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!