I refuse to believe that my daughter is almost a year old. It’s simply not true, stop telling me that it is, I’m not listening, LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.

We went to the park yesterday and she had the time of her life, clomping around in her new shoes. Though she’s been walking for over a month now, shoes are a novelty - being completely unneccessary until now.

See, we don’t DO “outside” unless the temperature in the shade is UNDER 3600 F …so no need for shoes until recently. But now that we’re approaching fall, it’s getting to be a bit more reasonable, and we can venture outside without the risk of getting stuck to the pavement.

She’s getting more talkative. She’s had her own language for a while now, but we’re really getting the idea that she’s starting to assign specific words to specific meanings. Bah-Bah is bottle. Mah is Light (which we only know because she points at the light on the ceiling every time she says it). Her latest additions are “Dot” and “Dude.” I don’t think they’ve been assigned meanings yet, she’s just enjoying the sound of them right now.

“Wow, Button. That’s some wild hair you have there.”

“Doooooood.”

She’s able to understand a lot more words than she can say. I can ask her where her duck is and she’ll go to the toy bin and retrieve it. When asked, she can point to our eyes, nose, mouth and ear…but her favorite is nose and she’ll often start pointing it out without the suggestion. She also really likes pointing to all the babies in a book or magazine.

She’s trying to grow out of her morning nap. I don’t neccessarily mind this if it means with certainty that she’ll sleep for at least 2 hours in the afternoon. On the days when she DOESN’T do that, I can feel the pigment in my hair start to fade.

She’s starting to understand the concept of “NO” and insists on testing us as often as possible. She’s more than willing to tow the line at every oportunity, to see EXACTLY where that line is. When I make her lay still and quiet in her bed at night, she’ll try rolling over. When that doesn’t work, she’ll try flinging her leg over. When that doesn’t work, she’ll look at me and TWITCH. I’m beginning to fear the teenage years.

She’s still not sleeping through the night. Or rather, she has not RETURNED to sleeping through the night since she started teething several months ago. It’s like a bad joke to get a taste of sleeping through the night and then have her suddenly quit doing so for an indefinite period of time. Last night she slept until 4:00am, which was a miracle. Actually, at 2:30am, I got out of bed and went to make sure she was still breathing, thinking surely something MUST be wrong. By 2:30am, she has usually woken up at least twice. But no, she was sound asleep, doing just fine. Button, if you want to make a habit of that again, I’d be in full support.

She’s teething again, which we only know because we can see the little nub of a tooth poking in on the top. It doesn’t seem to be bothering her at all, which is nice. And she hasn’t had the drooling symptom that accompanied the last round of teething. Also nice.

We finally had to give in and purchase a new vehicle when she grew out of her car seat, since the next size up didn’t physically fit into our 2-door coupe. We ended up with a Hyundai SUV and I’m absolutely LOVING it. I think I will probably never go back to 2 doors. It’s also nice to be able to fit more than just the stroller in the trunk. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone grocery shopping, lugged the huge cart full of my purchases out to the car, and opened the trunk to find that I’d forgotten to remove the stroller and had no room for the groceries.

Speaking of groceries…she’s eating more solid foods now, including finger foods. Which I fear may be leading toward the seemingly inevitable disaster in my near future: the neccessity of cooking.

I don’t cook. I never intended to start cooking. In my book, cooking is a complete waste of time.

You spend all this time and effort preparing a meal, and standing over it for an hour just makes you so ravenously hungry that you can’t wait to actually get it all on the table before consuming it, so by the time every part of the meal is complete, you’ve already eaten 90% of it and don’t get the chance to just sit down and eat for a few minutes (even if you’re good and resist the temptation of eating it before you get it to the table, you still don’t get the chance to sit down and enjoy it because the kid - who has had to be otherwise occupied during the hour you spent preparing the food - is now tired of whatever you’ve managed to distract her with previously, and requires full attention). And then you’re done and it didn’t taste nearly as good as it would if the restaurant made it and now you have to spend the rest of the evening cleaning up the kitchen.

But it’s hard to come up with healthy finger foods for a toddler that require no preparation, yet aren’t just sodium & carbs (yes, Cheerios, I’m looking at YOU). Child cannot live on Cheerios, string cheese and dried fruit alone. Though the more I imagine cooking on a regular basis, the more I’m considering pushing the limits of that theory.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 17th, 2006 at 6:00 am and is filed under Monthly Newsletter, Parenting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.