February 8th, 2003

Blah. Even with new improved everything in one place I just found a lost Diary entry. I had written one on January 23, only I had apparently started Vim from a different directory than I normally do, so it was saved not where I would normally look for such things and so I just found it now when I was organizing my directories a little. and I inserted it in the appropriate place, so if you are reading this thinking you have read everything before this entry you might want to go back to January 23. Then again, you might not. Anyways, I think I’ve got a system, and if I can just remember to start Vim in the Documents directory, maybe this won’t happen again. I’m pretty pleased though that I seem to be getting at least one entry in a week, despite a pretty busy schedule.

Last weekend Kurt’s parents came to visit. They had a great time with Sophia on Saturday, but by Sunday she’d gotten overtired and clingy and had started to be sick with a raging flu that’s spreading around like wildfire. According the papers roughly 10 percent of kids have been out of school in the last week with this thing. One of my co-workers took his child to the doctor, and the office was so busy that at first they told him they wouldn’t be able to see her. At any rate, the grandparents brought Sophia a great toy. It’s one of those cubes with the wires and the beads with the holes in them all over like you see at Doctor’s offices all the time. Sophia loves it. She also got a “bier! bier!” (bear, bear) from her Aunt Kelly, as well as a couple of books for her ever increasing library. It was quite a delightful visit, except perhaps too short. It would have been nice if they could have stayed another couple of days and gotten to spend a little more time with Sophia.

So Sophia went to Toddler B classes this week. Well, the days she went to daycare, anyways. She didn’t go Wednesday or Thursday. She seems to be thriving there, and she gets to do so many different kinds of activities. When I took her in on Friday, the teachers expressed concern that she hadn’t been there and said they had been so worried that they tried to call and check on her! This is so sweet to me.

For a long time most of Sophia’s vocabulary concerned either animals or food. She had some interest in objects (ball, heart, coat, hat, house) and in body parts, but by far she knew more food names and animal names than anything else. Now, she is learning about emotions and states of being. These new words are so exciting, because they demonstrate an awareness of changes that occur to herself and her environment. So I’ll take her into her room and she’ll say to me, in a whisper, “it’s daaaaaaaaahk. Scary.” She doesn’t actually seem to be scared, by the way. “Yes,” I tell her,”It is dark. Let me turn on a light.” So I’ll flip on the light and she’ll say “Light! Light!” and grin. She’s also conscious of her body, not just that parts of it have names, but that it changes as time goes on. “Sticky,” she tells me after eating, holding her hands out to be wiped. “Messy,” she tells me when she spills something on her clothes. “Stuuuuuuuuucky!” she cries in dismay when she can’t get her feet out of the high chair as I’m pulling her out, or when her arm gets tangled in the car seat belt. “Wet!” she cries with delight after splashing her hand repeatedly into Sergei’s water bowl. The other day she kept getting dismayed because her sweat pants, which have elastic ankles would ride up to around her knees and then stay there. “Stucky!” she would say, tugging at her pant legs. Once I’d fixed them, she’d get up and be on her way, perfectly satisfied.

I’m at work today. It’s my Saturday to work the reference desk. We’re in a bit of a weird situation at work, where they admonish us against getting too much comp time, but schedule us in such a way that we can’t help but accrue it. They don’t want us to have too much comp time because when it comes time to move into the new building they don’t want us to take time off. On the other hand they have so many things they want completed before the move (in some cases complete reorganizations of collections) that they can’t be completed within normal work hours. Not that this is either here nor there. I just come to work do my thing and leave and don’t worry about it too much. The reason I mention it though, is because the search room is freezing and my hands are cold and I’m having trouble typing. Also, there are hardly any people here because of the rodeo. The rodeo is down the street and all the roads are blocked off and it’s really hard to get to the building or the parking lot. There’s four people in the search room, total. I’ve had to pull five items for one person, and my co-worker has pulled a similar amount for someone else. And that’s pretty much it. Dead. quiet. Hence why I’m writing right now. Kind of pleasant, actually, to be able to write basically uninterrupted. The rodeo is on my list by the way, for being a nuisance that makes it hard for me to get to work and making our local hockey team have two solid months of away games. But that’s another story for another day.

Sophia is completely weaned of morning feedings now. With only the nightly feeding left, I no longer have to pump at work and this is a great joy. I put all the parts away in a box and sealed it up and it’s going in the attic. Hurray! In fact, the last Saturday that I worked back in November or whenever, I was still having to pump, and it was quite awkward to explain why I might be longer than 15 minutes on my break. Still, all done with that now. Yay!

Sophia is beginning to throw some of those terrible two tantrums, now. She’ll get angry or upset and just wail and holler and flail about and there’s NOTHING you can do but let her get her waaah-waaahs out. Yesterday she asked Kurt for milk coming out of daycare and when he said no she started to scream like a banshee. She wailed the whole drive home and my dear husband said he was more than a little concerned that child services was going to pull up along beside him and cart her away. The day before that, she threw a full-on tantrum at me when I refused to let her watch television. I guess it’s a test of whether she can get her way by screaming like an air raid siren. We do try to placate her a lot, but I don’t think either one of us is the type to give in on tantrums, so maybe she’ll learn the lesson quickly and spare us all a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth. We’re really putting a lot of effort into rewarding her when she makes herself clear to us. “uhhhhhhhuuuuuuuuuhuuuuuuuh” with outstretched arms gets nothing from us but one solitary “up” makes us pick her up. If she says “help” or signs it we rush over there to help her. Sometimes when she starts to get frustrated with a toy, I prompt her,”Do you need help?” and she lights up and signs help which is very satisfying. We want her to know that if she makes herself clear to us and we can provide it, that we will. Well, except she can’t watch television 24/7. Not even if she asks for it as clear as a bell. As we often say to her, half-jokingly and half-sympathetically, “Life’s hard when you’re a baby.”

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