Abigail has been 20 months old for a few days now, and somehow that just sounds so much older than 19 months. It sounds treacherously, impossibly close to 24 months, at which point we’ll stop measuring her age in months, I guess, and switch to…years? Years, as in plural, as in more than one? I’m sorry, I know that over-the-top sentimentality might be the very worst thing about mommyblogs, but that is seriously too much for me, you guys. She seems so old these days, talking all the time (she almost never signs anymore), repeating every word I say, making up songs, building forts, memorizing poems, creating spontaneous beat poetry while banging her drum or a handy piece of furniture, flirting shamelessly with the boys next door… Many of her baby words are disappearing, replaced by…the actual words? What? Augh, I am pathetic, I know, but seriously WHERE DID MY LITTLE TINY INFANT ABBY GO.
I have two excellent bits of news on the daughter front. The first is that I have succeeded in teaching her something approaching good manners: I have convinced her to say “please” when she wants something. Sometimes I have to prompt her, asking (in an annoying fashion that reminds me of my grandmother) “What do you say?” — but she hops to, and immediately says please (“pease,” actually). She also says “thank you,” though in Abby-speak it sounds more like “geek you.” My not-even-two-year-old is calling me a geek. Well, it probably won’t be the last time.
At any rate, I have found that having a child who says “please” all the time vastly improves my mood. My patience with her is not so quickly worn down by constant requests for “more, more, more”; instead it is “Mama, pease” and “geek you, Mama.” What do you know, Miss Manners was on to something! “Please” is the greatest word in the English language!
The second piece of good news is that my babysitter is back — hey na, hey na, my babysitter’s back. This has also greatly improved my quality of life. She’s only here for six hours a week, which I realize is less than a single workday, and yet it has made all the difference in the world. Abigail calls her “Rissa” (a shortening of her name, Marissa) and clearly wishes we would adopt her and make the situation permanent. It’s good for Abby to get the occasional break from me, and it’s good for my sanity to get a couple of hours uninterrupted worktime.
Best of all, Marissa is good enough with Abby to put her down at night — twice now Dan and I have escaped the house before bedtime, once for a quick dinner date, and once to see Yo-Yo Ma perform over an hour away. Both times we came home to a quiet house and a peacefully sleeping baby. Someone alert the Vatican; I think we have a miracle.
In other news, I am still blogging at Irene’s Daughters about Glee and the Ole Miss fight song and, from time to time, things that actually matter. We don’t have so many readers yet; I like to think of ours as the little blog that could. So far, the most hits we’ve ever had in a single day was 310, thanks to a kind repost/link from the fabulous Stuff White People Do blog. I know that a heated discussion about racism is probably, well, not quite the thing for most of you, but if you are ever curious, please stop on by. We rant a bit sometimes, but we try to be nice about it.
