Two and Two Months

Delphine is twenty six months old (or thereabouts) and all seems to be well. She talks in full sentences, and occasionally they are gramatically perfect, which is a bit of a thrill.

She's still in daycare, three days a week. She is quite stuck on one of the other kids there, a little boy named Antonio. She has taught herself to jump two-footed, and when she does it she says "Are you jumping like Antonio?" (She communicates a lot in rhetorical questions.) And whenever we talk about daycare, Antonio's name is always the first to come up. "Who did you see at daycare?" "Antonio." "Who is going to be at daycare today? "Antonio." Antonio is a very boisterous and energetic little boy, kind of the alpha male of daycare, and I don't know if he holds her in the same regard, but I don't think she really cares.

Her latest literary love is Franklin the Turtle. My dad sent her a couple of Franklin books for her birthday. I was a little skeptical at first because they are pretty wordy - several paragraphs - and they are just prose, not rhyme. But she sits through them and asks for them again and again. We also go back to the usual favourites all the time; "One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish", "Each Peach Pear Plum", and lots of nursery rhymes.

We haven't really started potty training in earnest. I'm hoping it will just happen all by itself. We have a potty, and sometimes she sits on it, but never for long enough for a result. They also encourage her to sit on the toilet at daycare (they have the cutest little toddler sized toilets), so I'm hoping one day soon something will happen. Antonio is close to being potty trained; maybe that will help.

We're having trouble with sleep; for the last week (or two?) she has been resisting going to bed, and crying for ages before finally sleeping. We have been going in to see her intermittently. She always has a raft of byzantine demands; a different blanket, Boy (her doll) in the crib, Boy out of the crib, a kleenex, and so on. Clearly she is just stalling, and it was working really well for her; lots of attention and extra time with Mummy and Daddy..

But I got Weissbluth's "Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child" out of the library again and having re-read the first few chapters, I think that she is probably sleep-deprived because we moved her bedtime later a few weeks ago. (In addition to the trouble sleeping, she has also been acting very two-ish in the afternoons and evenings -- very contrary and tantrumy and generally not like herself at all.)

So we are going to move her bedtime back up to 6:30 or 6:00 (even though I have no idea how we're going to make it work with our schedules) and starting tomorrow we will let her cry herself to sleep instead of going in every few minutes. It's mean but it works. I was going to start today, but Blake thought it would be nicer to go in one last time and explain to her that he wasn't going to come back, and she should just go to sleep. Sure enough, she didn't cry after that, so maybe the same thing will work tomorrow.

So, in general, she is getting smarter, and I think prettier, and definitely taller. I think my very favourite thing is when Blake brings her into the bedroom first thing in the morning, and she says "Hi Mummy!" and we cuddle and read books.