Kix and Valentines

I haven't written in a couple of weeks -- it's been a hectic time, and difficult, but things are really looking up, I think. Rather than focus this post on the negative stuff (True's week-long business trip, my strep throat, Shmoo's return to night-waking), I'd like to talk about my little girls and how miraculously they are growing.

Little Shmoo is still quite a peanut, but she's had a little bit of growth...from 16lb9oz at twelve months, to 17lb5oz at eighteen months. It's small, but it all happened in the last three weeks! We don't know whether to attribute it to the expeller-pressed coconut oil we've been slathering on her food, or the Carnation Instant Breakfast we put in her cup, or luck -- but whatever it is, we'll take it. She now asks for food by name ("olives!" "baby-yogurt!" "chocolate!"), and seems to have recovered from her allergies to oats and rice. I gave her a bowl of dried Kix cereal, and, to my joy, she ate some.

She ate Kix! This sounds like nothing to be excited about to most people, probably, even parents, but to me, eating dry cereal is part of being a toddler. When Doodlebug was a baby, we went through boxes and boxes of Kix, Cheerios, and something terrible-sounding-but-very-tasty called Crunchy Corn Bran. Handing a toddler a baggie of dry cereal is an activity for them -- it takes time, it stimulates parts of their mouth that they need for learning to make certain sounds, it is a quick sugar rush. It is also just darned cute to see them sit there very seriously with their bags of cereal. Doodlebug used to sit on our bottom stair with her bag of cereal and hum to herself while she snacked. I missed that experience with Little Shmoo. So much of feeding for her has been stressful for me -- I've counted every bite, I've worried over whether it would choke her, make her sick, whether she would eat enough to grow. I think I will always worry a lot more with her than I did with Doodlebug, but this new food -- cereal -- is emblematic of a bigger change for me. It makes Little Shmoo look like a healthy, normal child to me. How miraculous...and what a sweet feeling it inspires.

Doodlebug is suddenly almost-five, also a somehow much bigger deal than being four-and-a-half. She has lost all her baby fat and her toddler demeanor, and is 100% little girl. She wants to wear a dress every day, and asked me recently to stop calling her Doodlebug -- she wants to be called by her full name. Thankfully, that did not last, because I think it would make me cry! She also doesn't want to wear a pigtail in her hair anymore -- this from the girl who actually NAMED the little curly pigtail "my boinger." She's just learning so much every day now, and becoming more and more independent.

Recently, we made pancakes and had some leftover in the fridge. I was nursing Little Shmoo on the couch in the mid-afternoon, and Doodlebug wanted a pancake. I told her she could go in the fridge and get one if she wanted, but I couldn't warm it up right now. She said it was ok; she'd eat it cold. She disappeared for a while, and I heard her puttering around in the kitchen. About ten minutes later, I went in there to find her sitting at the table with a few bits of leftover pancake on a plate with maple syrup on them. She had gotten herself a plate, a pancake, a fork, and the maple syrup, and though she hadn't (thankfully!) tried to microwave the pancake, she had fixed everything for herself. How funny that something like that could move me to tears...but it did. I hugged and told her how proud I was of her for getting her own snack so neatly.

Then this week, she insisted on filling out the Valentine's Day cards for her classmates herself. We sat down with her class list and she copied every name, painstakingly, onto its own Hello Kitty card. It took her over an hour to write twenty names (and sign her own name twenty times), but she did it all herself. This is not really something special for a girl her age -- but this is MY girl, MY little girl who used to say that funny things were "ah-sterical," who used to offer her sippy cup of soymilk to all the animals at the zoo, who used to look at me with her big gray eyes and say, "mama, nurtch?" when she wanted to nurse.  My little girl wrote her own valentines. My little girl made her own pancake snack.

As I watch her thinking and expressing herself more and more all the time, and I watch Little Shmoo develop her own personality so distinctly, I realize that I have two little friends living in my house. They've been -- and will continue to be -- a lot of work, but I think it's going to get better and better all the time. I really LIKE them. What an adventure I have before me!