barkdust

Dear Silvie,

I have to say that January and early February were pretty tough because you got a whole string of cold viruses and were miserable most of the time.  Now that you are feeling better you are much more pleasant to deal with and you are growing by leaps and bounds.  Your 2T shirts are already too short.  You outgrew some of your pants, and you are stringing words together into semi-intelligible sentences.

The other day we had a rare (and unnecessary) snow day off.  This was the first snow in your memory and you were thrilled.  You were outside making a snowman with your Papa by 7:30 a.m.  Good thing too, since the snow melted by noon.  Anyhow, you very clearly were upset when you came to me and said, “Mama, my mitten fall off!”

You are working so hard to establish your own independence in multiple ways.  You undress yourself nearly every evening when we get home from work, just because you can.  We had to draw the line at taking your diaper off without permission after cleaning up one too many accidents.  At the dinner table tonight you were not so enchanted with the main course, so I offered you a choice of yogurt or an orange for dessert.  You stated, “Orange, peel it all by myself!”  While half the sounds are still missing from these words, the meaning was abundantly clear. You want to do it yourself!

And you did manage to peel it most of the way until some citric acid got into a hang nail on your little finger and you were overwhelmed by pain and suffering and had to have a complete meltdown to express your distress.  Your negative emotions are expressed just as intensely as your positive emotions.

Miss Naomi, the Super Sitter, reports that you are an excellent mama to the baby dolls at her house.  You feed them and wrap them up in blankets.  You now have three baby dolls at home–two larger dolls and a smaller doll.  You insist on having “Mama Baby, Papa Baby and Baby Baby” in the crib with you when you go to bed at night.

Every night I pray that you will grow up to be a woman who is strong and wise and true.  And I pray that I’ll be strong and wise and true in my parenting of you.

Love,

Your Mama

Dear Silvie,

Here are some things I love about you right now:

-Tonight we were driving in the car and I was listening to NPR.  The commentator was talking about how Barack Obama is carefully preparing for the State of the Union address tomorrow night.  From the back seat I hear a cheerful, “B’ock O’mama!!!  Yayyy!”  Ummm, we may have practiced saying that a few times in the past but this was the first spontaneous political act from you.  I love you, kid.

-For the last two months you’ve worn red, rubber rainboots and only red, rubber rainboots.  Fortunately, that’s a pretty good choice given the weather here in Stumptown so it’s worked for you.  You refused to even let me try other shoes on you.  Until today.  Today you chose the most hideous sparkly pink pair of “dancing shoes” in the shoe basket and wore them out to dinner.  You even did a little tap dance routine on our front porch.  I was prepared to hit the pink sparkly age around four, but certainly not before your second birthday.  Guess I was wrong.

-You are obsessed with identifying every living creature as a “mama”, “papa” or “baby”.  For example, if you see a picture of two cows, you point and say “mama cow, baby cow”.  If you see three of anything, they are automatically mama, papa and baby.  If you see an obvious male, it is a “papa”.  Today you even named the bike store we drive past as “mama bike”.

-You have an intense love/hate relationship with our little housemate, Mae.  You say “Mae ‘ome?  Cawa ‘ome?” every afternoon as we drive home from work.  If they are not home, you are very sad.  And when they come home, you exclaim, “Mae Cawa ‘ome!”  Mae is only a few months younger than you and she looks up to you and wants to be exactly like you and wants whatever toy you are playing with.  She also wants to get right next to you in your personal space.  Your initial reaction is to shriek and shove her out of your space.  Sigh.  We have worked a lot on sharing and using your words.  In the last week though, I have seen you turn to Mae and give her a hug instead of shoving her away.  I’ve also seen each of you rush to the other’s rescue when one falls and cries.  You try to help each other up.  Usually this is not actually helpful since you grab on and won’t let go, but it’s nice to see that you care about each other.

-Miss Naomi informs me that you are very motivated by food right now.  Each morning around 10:00 you announce to her that it is time for “‘nack!” and she says, “Silvie, you can have your snack after you pick up the toys.”  She says you zoom around the living room putting all the toys away in no time flat so you can have your ‘nack.

-You love “meat”.  You eat lunch meat (thin sliced turkey breast, ham, Canadian bacon and the like) with gusto.  You also have an unabated love affair with cookies.  Over Christmas break you woke me up one morning at 5:30 a.m. demanding a cookie.  Usually we keep fig newton breakfast bars on hand to feed you.  Unfortunately, that day we were out and you had a total meltdown at 5:30 a.m. for your cookie.  Sigh.

-You’ve started singing quite a bit.  I can recognize “The Itsy Bitsy Spider”, “If You’re Happy and You Know It” and “Rockabye Baby”.  Generally you launch into “Rockabye Baby” right after we talk about B’0ck O’mama. (Barackabye Baby!)

Love,

Your Mama