Week 204: Sickness, Pagents, and Language

Sam had a couple of bad days this week. The other night we heard her crying about midnight, and Ger went in to find that Sam hadn’t quite made it to the bathroom before throwing up. She spent the rest of the might barfing (no pictures, sorry), drinking some water because she was so dehydrated, then barfing it back up. At about 2:00 a.m. she was kneeling over the toilet while her best friend in the whole world (me) knelt beside her and held her hair back so she wouldn’t get vomit in it. I told her that in sixteen years when she’s a freshman in college she’s going to have an inexplicable case of deja vu, but she didn’t get it.

Earlier in the week Sam had starred (literally, as she was dressed as a Christmas tree with a star topper) in her preschool production of …some Christmas thing. I didn’t get to go to it since this one was on a weekday, but my mom and Geralyn went and reported vigorous singing on Sam’s part. She had, in fact, been rehearsing her songs in the bathtub all week. Nothing like a kid yelling “JINGLE BELLS! JINGLE BELLS! JINGLE BELLS!” at the top of her voice for half an hour at a time. But when she hit the stage she sang with the best of them and there was so much cute in the room you had to bail it out with buckets.

Mandy, the newly crowned one year old, is really starting to develop quickly. She’s so close to walking on her own that she may actually be doing it by the time I finish writing this sentence. Let me check. Nope, not yet. But soon. Her verbal prowess is developing quickly, though. She’ll constantly try to imitate our speech, and though she’s still not quite good at it (half the time we can’t even tell what she’s saying and we’ve known her her whole life), but it IS clearly speech. The sounds are often consistent, with her favorite words being “tree” (thanks to the Christmas tree, I’m sure), “light,” and “cat.” These also happen to be her favorite things to grab and manhandle, much to our frustration and the cat’s terror.

Mandy’s also getting good at the comprehension part of the language equation. In fact, she really surprised me the other day. She was crawling around our office floor near the trash can when she found some little piece of crinkly plastic that she liked the sound of. She held it up for my inspection, and when I judged it to be a delightful but deadly choking hazard I said, “Yes, plastic! Mandy, put the plastic in the trash can.” And …she did! She looked at the plastic, looked at me, and then crawled over to the trash can to plunk it in.

What’s even more shocking than the idea of obedience from a child was that she actually seemed to understand what I was asking her to do. She had labels for both “plastic” and “trash can.” Then she understood the verb “put.” That’s awesome. That’s the kind of first time developmental breakthroughs that I just love seeing and that make it so much fun to be a parent.