Blog-O! (Posts about development)

Cordelia is...

Amy Brown — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 13:35:08 GMT

...independent! We had Cordelia's parent-teacher "chat" today, with her nursery school teachers. I love talking about my children, so I was very excited to be there, and of course Blake doesn't have a job so he came along 'coz he doesn't have anything else to do. Just kidding; he had taken the morning off to come anyway, before the company folded (or whatever it's in the process of doing).

Simone and Sameera were very happy to talk about Cordelia too. Apparently she's a delight at school. (I bet they say that to all the parents.) She's very independent; she puts on her own outside clothes and clears up after snack by herself. This is a revelation to me because like idiots we're still helping her on with her snowsuit and boots, and begging her to take just one thing into the kitchen after meals. Suckers, we are!

Her favourite things are sensory activities: playdough, cornstarch, sand. Anything messy. She's still focused to the point of being oblivious to what's going on around her (she gets that from Blake), and she's happy playing by herself, to the point that her teachers are actually engineering situations to force her into talking and playing with other kids. They are going to hook me up with some good playdate matches for her.

That's their only concern for kindergarten, that she won't be able to make connections with other kids and with the teacher. Academically, in terms of colours, shapes, letters and numbers, she's just fine!

P-t-e-r-a-n-o-d-o-n spells Pteranodon!

Amy Brown — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 19:21:55 GMT

The other day Delphine peered intently at the world map we got for my birthday for a while, and then announced "I read San! S-a-n is San!" That's the first word she has read apart from her name and a few words that she'd memorized like "o-f-f off" and "n-o no". And it's in Spanish! She's bilingual!

Then later she read the first syllable of "Doritos", which is now that I think about it, faux-Spanish. I'm going to assume that's a coincience until I get more data. Anyway the point is she's almost reading! Hooray!

Cordelia Is Two!

Amy Brown — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 02:14:00 GMT

Cordelia turned two on Thursday, which was kind of sucky for her because it was her fourth day of nursery school and so she's still suffering from lots of separation anxiety. I felt like a monster leaving her crying and miserable in the arms of Lakeisha the teacher on her birthday, but when I waved at her through the window on the way out she was already smiling a little bit. They made up for it by giving her cake because it just happened to be the day for their September birthday celebration.

Altogether, counting the nursery school party, Cordelia had four birthday parties; one last weekend at Baba and Zaida's with a chocolate cake and presents, one on Thursday night at home with a plain cake with pink icing and more presents — we got her one of those rugs with roads and railways and stuff printed on it (Delphine's idea), and Hop on Pop — and yet another this weekend when we made a dinosaur-shaped cake just for the fun of it. We like cake, what can I say?

Nursery school is going well. I signed her up not to give myself a break — I think it's actually created more work for me — but because I thought it was time she started to have a life of her own, to gain some independence away from me, and to be exposed to all the rich and interesting things they offer at nursery school. It seems to be a really good facility; they always have lots of interesting activities set up when we get there in the morning, the teachers are lovely, they have a real music teacher with a guitar in every other week, and every week they take a picture of your child and save it in a portfolio that you get to keep at the end of the year.

The only catch is that the school is about one and a half kilometers from home, around a fifteen minute walk. I originally thought it was going to be a longer walk than that, before I actually tried it, so I was quite pleased. On Thursday I strapped on my running shoes and put the girls in the expensive but very cool jogging stroller / bike trailer and ran up there, which of course also took about fifteen minutes because I am that slow and also running with a stroller sucks. But it's better than running at 7:30 at night when all I want to do is collapse on the couch.

Cordelia can count to twenty, which is kind of odd for a two-year-old. She loves to count, but she's not really counting per se. I think she knows about counting in some sense; she knows you do it when you have a lot of something, and that you count for a while and then stop and the number you stop at means something, but she really doesn't map the actual number of things to the words she's saying. She loves to over-count and usually ends up with "seven" of whatever it is. Also when people ask her how old she is she says "three!" She just likes numbers.

Incidentally, Delphine's friend Ursa also loved counting and numbers, to the extent that she still calls both letters and numbers "numbers". This is interesting because Delphine used to call numbers "letters". Shall we typecast them as the Wordy One and the Mathy One already?

Cordelia talks in full sentences, and she has reached that age when she comes out with syntactically perfect sentences which leave me speechless. "Help me put my sweater on!" I hear it and it's a perfect sentence, and then I realize it came from my tiny baby! She doesn't do full sentences all the time, though. Mostly she's still trying to cobble together communication with the few words and bits of grammar she knows, backed up with pointing and when all else fails, shouting really loud.

Communicating is complicated by the fact that she doesn't know her colours yet; when Delphine was this age at least we could figure out what she wanted by saying, "What colour is it?" Cordelia, for whatever reason, can't get her colours straight. For a couple of weeks everything was blue ("bah-loo!") and now things seem to be mostly red. If you drill her you can get her to get a colour right for a few minutes but then if you go back to it later, she goes back to guessing. I find this rather perplexing; she doesn't seem to have trouble learning the words for anything else. Either she can't map the colours to the names, or she can't distinguish the colours for some reason. Anyway, you aren't really expected to know your colours until you're three or even four, so maybe there is some mental or visual development yet to come which will resolve this. In the meantime all the grandparents have made it their mission to help her learn colours.

Cordelia sleeps from about six thirty until six thirty or seven in the morning. Well, I put her to bed at six thirty; usually she stays awake talking and singing to herself until seven. She also naps from one until two or two thirty. (I got all my sleep advice from Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child by Marc Weissbluth, so if you want a narcoleptic child and a rich adult-only evening life you should read it too.) She scared me on Friday by not napping at all; I wondered if she had decided that since now she's two she doesn't need a nap. But then she napped yesterday and today, so I think I still have a napper. It's nice because she naps while Delphine is in kindergarten, so I get some time to get stuff done in the afternoons. If I am not too tired to think; afternoon is not my brightest time.

Cordelia has peed in the potty exactly twice, both times under the tutelage of Baba. I suppose she is more or less ready to be properly potty-trained, which is exciting in the sense of no more diapers, but I am not looking forward to the process, the constant trips to the potty and interrogation regarding her need for the same. "Do you have to go pee? Do you have to poo? Do you want to sit on the potty?" However, it has to happen sometime! The nursery school teachers say they are happy to help, so maybe I will rope them in and see if we can get it over with. That would be awesome.

Tomorrow is Monday, and October, and I have a million things to do so I had best get to bed so I am not tired and grumpy all day.

Cordelia is Fifteen Months Old

Amy Brown — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 04:30:00 GMT

Cordelia is my little monkey. She is fearless and ambitious — this morning she was hauling the cat carrier around the house, dragging it behind her and bashing into every damn thing. She dragged it into the kitchen and before I could turn around she had climbed on it and was messing around on the counter. She does appalling things like that every day; I certainly didn't get any experience with this kind of behaviour from Delphine.

Last time I posted about Cordelia, she had just started walking. Well, she's been walking for four months now and she's pretty darn good at it. Mostly. The other day I put her down in the front yard and she took off like a flash down the path; there's a little step right before the path meets the sidewalk, and she stepped down it. Unfortunately the step is about four inches, and Cordelia's leg is also about four inches, and so after her foot made contact with the ground, her right hand did, then her left, and then... her head. She hardly cried at all, but I had to pick some grit out of her, and now she's walking around with a gnarly big scab on her forehead. She doesn't care; it makes her look fierce.

She says a few words now: cat, up, milk, ball, book, Mimi (which applies to all cats), Daddy, Mummy, duck, and of course, "no", with a little head shake. She always says "no" when you ask her a question; I think she just likes shaking her head. She had her eye on my tea — the child is always thirsty — and asked for it, but then answered her own question by shaking her head sadly: "no".

Fifteen months is the age Delphine was when we started putting her down to sleep alone; Cordelia has been sleeping alone for almost a year. She sleeps from six or six-thirty until six in the morning, and she goes down without a fight. Last night I was nursing her to sleep and she stopped nursing and looked around. I issued my usual ultimatum: "Boobie or bed!" Her typical response is to latch right back on in a hurry, but last night she said "Bed!", and sat up to be put in the crib.

She's down to one nap a day, mostly — she just suddenly stopped needing a morning nap one day. The catch is that when she's sick she still needs two naps some days, and I'm never sure whether any given day will be a one-napper or a two-napper. Makes planning ahead hard.

Being in the house with Cordelia is also really hard; if I want to go upstairs or to the basement, I have to pick her up; I can't work in the basement with her because there are too many hazards: cat litter, stairs, unexpected pointy things. Upstairs we don't have a baby gate for stairs, so I have to pick a room to work in, shut the door, and stay there. So mostly we stay on the main floor, which makes unpacking and doing laundry and any other multifloor pursuit very difficult. I do miss having everything on the same floor, but I have to remind myself that one day Cordelia will be able to handle stairs and being by herself, so I will be able to get stuff done much easier.

And in the meantime, she makes me laugh every single day.