Thanks for Sharing

Saturday, January 28th, 5pm, Andrea talks on the phone with Nana as Fiona (who has been fighting a cold all week) plays nearby.

Andrea: Fiona, do you want to speak to Nana?
Fiona (picking up the phone): Okay.
Nana: Hi, Fiona.
Fiona: Nana, I got boogers!

Fiona Comes Out of the Closet

Family lore has it that when I was Fiona's age I used to play a game where my grandmother and I would pretend to ride the subway by sitting down in the closet. Apparently, Fiona isn't going to play the same game (given that she has Queens-based parents with a car as opposed to Brooklyn-based parents without she doesn't ride the subway very often), but she has come up with two games she likes to play with the walk-in closets in our apartment.

First, she likes to go into the closet in our bedroom and close the door as far as she can (the door doesn't latch shut easily, which is good, because Fiona is still a ways from mastering knobs). We then talk about how much we miss Fiona and how we wonder where she's gone as giggles emanate from behind the closet door. Fiona then throws the door open and shouts "surprise!"

The pantry closet, on the other hand, has become a pretend front door. Fiona says "doorbell, who is it?" and then opens the door to greet Aunt Kathy, or Nana and Pop, or Grandma and Papa, or whomever she's decided has come to visit (this was particularly neat when Aunt Kathy actually showed up in person last night less than an hour after Fiona had been conjuring her from the pantry). This morning the game seemed to have evolved to the point where some of her toys go away (to work, I think) behind the pantry door. We all had to give her corn popper a kiss and a hug before Fiona put it in the pantry, said good-bye, and closed the door.

Looking Ahead

Fiona is going to learn the alphabet and numbers in 2006. I'm not saying that as an ambitious parent who's got the timetable figured out in order to guarantee the right PSAT score in 2019. I mean that Fiona is noticing letters and numbers, asking what they are, and even recognizing some without being prompted.

Her first letter was, to nobody's surprise, "O". The Cheerios people make sure of that. Since then she's added "W", "E", "S" and sometimes "A", "I", "L" and "M" (she almost always gets O, W, E and S right, which means she can spell OWES and WOES, which aren't words I hope she has to use too often, especially at her age).

She can also do a few numbers. When we were at the grocery store last weekend she pointed out every "4" she saw--which was quite a few, since seemingly every special at the deli was advertised at $4.99.

And, yes, we have refrigerator magnet letters. They're getting a workout these days.

Annual Report

Catching up, since Fiona turned two earlier this month:

From January 7, 2005-January 7, 2006:

Years aged: 1, increasing her age by 100%. If she does that again next year, she'll turn 4 in 2007 and 8 in 2008.

Weight: 29 lbs., up from about 21 at the beginning of the year. If she adds 38% to her weight every year between now and her 18th birthday she'll weigh 2 1/2 tons at that point.

Vocabulary: Well, she snuck in her first word the day before she turned one, and we lost count of how many words she can say after about June (when she had about 5 dozen). I'm guessing she can say 200-300 words and understand a lot more than that. Only concrete concepts at the moment, of course; her favorite phrase is "what's that?" and we have yet to grapple with "why?"

Steps taken: The first ones came in February, and she's been off and running since May. Lately we're working on jumping and dancing (which are roughly the same thing to a two year old). Recently she walked all the way home from day care without riding in the stroller.

Tantrums thrown: I'll laugh at what I thought was bad in 2005 if I write another one of these after her third birthday.

Revenue contributed to the Pooh Industrial Complex: Oh, boy. I don't think it reached five figures. When she turned one she had a crawling Pooh and some very small stuffed characters from the mobile that used to go above her changing table. When she turned two... let's just say she has considerably more Winnie-the-Pooh memorabilia.

She Would Figure This Out Mid-Winter

I haven't posted in forever so I'll have to do a bunch of catch up posts. But I'll start with the most recent news, which is that Fiona has figured out how to take her clothes off on her own.

Yep, now we get to go through that phase, right in the middle of sweater season.

Nighttime Visits

We finally gave up on trying to convince Fiona not to visit us at 2am and now just keep the door to her room closed all night. But we're still going in to her room a few times each week when she wakes up crying because one of her stuffed animals (last night it was Tigger) has fallen out of bed (Grandma discovered this when Fiona stayed out in Connecticut over New Year's).

Obviously, Fiona is able to get out of bed to retrieve her stuffed animals, but since she isn't yet capable of covering herself with her blanket and tucking herself back into bed we still have to make the nighttime visits.

Thank God it's not as frequent as the pacifier visits when she was 4 months old. Instead of once or twice a week it was 2-3 times per night. Even once they learn to sleep through the night, they don't sleep through the night.

Misheard

As Fiona's vocabulary grows and she sings more and more we're starting to enjoy listening to what she thinks the lyrics of her favorite songs are. So far, we've discovered that the Allison Krauss song "Down to the River to Pray" from the O, Brother soundtrack is actually "down to the river to play" (which makes sense--what else would you be doing down by the river?). And when you count all the pretty little horses, dapples and grays have become apples and grapes.

Fiona can also count to twenty... sort of. She still usually starts at three (although with prompting she can do one and two), and the numbers past ten usually go something like "11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 18, 20!" And she can identify the letter "O" (that one was easy, given all the Cheerios she eats) and "W" and can sometimes do "E" and "S". Which means she'll be able to spell "woes" pretty soon. And "owes"--hmm, any useful words out there?

And It Isn't Even Baseball Season

Yesterday morning as Andrea read the front section of the Times, Fiona pointed at the paper and said "paper."

Andrea nodded and told her she was right.

Fiona then pointed at the Sports section.

"Daddy paper."