Eat A Peach; Comings and Goings

First off, Siena will eat anything that Daddy's eating. Yesterday after school I sat her down with her usual bowl of yogurt ("og-urk!") and I sat down beside her with a peach. Now, Daddy likes peaches that are about as hard as granite, as opposed to the almost-too-ripe super-sweet slushballs that some prefer. But as soon as Siena sees Daddy crunching away, she indignantly demands a bite. Which she then gets, though she has to gnaw at the darn thing like a beaver felling a pine tree. And she grimaced after each of the three bites she took! Guess she'll be buying the slushballs someday.

Anyway, what prompted me to write happened just this morning. Daddy drove Siena to school this morning, and waited at the door while Siena kissed Mama goodbye. But as she crossed the living room, Siena stopped at her Elmo book laying on the floor. "Bye-bye, Elmo!" she said, and bent down to kiss the furry little guy. Then she said "Hug!" and gave her friend a brief embrace before meeting Daddy at the door.

I have no pithy observations about this (why break a streak?) but I bet you said "Awww!" just like me.

Head over Heels

For a few days now, Siena hasn't been screaming for us at 6:30 a.m. Mama and I haven't felt the need to look this gift horse in the mouth, but today we discovered why Siena hasn't been champing at the bit to get out of her crib immediately upon waking.

Mama goes in at 7ish, and SIena's already awake. Then she shows Mama her new trick: somersaults. She rolls forward and ends up flat on her back at the other end of the crib. Of course, the crib isn't that big, so Siena often ends up with a half-executed somersault, her legs stuck up the wall of the crib. But she manages to scramble back to first-position, and soon is tumbling away once again.

Once we got her up, though, she didn't try her tumbling on the hardwoord floors. Smart girl.

Brought to You by the Letters M and S

We've started getting Siena familiar with words and writing. Either on the chalkboard or on this little Etch-A-Sketch type thingy that you can write on and then pull the lever and wipe clean (memo to self: get the name of that toy) we write names of family and friends, go over the letters, and see if she'll repeat them.

After a couple of weeks, We're proud to say that she can recognize "Siena," and she knows that it starts with "S" ("Etth"). She also knows "M," and that it starts "Mommy," "Mimi," and "MawMaw." Unfortunately, at this point she thinks that every word other than "Siena" starts with "M." For example:

"What do you want to write now?"

"Daddy!"

"Okay. What does Daddy start with?"

"M!"

"No, 'D.' D-A-D-D-Y. Daddy."

"Baby!"

"Okay, 'Baby.' What does 'Baby' start with?"

"M!"

and so on.

Two down; twenty-four to go.

Bombs Bursting In Air

Siena accomapnied Mama and Daddy to Marina Del Rey for a Fourth of July barbecue on the boat of our friends Stewart and Kim, proud parents of baby Kyle, or as Siena says, "Babee Glaighle."

Yes, Siena still has trouble with certain consonants. In fact, she can't even say "S," so she still refers to herself as "Enna." But she has noticeably improved in her verbal skills in just the past few days. She's picking up new words more quickly; within minutes she was calling for "Kim!" on the boat. And she's pronouncing words better; Pllease no longer comes out as "Peez," but now more like "Pull-leeze," kind of like how Sylvester the Cat might pronounce it.

The next big step, I expect, will be sentences. Sunday we attended the fourth birthday party of Jared, whose daddy goes to school with Mama. At the party I noticed that another little girl, only two-and-a-half, was speaking in sentences and using words like "maybe." That strikes me as an intellectual quantum leap from Siena's simple commands, e.g., "Daddy! Up!" or "More Milk!" I can't wait to see Siena make that jump; I just can't imagine how it happens in the mind of the toddler.

That birthday party was a pool party, and Siena's love for playing in the pool has only grown. So much so, in fact, that now we really have to watch her around any pool that she could crawl or fall into herself. Nothing cute here; just a paternal concern that I needed to vent about.