"I am a toddler and I have opinions."-Lucy Lynn Bisha

More than once I have heard the question from parents wondering when their baby transitioned into toddlerhood. I always thought it would be when she started to "toddle" about as a new walker, but I have recently learned that this isn't the stuff a toddler makes. Opinions. That is the difference between a baby and toddler. Lubear has opinions. Many of them. And they are started to be accompanied by a myriad of feelings that she has absolutely no skills for controlling. Most of her opinions are reasonable and we make an attempt at saying yes as often as possible. Yes, you can wear three hats, mittens, a down coat and a down vest to play with your puzzle in the living room. Yes, you can brush your teeth at 2:00 in the afternoon. Yes, you can ride in the cart and not the front carrier. Sure, we can watch the birds flying over head for another moment or two.

Some requests and opinions are met with no or stop. No, you cannot touch my bike so that it won't fall over on your head. No, you cannot toothpaste from the tube so that you don't get a belly ache. Stop, slapping me in the face hurts and it is not a responsible way to use your hands. Absolutely not, no you can never crawl out into the parking lot. No. Never. So far, she is pretty easily redirected and hasn't had more than a couple of tantrums. When she is tired, our sensitive darling is even more so. And, while all of the refusals are given with sternness, we also use a gentle and loving voice and body language with validation of her request. Now that she is using so much sign language, we feel that it is important to acknowledge her communication and try to honor her request, but sometimes the answer is no. We want her to understand boundaries, to provide a framework for appropriately dealing with many and big emotions and to help her have flexibility in her decision making.

When it gets a little too quiet and
you find your daughter in her her room reading.

We won't know until it is too late, but it seems like Lulabee is feeling validated in her communication. Of course, only a mum mum can understand everything she is saying, like pointing to the pantry and knowing she wants a crispy snap pea and not dried mango. Jim is working on being attentive to her communication and Joanna teaches her to respond to every new sign in Spanish and English. Yesterday at the park Lucy was hungry and done playing, so she looked up at me, signed "eat" and we left right away to come home for lunch. Soooo much more pleasant than a tantrum and neither one of us being able to help the other. She wanted more blueberries for snack yesterday and actually used "more" and "please" in tandem. The kid asked for "more, please!" I have always known kids were sponges. It is a completely different journey to see the learning transpire right in my own kitchen.

It is obvious that she wants to communicate with us using verbal language, too. I have no idea what the parameters for counting actual words are, but she definitely has a few words outside of animals sounds and signs (by the way, we can add "wave your arms like a monkey" and "snap your hand like a crocodile" to the list of animals she recognizes and responds to :-). While our animal lover has been quacking for a while, she is now verbalizing "duck," as well. And even though I know they all of similar ending sounds, she is saying, "truck" and "sock," as well. I can't be sure of this one, but this morning during breakfast Lucy gave a little "cado" like sound when I showed her the avocado. Jim is so excited for her to articulate her wants, feelings and needs, whether it is by sign or by verbal articulation. He has even learned some basic signs, which he made a poster of to hang on the fridge for all who want to interact with our Louie Baby.

Our busy bee almost never wants a snuggle
nap any more, but I was lucky enough to
get one recently and I hated it :-). 

Jim was gone for the past week traveling and it always amazes me what he misses in one week's time. When he left, Lucy Lu could vaguely recognize some body parts, like her feet and her "ojitos" (eyes). By the time Daga came home, she was able to show him her head, hair, ears, eyes, nose, mouth, feet, hands and belly (in Spanish and English, of course :-). She has also become a walker-in-training machine. When put down on the floor, she now lands on her feet instead of going to her bottom. There is a little toy fire truck pusher thing at the park and she can push that truck around the entire park. The other day at the YMCA Kindergym she crawled over to a large, foam block (bigger than her) and pushed that thing all over the padded gym floor. Since just before her first birthday, Lucy has really shown interest in wanting to walk. We are so thankful that she is on the later side for walking. She has a MUCH better sense of "where the edge is" on the couch, the sidewalk, the playground, etc... Currently she understands very little about the cognitive consequences of falling and whacking her head, but she certainly gains a little more of the understanding every day. By the time she walks her self-awareness of her body in space will be more sophisticated and much less dangerous her noggin.

Growing and Playing

Messy science with cloud dough and
kitchen equipment. 

Lulabee had her one year well-baby visit today (yes, she is still my baby). She weighed in at 19.45 pounds and is now 28 inches "tall." They still measure her by laying her down on the table and making tick marks on the paper, but she is now measured in height and not length :-). Joanna went with us because she is so invested in Lucy's life that she wants to experience and learn about every part of it. I warned her that some babies don't like shots, some babies hate shots and some babies think the world is ending when they get shots. Poor, darling Lucy, of course, is on the most sensitive end of immunization reactions and it is just awful...usually. I don't know if it is because she is older, because we created the perfect storm of outdoor play, a nap, a smoothie, milk and then the shots or if Joanna has magical powers, but this was, hands down, Lucy's calmest visit to the pediatrician in her entire year of life. She usually hates going even when there are no shots involved.

Pipecleaners and colanders with YoNanna.

Today she watched patiently as they pricked her finger and squeezed blood out for a hemoglobin test (13.7 out of 14 on the iron scale...yay!) and didn't even flinch when they gave her the second half of the flu shot. The MMR shot, which is apparently very painful not only on impact, but also the whole time going in, made her lose her mind. Then the most amazing part happened. She was calm within three minutes and playing with Joanna's hair clip, one of her favorite toys. Her leg is definitely sore where she got the MMR vaccine, but overall we had a lovely, playful afternoon and evening. I always leave at least 48 hours in our schedule to act as only Diddle Bee's mom after shots. I am grateful that she is taking these so well.

Dry noodles and an Amazon box so mum
can cook dinner. 

Not only is she healthy, but the pediatrician came just short of admitting that Lucy is a bit advanced for her age. I mean, Jim and I have known this since I got pregnant. After all, look at the two gene pools she was created from :-). The doctor was happy to hear about her varied diet, her sign language and pleased by her interactivity level. What can I say, we just may have a genius baby on our hands. Let's be real here. The kid can say "mum," "ada ada," "ck" (socks) and make a plethora of animal sounds, if not adapted for her genius size tongue. So advanced.

I don't always wear a hat, but when I do I
 wear three of them.

Lucy has mastered a number of signs which thrills me to no end. This has significantly improved our reciprocal communication abilities with her and she does not show much of the typical frustration that comes with trying to communicate and not being understood. Granted, she does not have a sign for everything she wants to say, so sometimes "push me on the bike" is more and "let's go play outside, mum" comes out as a milk/more/eat/milk/more/milk/eat. But she is totally willing to try to sign for us and almost always understand what she wants. This doesn't mean she always gets what she wants, however, it does mean we can acknowledge her communication. By the way, she uses these signs whether the conversation is happening in English or Spanish. Be still my little heart.

Sheppard's Pie Delight. Lucy can now stick food with a fork
AND put it in her mouth. I think this photo depicts how
advanced she is nicely :-).

Her signs so far:

• Milk/Leche 
• Eat/Comes
• More/Mas
• All Done/Terminaste
• Please/Por Favor (used when she wants something, like ride bike)

Lucy loves animals (so advanced for a one year old) and has sounds for a number of them at this point. Again, she makes the same sound whether you say the animal name in Spanish or English. We have Joanna to thank for this! Some of the animals have a movement, like arm-waving for a monkey and neck bending for a giraffe. What sound does a giraffe make, any way?!

• Cow
• Duck
• Horse/Zebra
• Pig
• Bird
• Snake
• Cat 
• Dog
• Fish
• Giraffe
• Elephant
• Rat/Mouse

All three of us continue to enjoy escapades in play. I wish I could ensure that all babies and kids got to experience play like Lucy does. It is both fun and meaningful in so many ways. This past week we had a play date with our neighbor, who we met in Lucy's old classroom. His parents are wonderfully brave and were excited about bathtub finger painting. It was messy and fun and a surprisingly easy clean-up. Macsen dove right in and got covered in paint immediately. Lucy was, as always, tentative and cautious until she warmed up to the fun. She ended up painting on both Macsen and his mommy.

Then they had a bath party to get washed up. Lucy thought it was so funny to find Macsen's feet through the red colored water. I am grateful that we are making connections with such great people so early in Lucy's life. She may not have specific memories of all of these fun times, but they all add to her vocabulary and prior knowledge which builds the foundation for future reading (and thereby academic success). Nothing is ever just finger painting when your mum is a teacher :-).

West Coast National Parks Part I: Joshua Tree

After successfully driving across the country for three weeks with our then 5-6 month old, camping, staying at friends and stopping at hotels, a nine day trip to one destination seemed like it was reasonable with a now one year old. While Luc isn't a big fan of the car, she can hang in there and we have a pretty good formula for sane road trips at this point. I am actually grateful we had the opportunity to do a big trip in the car because the whole thing is so much less intimating than it was the day we left New York and headed for our new home in California. I mean, that was about as high pressure as I could have handled. We were moving to Berkeley for me, for my new adventure. If it didn't work out (which it still may not, but is going surprisingly well so far...I think I even got an A in statistics!) we would have to go with plan b, which wasn't crafted then and isn't crafted now. Packing up and driving 7.5 hours south to Joshua Tree National Park for a week of camping, climbing and outdoor adventuring seemed like a piece of cake.

Until I considered the weather. And the gear. Good god the amount of gear it takes to bring a small human into the wilderness. One may say that I over gear every time we leave the house (said "one" being my husband), but I didn't want to get stuck in a lurch and not have the backpack carrier and the front carrier and the stroller and the bike and the cooler and the mini camp stove and the big camp stove. Scratch the bike. Be a little reasonable, Jen. Great, now we have room for an entire king size down comforter because it is going to be TWENTY-FIVE degrees at night while we camp. Headlamps! Remember headlamps. And extra batteries. Surely Joshua Tree and the surrounding area do not have stores that sell batteries. And then the food. Packing balanced food for a week of camping for a kid who has two bottom teeth, loves finger food, but gets most of her nutrition and calories from homemade purees is a lot of work. And of course, if it could be bought at Costco and I fail to think of it before we go, we absolutely under no circumstances will buy that item any where else because of the price difference. Unless you forget sweet potatoes. Turns out grocery stores every where have sweet potatoes.

Lucy's first taste of chocolate. She is in love.

Oh, and underestimate your child's natural ability to be entertained by the big, wide world and pack an entire bucket of toys. An entire bucket. And 28 library books (which we did read all of and ended up being one of the more sane things I thought of). She will be fascinated by rocks and birds and DIRT! She will play with rocks and sticks in the dirt. She will eat the dirt. She will be covered in dirt and you won't be able to think of time she seemed happier than when she could crawl and walk all over the desert and stop whenever she wanted to scoop up dirt. But obsess over which plastic Fisher-Price toys to bring. That she won't touch. She will choose to climb rocks, to watch birds, to learn about the sharpness of a cactus and to admire the stars. Unpredictably, she will take 2-3 hour naps twice a day because all of that dirt is tiring and sleeping in the cool, desert air with the warm sun beating down makes for a perfectly content babe.

Then, when it snows on the first night you camp and it takes you three hours to cry uncle and check-in at the Holiday Inn, feel terribly guilty about the camping fail and the massive amount of gear you brought to help make camping successful. Feel sad that you are a Holiday Inn mom after growing up camping and loving it. Luckily, your husband will remind you that bailing on cold camping does not end our warm weather camping days as a family. Feel thankful that more camping is in your family's future and enjoy your long, hot shower and the king size bed that all three of you actually fit in.

Once my anxiety settled, we got settled in and figured out how to take Lucy into the desert for hours at a time, we had a fabulous trip. I am filled with gratitude that our lovely girl loves, enjoys and revels in the great outdoors. As soon as she would wake up from her nap, she would eat lunch (in her camping chair) and then climb, climb and climb some more. She picked out the boulders she want to scale and then would point to our climbing friends as if asking to climb to the top of the cliff with them. She loved the birds, cawing out to them as they flew overhead. When we arrived at our friends rental cabin for New Year's, I pulled her out of her car seat and into the vast, dark night sky that can only found in the desert. She looked up all on her own and pointed to the stars, exclaiming her amazement at the giant sky that looked down upon us from its own place in the universe. She started dancing her hands like we do when we sing Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. She couldn't believe what she was seeing. It was one of my most joyful and rewarding moments as a "mum" (as she is calling me these days) thus far.

Jim and I just kept saying, "what an incredible kid we have." She did really well in the car, took killer naps and palled around with all of our friends from Ithaca, as if she remembered meeting them when she was itty, bitty. She added a bunch of animal sounds to her vocabulary, including a horse, a snake and an elephant (the latter may not be relevant to the desert, but elephants tend to show up frequently in books we read :-). She loved being toted around in her blue Osprey pack and chattered away to who ever would listen for the whole ride. One of the great parts about J Tree is the proximity of climbing to the parking lots. This made it possible for me to get in four climbs on one day and seven climbs overall. And, while this low number of climbs is a bit hard for me to swallow, I am convinced nothing will bring me the depth of joy that seeing my daughter play in nature will bring me.

I intend to make a list of all of the parks we would like to visit while we live out here. Jim and I commented a number of times that it seemed crazy that we weren't dealing with a time change considering we were visiting a California National Park. We probably won't stay in CA forever (the cost of living is just crushing) and we want to take advantage of the opportunity we have while we do live here. Our National Parks pass is good until July and has already paid for itself.


Things that worked really well and we should repeat for future climbing/road trips:

• Car activities-I made a bunch of "games" that Lucy and I could play in her car seat. We shoved golf tees in floral foam, opened plastic eggs filled with pompoms in an egg carton, pulled pipe cleaners from a container and stuck them in a plastic colander and pulled an entire box of tissues apart, one at a time. It made a big difference to have activities she had never done before and I would do the same thing all over again. 

• Baby Carrying Devices-We used the back carrier, the front carrier and the stroller. I will advocate to bring all three of them as long as she fits in all three of them. She napped in the front carrier and the stroller every day when we were out and got a real thrill (as per usual) out of riding in the hiking back pack. 

• Food-pre-planning and preparing food is not only stress reducing, but it is enormously more cost effective. I like to shop for food in familiar environments where you know what you are getting for the price. Jim debated this point before we left, but he didn't seem to mind eating all of the items I shopped for, prepared and packed for us. I would make buying produce before we go a bigger priority next time. Lucy has been having some belly issues for the past of couple of days and seems to be doing better now that she is back on a really clean, unprocessed, high in vegetable and fruit diet 

• Playlists-Lucy is calmed by music. I am going to bite the bullet and pay for a few more songs similar to the ones she loves (mostly so Jim and I don't lose our minds). This tactic makes car rides more enjoyable for everyone and I am thankful we had the playlists we did on this trip. I never got around to making any for our summer trip and regretted not doing that. 

Lucy climbing her first chimney/a hole in the rock that allowed
for a picture from the perspective of a chimney.

• Warm clothing-I packed too much clothing for both Lucy and myself. That being said, she did use her down coat, hat, mittens, fleece pants, capilene long underwear, down onesie and fleece onesie every day. I had to get more comfortable with her wearing dirty-ish clothing. 

• Dirt-I hate dirt. I hate uncleanliness. I hate the way dry dirt feels on my skin. I hate dragging dirt into our dwelling. I am really glad Jim reinforces my decision to let Lucy Goosey explore as freely as is safe. She was dirty. Every day. Dirty, dusty and sticky. She loved climbing and playing and being outside and if I was as outwardly uptight about dirt as I feel inside it would have been miserable for everyone. Yay and boo for dirt.

Rock, I own you.

To prove that I own you, I will step on you,
try to move you and sit on you.

To show my respect, I will kiss you.

Rock, you are mine.

• Schedule-We tried to stick to our normal schedule. It definitely didn't work out every day that we were gone. Pulling into LA at midnight, sleeping in five different places in nine days and being in the car took a toll on all of us. She is already back on a normal schedule at home and, while she went to bed too late some nights and missed a couple of naps, overall she coped with the chaos of travel extremely well. 

West Coast Family

While we are missing our East Coast family and friends, we are grateful to have some time with our West Coast family. We have been doing things with them that are impossible to do when you live on opposite ends of the country. Lucy and I got to go to Mahalia's Thanksgiving Feast at preschool and then we checked Monkey out for the afternoon and the three of us the Children's Museum in Stockton. It is absolutely wonderful. It is also a different experience to be a child without their siblings. Time is usually so limited with them that I don't get to chance to have them in smaller numbers, let alone one-on-one.

Because we had such a good time, I asked Novalynn to come for a sleepover for her birthday. The three of us all went to Santa Breakfast at their school, did a little thrift store shopping and then brought Novalynn back to Berkeley with us. Lucy is getting to spend so much special time with her cousins, aunt and uncle. She is absolutely spoiled rotten by them and soaks in all the time. The girls are so loving and caring toward Lucy and it is a special relationship that I am sure will continue to grow.

In addition to celebrating Halloween with the Hosker crew, we also went to their house for Thanksgiving and Christmas. My sister fed us one of the best Thanksgiving meals I have ever had and I organized and made crafts with my daughter and nieces while she worked away in the kitchen. It was relaxed and lovely. I have missed all of these special times with my ladybugs and I am completely enjoying the time I get to spend with them now.

We did not do a lot as a family of three for Christmas (well, we packed up and went to Joshua Tree for nine days, but that is worthy of its own entry), but Christmas with cousins is always more fun. This year, the sisters included Lucy in on their sister swap and turned it into a cousin gift swap. Caleigha picked out the most perfect set of stacking/nesting blocks for Lucy and was so proud to see Lucy enjoying them. I am not sure what Christmas traditions we will end up with a family, but it was really fun to a part of the excitement with the Hoskers.