Friday, August 13, 2010

Stealing a Minute

I'm stealing a minute from my own work time to write a quick Valerie post. She's at Grammy's right now, and Terry took Gabriel with him (after a ridiculous cluster-feed, every hour from 7 - 10 a.m. Seriously - he's now 10 lbs 14 oz, having gained another 13 oz in a week, can he really be that hungry??? Apparently, yes!!)

So, Valerie. She is growing so much. She loves to move and dance and tumble - she's mastered the somersault, and loves to run and jump and dance just for the fun of it. I love her delighted grin when we play "chase" around the house.

She's still not really talking, although her vocabulary continues to grow (she only rarely combines words into phrases). But she's really, really into numbers. She knows all the numbers up to 10, and *tries* to count to twenty ("free-free, four-four, five-five, six-six... ten-ten!") She has trouble pronouncing seven ("eppie" or "sefee") and one ("wu" or "mm") but the rest are pretty clear. She counts steps, toys, bottles in the bathroom, and so on. She can also count backwards from five down!

She's still a bit stressed out by Gabriel, and her new coping mechanism is to bang her head - well, her mouth, really - against our shoulders. This really is hard to deal with. And now she shrieks not only when she hears him make a noise (although not all the time), but when other children get within 4 or 5 feet of her. This makes playground visits a little less fun.

After several months of sleeping through the night, she started night waking again in the week after my parents left. I don't really anticipate this getting better until, oh... maybe 2011?

She's becoming a bit more picky about foods but has a new love - KETCHUP!! Anything dipped in ketchup (even grapes - ugh!) is automatically better. Definitely a Jantzi.

3 comments:

racheljherr said...

I just always enjoy your posts so much. Thanks for sharing them. I like how you write out the way Valerie pronounces certain sounds and words - I think those are the dear sorts of things that would be easy to forget.

Rachel said...

I love the family photo in the next post!

My guess is that Val is just where she should be on speech. I can't believe she is turning somersaults, must be a girl thing, LG has no interest.

Christian Dior said...

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