Lea right now

Every now and then, I startle myself by realizing that on some level, I go through each day with Lea as though assuming that her personality and her way of communicating today will be permanent.  I think it's because she is communicating so well; she is able to express her needs pretty clearly, and we have conversations, so I no longer spend much time thinking "if only she could ____," the way I did before her leap in vocabulary, when we'd both be brought to tears at times by the frustration of not understanding each other.   So we're at a sweet spot right now, and because of that, I often forget that it's temporary, that she'll progress even more with her language skills, and her personality will evolve and she will grow up.  Wow.

In particular, I find myself smiling at the Lea-related memories of just about every second of this past Christmas, because over the month of December she caught on to enough about the season to get really, really excited, but still bewildered in some ways, which was insanely cute. For instance, she started to become familiar with Christmas songs, and developed her favorites: "Rudolph the Reindeer" (and now she calls every deer a reindeer), "Confern-en-joy song", "Crib for Bed," "Now you dear old man song."  She would request these at bedtime and freak the heck out when she heard them on the all-Christmas radio station or at church.

A couple of times recently, she'll start to sing one of these songs out of the blue, weeks past Christmas, and screw up her forehead trying to remember the words.  In the car the other day, she kept repeating, "Christmas eve is coming soon, now you dear old maaaaan."  After about 5 repetitions of that line, she paused, and asked, "What's the next one, mama?"  When I started to sing "Whisper what you'll-", she cut me off.  "No mama, I sing." And then, memory jogged, continued: "Whisper what you'll bring to me, tell me if you caaaaaan."

We took her to the Bristol Motor Speedway light show.  Twice.  She would literally gasp with excitement, saying "Look at thaaaaat!" in a breathy, awed voice. "And look at thaaaaat!  See?  See, look!  It's a snowmaaaaaaan.   It's a-- It's a-- It's a penguin!!! Look at thaaaaaat!"

We also geared our bedtime stories to the season, flipping to the nativity stories in the little kids' Bible storybook we got for her a long time ago.   Through this, I'm assuming, she got the idea that all babies could be identified as "Baby Jesus," and has since pointed out a little Willow Tree figurine of a mother, father, and baby, saying, "And there's Daddy, and there's Mama, and there's the Baby Jesus!"  Those stories have also introduced words like "manger" and "stable" into her vocabulary, and she's been using them both to mean any sort of small space.  I found her recently putting all her beloved stuffed animals in the bottom of the little Ikea wardrobe in her room.  When I asked her what she was doing, she said, "Shhhh.  Everybody's sleeeeeping.  In the manger."

By the time we got a few days past Christmas, the Bible storybook had moved on to grown-up Jesus, and the little follow-up question to one of the stories (I forget which) was something like, "If you could spend the day with Jesus, what would you ask him?"  Usually these questions are totally rhetorical, because Lea's just at the beginning of understanding open-ended questions like that, but she actually answered, and with feeling: "Hi Jesus.  How are you doing?  Are you feeling ok?  OK!"  We laughed, and Brian followed up: "That's a great thing to ask Jesus.  What do you think he would ask you?"  Again, we didn't expect a coherent answer, but: "He would ask... for a potato."  By this point, I was really laughing.  "Wow!  Anything else?"  Lea answered matter-of-factly.  "A banana."  Of course. 

She also has started to compose her own bedtime prayers.   Nine times out of ten, the result is, "Dear God.  Jesus.  Was born.  In a stable.  Amen."  

(Coming back a day later, I remembered something else I wanted to add.  Christmastime also coincided with a period of heightened confusion regarding subjects and objects when piecing together sentences.  This resulted, most notably, in the often-repeated insistence that "A fire truck was on top of Santa, and he fwo chid-a-wen to the candy.")

As usual, I'm having a tough time letting go of the Christmas season, which, even though I don't get that sense of magic I did as a kid and young teenager, still gives me a very warm feeling that I tend to grieve for the rest of the winter.   But Lea still sings Christmas carols on occasion, which is fun, not to mention a whole host of other songs.  She asks frequently for "Hills lar-alive song" (the Sound of Music), and actually knows most of the words.  Sometimes, when we've put her to bed for the night, we can hear her quietly singing to her animals "... for the thousand yeeeeeeears...."  

Actually, listening to her over the monitor is often hilarious.   Last night, she spent about 10 minutes taking body-part inventory: "What do you have, Caw? Do you have toes? Oh, you do have toes! OK!  What do you have, Rufus?  Do you have eyes?  Oh, you do have eyes!  OK!  What do you have, Froggy?  Do you have arms?  Oh, you do have arms! OK!"

Those three animals-- Caw (so named because although he is apparently a duck, we thought he was a seagull and would have him go "Caw! Caw!"), Rufus (the little stuffed dog that we got as a shower gift and has been Lea's favorite animal since about 6 months old), Froggy (who came from my cousin Glen, weirdly enough, via my dad, when they ran into each other at a trade show and Glen had won this little frog at some booth with carnival games, and didn't know what to do with it), plus a stuffed owl known as "Owl Baby," comprise the A-team that Lea sleeps with every night and refers to as "Everybody."  They are small enough that she can, when she's feeling particularly somber it seems, gather all four into her arms and clutch them to her chest to keep with her at all times.  

You need to know this to understand another funny moment.  You also need to know that her first McDonald's happy meal toy is a plastic Shrek that she, for some reason, started calling "Guy," and is very keen on at the moment.  

The other day we were talking about having good friends, and I heard myself saying how some friends are extra-special.  Feeling stupidly self-conscious about this, and wanting to make sure she is friendly with everyone, I said to Lea, "Everybody is special, you know."  She paused, and added very soberly, "And Guy is special, too."  

She has animated, and very brief, pretend phone conversations, using our old XM Radio remote as a prop.  "Hi Uncle Eric, what are you doooooing?  You feeling OK?  OK! Bye Bye!" Pause.  "Beep beep beep."  Another pause.  "Hi Aunt Megan, what are you doooooing?  You feeling OK? OK! Bye Bye!"  And then on down the list of relatives.  

She calls credit cards "messages," fishing through our wallets with urgency, insisting, "I have to get my messages!" No idea where that came from.  She also plays occasionally with the gigantic plastic orange wristwatch that Brian purchased at Rite-Aid to time contractions the first night I thought I might be in labor with Lea.  She calls this "my match," and will frantically push all the buttons on it, announcing with a slightly panicked voice, "It's not working!"  I'm not sure what she expects it to do.  ("It's not working" is her go-to phrase when she's frustrated with something.  Can't get her pants on?  "It's not working!"  Keeps dropping peas off her spoon?  "It's not working!")

And oh, I was mistaken when I said that she calls all deer "reindeer."  There's apparently one exception.  When she and Brian were flipping through a coffee-table book about Smoky Mountain wildlife, they came across a picture of a bobcat.  Evidently, that term really struck Lea's fancy, because when they turned the page and Brian pointed out a deer, then came the logical correction: "No, it's a bobdeer."  Come to think of it, I rather like the sound of that, too.

I hope this all gives a glimpse, for those of you who are far away and haven't gotten a chance to see these developments in action, of the very entertaining phase we're in.  I'm sure half of it is my aforementioned wistfulness about the ever-shortening "just Lea" time, but so far I have very few complaints about the so-called terrible twos.  I know life is about to get crazy, crazy, crazy, and it will be perfectly understandable if our frustrating times ramp back up as we sort out how to continue to meet Lea's needs as best as we possibly can.  Above all, I know it's going to suddenly become immensely more difficult to remember these times, so it is with some urgency that I try to record it all here.  (I never did keep an official baby book, but every now and then it strikes me as something like an emergency that I create a textual snapshot of who my daughter is.)

I also, in the interest of full disclosure, remember something I was told when I crept further and further past my due date with Lea.  I went for my first acupuncture treatment, which was designed not to induce contractions, but simply to help me get rid of tension.  The practitioner said it would be helpful if I could spend time during the treatment thinking about ways in which I might be internalizing stress about the transition to parenthood, which could be counterproductive in terms of my ability to relax enough for the treatment to work (and ultimately, go into labor on my own).  I've been thinking a lot about what's stressful about the upcoming transition from one child to two, and the main thing I fixate on is this: have I adequately celebrated and cherished the child I already have, the parenting I've already done?  Will I remember this time as a mother to one?  As a writer of sorts, or at least a writerly person, my compulsion is to sort through those worries by describing life the way it is, right now, so it doesn't slip away forever during the upcoming post-partum haze and subsequent ramping-up of stress. 

I don't have an acupuncturist here, so my blog will have to do.  So there, mind-body connection: I've written it all down, I've responded to my worry about losing the specialness of this time, I've preserved the pre-baby memories as best as I can.  I'm free to go into labor now, correct?