Odds & Ends

Fall break

Elisa and Mommy have enjoyed the last two days of Mommy’s break while Daddy was in Wisconsin for meetings.  We’ve had more time together, with Mommy only having one student teacher observation.  So we have tried to clean a little in Elisa’s room – but that didn’t work so well since Elisa wanted to play with the clothes that Mommy was trying to pack up and put away.  We have played piano and danced to music and climbed on chairs and taken baths.  And Mommy has had more chance to take pictures of all of it! 

We took a trip  to Rochester, NY in order to get a minor safety recall on Mommy’s car fixed.  Before we left home, we played in the 2 inches of snow on the ground (in mid-October!) for a few moments, and Elisa was decidedly ambivalent.  She was happier once Mommy gave her a big chunk of snow, but still uncertain.  While the car was being fixed, we went to the mall across the street.  Elisa got to look at the puppies, birds, rabbits and pythons at the pet store, squealing louder than their delighted yips and stomping her feet in excitement.  We also got Elisa outfitted for the winter earlier than planned, buying a snow suit (maroon, not pink!), hat and mittens.  She liked the hat and mittens enough that she wandered around the house in them for a bit.  We also had lunch at Friendly’s (mac and cheese and brocolli for Elisa…and she even ate off the plate without picking up the plate!) and shopped for a few things for Mommy.

We did miss Daddy, though.  Elisa waved a big goodbye to Daddy Wednesday morning.  Thursday afternoon Elisa started waving and smiling at Daddy’s picture on the wall.  So Mommy took down the picture and let Elisa look at it and she carried it around for a while, eventually secreting it in the bottom of the end table in the living room. (Mommy didn’t find it until Elisa brought it back out later!) 

Elisa is still teething on her 1st year molars and as of Thursday, the top two had started to break through.  In the process, Elisa has been running a low grade fever on and off for the past week and having sudden unexpected moments of pain.  So she will be happy and grinning, especially now that she has started to deliberately smile and wrinkle her eyes, and then will yell.  This has a side benefit for Mommy, since Elisa has taken to bringing books to Mommy or Daddy when she isn’t feeling as well and cuddling.  With teething, we have even made it through multiple stories at one sitting.

Mommy has indulged Elisa just a little while Daddy was away.   Elisa has continued to get much more fluent at climbing up on the dining room chairs.  So she is frequently up and down two or three times in the time it take Mommy to get breakfast (i.e. cereal and juice).  Friday, Mommy allowed Elisa to eat her toast and banana while standing on a chair.  Elisa also managed to get a knife from further in on the table and speared her toast so she worked a little at toast on a stick.  Elisa has been working on getting more fluent with silverware, sometimes having good success with a fork and macaroni and other times (most of the time!) picking up food with the fork and then using her fingers to take the food from the fork to her mouth.

Elisa also continues to climb and clamber more.  This morning, she made it onto the coffee table on her own.  The other day she crawled under the chair which has cross bars about 8 inches off the ground.  Her dancing has become much more varied, including stomping her feet one after another, swaying from side to side (even in a stroller in the mall to background music), waving arms in the air from side to side and “singing” as well as the regular bending at the knees.  Despite the fussiness with teething, she is a very happy girl – and she likes being happy!  We enjoy her playful and cheerful spirit! 

Climbing and Communicating

We continue to be amazed how quickly Elisa changes!  She is now 14 months and it was just 6-7 weeks ago she was introduced to milk and it seems like ages ago!  Since then she has also learned to drink from a straw, which leads to better sippy cups and less spilled milk.  Elisa has no new teeth, but the gums are swelling with molars coming and as a result have been constantly drooling for more than a week.

This week she has taken her climbing skills to new levels.  For a week or two, she has enjoyed getting up on the little two-shelf shoe rack and this week she has mastered climbing onto a dining room chair by using the rungs on the chair.  (At first she was stepping up on a little box.)  The table is no longer a safe place to leave anything because she wants to climb from the chair to the table!

Elisa is also getting better at putting objects in their places, like the pieces for her fridge farm and the alphabet tiles in her Croc.  In another sense, she is definitely learning to pick up (though not always doing it.)  She has a bin for her bath toys that goes under the towel stand in the bathroom which she has been taking out and dumping (on the floor, into the bathtub, in the hall, etc.)  One morning this week, having dumped it out, mommy asked her to put the toys away and modeled with two of them.  At that point, she picked up every other toy to put it away and then carried the bin to its place in the bathroom.

Elisa has also gained a couple new words.   She clearly started saying “ki” for kitty by mid-September.  “Dog” is her current favorite.  We taught her this since she was applying “ki” to the neighbor dog and now she is applying “dog” to cats and bears and all sorts of animals.  Today she came home and said “uh-oh” a couple times when she had dropped something – a word I’m sure she learned from a 17-month old girl she spends half her days with!

What is most surprising is the amount of understanding she has even though she has few words.  Early on, she would bring us our shoes or her coat to hint that she wanted to go outside.  Recently, she has clearly caught on to words like “piano,” “music,” “bath” and “outside,” knowing certain places in the house associated with these words.  Most surprising are the times that she will respond to complex commands.  Last weekend, Andrew wadded up a plastic bag with a hole and asked her to throw it away, noting that she was allowed to throw it away since we normally discourage use of the trash (since desirable things tend to be added…).   She took the bag, deliberately set off the 8 feet to the trash can, opened the lid and put the bag inside and, when Andrew requested it, she shut the lid of the trash can rather than continue to play in it.