to enter the city, so there were any number of drivers looking for extra bodies). This meant that Fiona had to be packed into the car almost as soon as she woke up in the morning. We explained to her that it was time to "take Daddy to the bridge--gonna take him to the bridge!" -- to which Fiona would repeat "take to the bridge!" Always good to get a kid learning a little James Brown before her second birthday.
  
  
• Fiona's been putting words together more often to make... well, not quite sentences, but at least phrases. Taking off on a page in one of her books in which the father bear takes the baby bear to the store (Daddy Loves Me, to be precise), Fiona recently spent an evening carrying a basket around the apartment chanting "I go to market! I go to market!" Another favorite of mine was the day she kept repeating "I got to say bye now" (which was a little odd since we weren't going anywhere and hadn't been anywhere).
  
  And she wouldn't be a near-two year old if she hadn't learned a few phrases for resisting. If you ask her to do something she doesn't want to do (like get a diaper change), she'll insist "no like diaper change!" It gets kind of amusing when she gets in a seriously bad mood and starts rejecting everything we know she really likes ("no like juice! no like outside!")
  
  
• From the photos-we-can't-take department (a.k.a. the "stories Fiona really won't want to be told in about ten years" dept.): like most toddlers, Fiona loves to be naked. She only gets to be totally naked at bathtime (which is right before bedtime), and we usually let her run around for a minute or two before we guide her into the bath. Fiona figured out the rules pretty quickly, and showed she's no dummy--a few nights ago when I went to change her diaper, she started asking to take a bath. At 4:30 in the afternoon. When I asked her if she was just hoping to run around naked, she gave a big grin.
  
  
• Over Thanksgiving in Florida, Fiona acquired two small stuffed animal cats named Tiá Cat and Tió Cat (named for her real Tiá and Tió). They've become her favorite stuffed animals and she likes to clutch them tightly when she goes to bed. She also likes to put them to sleep (all the stuffed animals get put to sleep), singing them lullabyes and reading books before laying them down on the bed.
  
  I know at least one occasional reader of this blog is going to have a baby soon, so here's a tip on what to do when it's time to put the baby down, at least to follow Fiona's example of how she puts Tió down: push the infant's face into the pillow as hard as possible while yelling "go sleep! go sleep!" Keep mashing it around--Fiona seems to think it really works!
  
  
• Her imagination continues to grow by leaps and bounds as well. A few nights ago she grabbed a wooden spoon and the lid to her toy basket, sat down and started "rowing" her "boat". She's also jumped around the apartment pretending to be Kanga (from Winnie-the-Pooh, as if you needed to ask) looking for Roo.
  
  Her favorite games, though, are role reversals, where she gets to be the parent and we're the babies. Putting Mommy or Daddy down to bed, complete with good night kisses from the stuffed animals. Consoling Daddy when he yells and cries. Calling Mommy or Daddy a "diaper baby" and laughing when we run around the way she does when she's in her diaper (we, um, don't actually put on diapers when we do this, all right?) Daddy "sitting" on her lap.
  

Well, 'tis the weekend to lavish toys upon the toddler. When I next report in I'll have a whole new batch of repetitive melodies to complain about, and reports of how Fiona feels about Santa once she sees what he can bring down a chimney. Happy Holidays all!

Christmas Trees, Santa and the Binch and His Doggie

On Saturday morning we bundled up and headed off to see Santa, ready to get the traditional family photo of a two-year old screaming in terror on Santa's lap. We didn't even make it that far; Fiona, who had happily walked the whole way from our house to the drug store, froze in terror when she saw the white-bearded guy and clung so tightly to mommy and daddy that we weren't even able to get near enough to Santa to kneel with her in a photo. Perhaps next year.

After that, we picked out a tree. Decorations took place after Fiona had gone to bed (too many wires for the lights and breakable ornaments that had to be hung out of reach to be worrying about navigating around a toddler). Since she woke up on Sunday morning, though, Fiona's been excitedly pulling ornaments off of the lower branches. She doesn't have the same lingering fear of Santa that she has of airplanes, either--she took an ornament of Santa playing baseball down and carried him around the apartment for a while, saying "come on, Santa, let's go Santa" as she walked.

Of course, she probably has a warped view of Santa to begin with. We live in a neighborhood where people decorate their front lawns according to the holiday, which means Fiona can learn about ghosts and pumpkins before Halloween, or turkeys with pilgrim hats before Thanksgiving. The guy across the street from us has a giant Frosty the Snowman and a Grinch in front of his house. Fiona loved pointing to them, so we decided to show her our DVD of How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Afterwards we realized that this was going to be her first frame of reference for the man in the red suit--a mean green guy who steals presents!

In all seriousness, Fiona loves the Grinch and now asks to see it pretty much every day (she has trouble with the "Gr" in his name, so when she asks for it he's the "Binch"). To her mind, though, it's a story about a dog who goes on a sled ride:

Nighttime Visits

Well, it was too good to last. Fiona visited us last night at about 11:15. And then again at 11:30, 11:40, 11:45... As a last resort, we finally wound up closing the door to her room. She cried for about five minutes and then went to sleep. But we're very tired this morning.

On the other hand, yesterday during dinner she looked at me and said "Daddy?" as she held out her hand.

I leaned in. "Yes?"

She grabbed my head and pulled it close to her.

"I love you."

So, as you can imagine, I was willing to forgive her just about anything after that.

I'm still tired, though.

Big Girl Bed

After a month of talking about it, with Fiona and with each other, we finally made the move from the crib to a toddler bed ("big girl bed," as Fiona calls it) on Saturday. Which gives Aunt Kathy the distinction of being the last person to put Fiona down to sleep in her crib when she babysat on Saturday morning.

Fiona took to the bed immediately--as soon as she saw it, she climbed right in and pulled the blanket over her. She then spent the evening climbing in and out of the bed, putting her various stuffed animals down to sleep, discovering that she could bring her own books into bed with her, et cetera.

She was so excited, in fact, that we almost couldn't get her to go to sleep on Saturday night. She didn't want to read stories, she didn't want to hear any lullabys, and she certainly didn't want to have a good night cuddle. So when Andrea finally kissed her good night and closed the door, we were treated to a screaming fit the likes of which we hadn't heard since we were first teaching Fiona to fall asleep on her own over a year and a half ago.

I went in after a few minutes of screaming and discovered that Fiona, regretting her newfound freedom, had pulled her nightlight out of its socket and had plunged her room into darkness. So I plugged the nightlight back in and explained to her that even though she could climb out of bed whenever she wanted, it was still just like sleeping in her crib, and she probably didn't want to pull out the nightlight. I don't know if it was my talk or (more likely) the fact that she has a basic enough understanding of cause and effect, but the nightlight stayed in the rest of the night (and last night, too).

The newfound freedom did mean, however, that at 4:45 am on Sunday morning we were treated to a very, very, very happy toddler suddenly crawling up the mattress to lie down between us. Once again, she was too excited for the trip to really work, and after letting her stay for about 15 minutes, I took her back to her bed and told her we could play again in the morning.

Her next visit came shortly before 6am. That time I tried to take her straight back to bed, and she hopped straight back out. But she did better on the second visit, and actually let us get another 30-45 minutes of sleep with her in our bed. Even so, we still felt like we were returning to newborn sleeping hours.

Since she'd done so well at keeping the nightlight in after the initial incident, I figured there was no need to remove the nightlight on Sunday morning, the way we always had when she slept in her crib, once we got up. But Fiona has been watching our routine all her life, and when she saw that the nightlight was still plugged in, she pulled it out of its socket and carried it over to the basket where we normally keep it during the daytime.

With the bed being a clear hit, we decided to take the crib down on Sunday (we left it in her room on Saturday night in case the bed turned out to be a massive failure, but since her room is only about 100 sq. ft., there really isn't room for both a crib and a bed). We said a big goodbye to the crib, but still Fiona screamed and cried while I took it apart. Ultimately, though, we decided it was better to take that path than to have her go out for an hour and discover that her crib had vanished; we don't want her thinking that the things she loves will suddenly disappear.

For the second night with the new bed, Fiona did much better at following her normal bedtime routine. She did fall out of bed for the first time, but the distance to the floor is so short that she barely cried. Instead, she hopped up and headed for our bedroom. Since it was only 5:15, and we knew that stopping nighttime visits before they become a habit is the first task every parent faces once the toddler leaves the crib, I intercepted her before she could reach our bed and carried her back to her room.

I tucked Fiona in and told her that nighttime was for sleeping and that she should try to stay in bed until it was light outside. She didn't say anything, but after I left she stayed in bed and didn't come to visit us.

When she did wake up shortly after seven, she cried out and called us to her room just as she did when she slept in her crib. When we came in to see her, she was still in her bed, worried that she wasn't allowed to get out. I tried to explain to her that it was now light outside and that she could see the light pouring in around her window shades, but she didn't seem to believe me until pulled the shade up.

So it looks like my instructions worked a little too well and we're going to be looking for a middle ground between "don't come into Mommy and Daddy's room in the middle of the night" and "don't ever leave your bed no matter what." I guess in 10-12 years I'm really going to miss the days when she followed my commands too much.