Dress-Up Shoes

Someone gave these to us when she was born. I finally got to pull them out for a holiday party last weekend. Dressing up baby girls is just about as fun as I thought it would be.

Journal Excerpt

I really like the way she hunches up her shoulders while she’s walking, as if she might fall right over if she relaxes too much.

I also like the way she says “www-OW!” if she sees anything exciting. She says it when pointing to fish at the aquarium. She says it when she sees the cats for the first time every morning.

Because she doesn’t talk much I tend to forget that she notices things, until she’ll do something that completely surprises me. Like when we walked by the hand sanitizer, she pretended to squeeze some out and made washing movements with her hands. When she grabs her toothbrush, she’ll also grab the toothpaste tube and pretend to squeeze some onto the brush. When I say “all done” after a bath, she’ll reach down herself to unstopper the tub so water flows out. I caught her trying to put her own socks on the other day, and she also tries to put her feet into our shoes. Seeing her do these things without previous instruction is sort of be like seeing one of the cats suddenly grab a broom and sweep up spilled litter on the floor. It’s rather bizarre.

Noises

The more I talk to other people with babies, the more I get the sense that E is really a pretty loud person. You mean it’s not normal to not need a baby monitor because you can hear her cry in every room of the house? Oh. My mom used to remark on how “resonant” her cries were. And the nurses in the hospital on what a “healthy” pair of lungs she had. Ha.

Sometimes she’ll start to yell AAAH—AAAH—AAAH continuously, usually because she’s bored. I’ll be switching her to different positions in my arms, trying to distract her with things, but she just keeps going. She’s not upset, or crying, or squirming, just sort of yelling. It’s like I’m holding a little car alarm. People start to look over and I’m tempted to leave her there and pretend I don’t know her.

She’s good at letting us know in the mornings she’s awake. She’ll go sequentially through all the sounds she knows how to make, which put together means GET OFF YOUR BUTT AND COME GET ME NOW.

She likes to copy other people’s sounds. When other people cough, she makes little fake coughing sounds back. If I say “mmm, that was yummy” she’ll go “mmmmmm” back. She likes to mutter to herself, with lots of “sh” “ppuh” “pht” sounds, when reading a book on her own. She’s starting to copy our words: “up” is “UHH.” Bubble is “buh-boh.” Banana is “aah-na-na.” Apple is “ah-puuh.”

Journal Excerpt

These are the things about her that I’m really getting a kick out of these days:

When we ask her, “where is God?” she cranes her neck back and looks up for a really long time at the ceiling. Then she points up her finger as far as she can, standing on her tippy-toes. Then she’ll look back at us while keeping her finger pointed straight up. The first time she did this, D laughed for five minutes straight.

When I ask her “give me a hug?” she’ll lay her head down against whatever part of my body she can reach and gently rest her hands against me. The first time she did this, it was always to the cats; she would sneak up behind them, lay her head down on them and wrap her arms around them, which was adorable.

She’s starting to walk, but she looks drunk doing it. She has this slow, wide-based gait, and frequently her tummy, which sticks out in front of her, overpowers her balance and sends her plopping down on her butt.

She discovered last week that she has a bellybutton, and it scared the living daylights out of her. When in the bath, she’ll occasionally feel for it, and immediately get frightened and want to be held. Most of the time her belly is so big she can’t see it, which is a good thing.

She can distinguish between all twenty-eight animals pictured on her blocks. I sometimes lay them all out in a grid, then ask her to point out various ones—swan, seal, hen, eagle—and she points to the right picture nearly one hundred percent of the time. The fact that she can’t really speak much yet makes this feat seem more brilliant than it probably actually is, but it floors me every time.

She prefers to eat in a civilized manner these days. If I lay out peas on her tray, she won’t touch them, but if I put them in a bowl and give her a spoon, she’ll patiently spoon up each one. Even if she misses, she seems to find the empty spoon just as tasty.

When we tuck her into bed now, she lies quietly on her back while we fold the blankets around, holding onto her security blanket and sucking her pacifier. She’ll rest her hand against her cheek to sign “sleepy.” Then she’ll take her pacifier out and with her other hand, blow us a kiss. Then she’ll put the pacifier back in and wave goodbye.

Certain Qualities

I was thinking about what I want for her to be known for. Before she was born we read some books that talked about how children are judged so much from an early age by how they look. And it’s sort of true. What else can you really say about a six month-old? (wow, he really makes great poops.) Why else do we fawn so much over cute little outfits? I realized pretty quickly after starting her in daycare that dressing her in the same pajama onesies every day, while clearly the most cost-effective and diaper-efficient method, was not going to cut it. Those daycare babies had real little fake jeans, and socks with shoes. I never really got the point of shoes for babies who can’t yet walk.

D and I asked ourselves one day, if we had to pick the top three qualities we wish she would have, what would it be? Would we want her to be a girl that people would know and think, “wow, she is really good looking”? Or, “she’s incredibly smart”? Or, “she’s an amazing athlete/musician/writer”?

D said he would most of all want her to be someone kind. That of course made me immediately ashamed of my top three, which were somewhere in the vicinity of looks/smarts/the-mad-athletic-skills-I-never-had. It made me realize that the road to caring too much about how she looks or what she can achieve can be a slippery slope.

It got me thinking about the other fruit of the spirit that didn’t make it on my list. What about praying for E to be someone who is patient? Who has self-control? Who is gentle? Who, like her name, is full of joy?

So to remind myself, I posted a list of one quality to pray for, each day of the month. Today was courage. Tomorrow is salvation. We’ll see how it goes.