now we are two
Jan. 25th, 2012 10:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnE celebrated her second birthday by contracting bronchitis. This turned out to be an ideal time to do so, in the sense that we went to the doctor for her two-year checkup before we actually realized she was sick enough to require more than extra-long naps (we've been exceedingly lucky in that although she's gotten quite a lot of colds, she previously hadn't gotten anything worse than that), and the doctor took a look at her and a listen at her lungs and immediately prescribed an inhaler and antibiotics. (This doctor is usually pretty good about our stated wish not to use more antibiotics than we can help -- for example, she rarely prescribes them for ear infections -- so you can see that she thought it was something to be concerned about.) She's much better today.
But mostly she is awesome.
-She is extremely interested in verbal communication and always has been, to the extent that she WOULD NOT do sign language because she just wanted to talk, which she did earlier than almost all her peers, I think. She's not so early anymore -- doing multi-word groupings/sentence-ish things now, but there are at least a couple of girls her age (none of the boys seem to be talking at all) who are doing actual adult-sounding sentences, which E isn't really doing, I suspect because she can make herself understood without all the articles and most of the prepositions and so on. When she can get her point across, she's pretty happy, and when she can't make us understand, she gets extremely upset.
-The thing that makes her the most upset, though, is not being able to Do Things Her Way. There are songs where she's used to (say) sing the last word when I sing them to her, and if I try to sing it myself she gets really angry, it's sort of hilarious to watch. Same thing if you try to buckle the top buckle in her car seat because The Proper Way to Do Things is that "E-- do it!" Interestingly, my sister-in-law is having the exact same issue with her daugher, who is almost two years older than E... I don't know whether this means we're just getting it early or whether it's going to be really bad when E turns three (all the other kids in D's family have gone through "Terrible Threes" as opposed to "Terrible Twos").
-She doesn't, however, seem that interested in her motor development, which has in general lagged behind her peers; she crawled and walked late, figured out zippers late, started climbing on things much later than her peers, and so on. (The climbing on things late we're quite happy about.) We took her to swim class this fall; all the other kids in the class, who were her age and also taking for the first time, were excited to kick and move and blow bubbles and all that, and she... wasn't.
-She is also generally late in social development, and not for lack of trying on my part. She does all sorts of social things, has a bunch of little "friends" that she sees regularly and whose names/faces she knows, and still she'll be around, say, our friends' kid A., also a first child and born the same month as E., who stays at home with grandparents and has much less in the way of social events, and A. will want to be friends with her and offer her little-kid gifts like a leaf or a ball, and E. will look at the A. like, "Who are you and what is your deal, anyway?" This has cured me of thinking that introversion and extroversion can be taught, because E was an introvert from day one, and A. was an extrovert from day one.
-I suspect this has something to do with how eager she is to communicate: About a month ago, she went through this cognitive jump where she started doing multi-word groupings and at the same time suddenly started to understand that letters make words! It was weird (to me, anyway) how fast it was -- one week she didn't get it at all (before that she was doing some sort of haphazard pattern matching where she figured that anything that contained an "M" was probably "Mommy"), and the next week she totally did, as evidenced by teaching her a word in upper case and seeing her recognize it in lower case and vice versa (although she usually has to spell it out first, so I think there's aural memory involved). D is very proud of the fact that the first word we had evidence of this with was "pizza." She also knows that letters make sounds, but there's a key piece missing there... she'll identify the sounds individual letters make when I point to them, and once I sound out a word for her she'll often be able to figure out what the word is, but she doesn't apparently know how to sound out a word for herself. She also doesn't seem to understand that words make up sentences (she always seems taken a bit aback when I point to words she knows in books, although she then usually spells and recognizes them), which is interesting to me because I would have thought that would be a much easier thing than letters-to-words, but apparently not for her. She also doesn't really get compound words, for instance (which tells me she is really not understanding phonetics); and she's still cheerfully interchanging left and right: yesterday she identified the word "SUB" as "B-U-S bus!"
-The cognitive jump coincided with learning the word "No" (which also coincided with my mom looking after E for a week... don't know if that was a coincidence or not, but I am suspicious; we've tried in general to avoid saying the word "no" in front of her) and in general being far, far less willing to do things just because I want to do them. She used to be really great at clean-up time and helping mom put away laundry and all kinds of things, and now when I say it's clean-up time, she'll say "No!" and keep doing whatever she was doing. (She is a good kid, though, and can usually eventually be convinced to put away at least a couple of toys unless she's really tired. But sometimes it's a hard slog to get there.)
-She's started to argue; her arguments at this point are just hilarious and sweet. When she gets up in the morning, I say, "Okay, let's get up and see the world!" Now, the other day she wanted to go to the zoo at night, and we told her "We can't go right now, the animals are sleeping!" (I suppose this is a mild untruth.) She responded pleadingly, "Animals get up see world!"
-A friend once told me, speaking of his own two small children, "All your and your spouse's traits will come out in your kids." She mostly seems to take after D in temperament, and always has, though she reacts to being hungry (DRAMA!!!!!) like I do.
But mostly she is awesome.
-She is extremely interested in verbal communication and always has been, to the extent that she WOULD NOT do sign language because she just wanted to talk, which she did earlier than almost all her peers, I think. She's not so early anymore -- doing multi-word groupings/sentence-ish things now, but there are at least a couple of girls her age (none of the boys seem to be talking at all) who are doing actual adult-sounding sentences, which E isn't really doing, I suspect because she can make herself understood without all the articles and most of the prepositions and so on. When she can get her point across, she's pretty happy, and when she can't make us understand, she gets extremely upset.
-The thing that makes her the most upset, though, is not being able to Do Things Her Way. There are songs where she's used to (say) sing the last word when I sing them to her, and if I try to sing it myself she gets really angry, it's sort of hilarious to watch. Same thing if you try to buckle the top buckle in her car seat because The Proper Way to Do Things is that "E-- do it!" Interestingly, my sister-in-law is having the exact same issue with her daugher, who is almost two years older than E... I don't know whether this means we're just getting it early or whether it's going to be really bad when E turns three (all the other kids in D's family have gone through "Terrible Threes" as opposed to "Terrible Twos").
-She doesn't, however, seem that interested in her motor development, which has in general lagged behind her peers; she crawled and walked late, figured out zippers late, started climbing on things much later than her peers, and so on. (The climbing on things late we're quite happy about.) We took her to swim class this fall; all the other kids in the class, who were her age and also taking for the first time, were excited to kick and move and blow bubbles and all that, and she... wasn't.
-She is also generally late in social development, and not for lack of trying on my part. She does all sorts of social things, has a bunch of little "friends" that she sees regularly and whose names/faces she knows, and still she'll be around, say, our friends' kid A., also a first child and born the same month as E., who stays at home with grandparents and has much less in the way of social events, and A. will want to be friends with her and offer her little-kid gifts like a leaf or a ball, and E. will look at the A. like, "Who are you and what is your deal, anyway?" This has cured me of thinking that introversion and extroversion can be taught, because E was an introvert from day one, and A. was an extrovert from day one.
-I suspect this has something to do with how eager she is to communicate: About a month ago, she went through this cognitive jump where she started doing multi-word groupings and at the same time suddenly started to understand that letters make words! It was weird (to me, anyway) how fast it was -- one week she didn't get it at all (before that she was doing some sort of haphazard pattern matching where she figured that anything that contained an "M" was probably "Mommy"), and the next week she totally did, as evidenced by teaching her a word in upper case and seeing her recognize it in lower case and vice versa (although she usually has to spell it out first, so I think there's aural memory involved). D is very proud of the fact that the first word we had evidence of this with was "pizza." She also knows that letters make sounds, but there's a key piece missing there... she'll identify the sounds individual letters make when I point to them, and once I sound out a word for her she'll often be able to figure out what the word is, but she doesn't apparently know how to sound out a word for herself. She also doesn't seem to understand that words make up sentences (she always seems taken a bit aback when I point to words she knows in books, although she then usually spells and recognizes them), which is interesting to me because I would have thought that would be a much easier thing than letters-to-words, but apparently not for her. She also doesn't really get compound words, for instance (which tells me she is really not understanding phonetics); and she's still cheerfully interchanging left and right: yesterday she identified the word "SUB" as "B-U-S bus!"
-The cognitive jump coincided with learning the word "No" (which also coincided with my mom looking after E for a week... don't know if that was a coincidence or not, but I am suspicious; we've tried in general to avoid saying the word "no" in front of her) and in general being far, far less willing to do things just because I want to do them. She used to be really great at clean-up time and helping mom put away laundry and all kinds of things, and now when I say it's clean-up time, she'll say "No!" and keep doing whatever she was doing. (She is a good kid, though, and can usually eventually be convinced to put away at least a couple of toys unless she's really tired. But sometimes it's a hard slog to get there.)
-She's started to argue; her arguments at this point are just hilarious and sweet. When she gets up in the morning, I say, "Okay, let's get up and see the world!" Now, the other day she wanted to go to the zoo at night, and we told her "We can't go right now, the animals are sleeping!" (I suppose this is a mild untruth.) She responded pleadingly, "Animals get up see world!"
-A friend once told me, speaking of his own two small children, "All your and your spouse's traits will come out in your kids." She mostly seems to take after D in temperament, and always has, though she reacts to being hungry (DRAMA!!!!!) like I do.
