18 Months

Eighteen months is proving to be a very fun age. I think it's my favorite age since ten months, which is the last time Gavin made a big leap forward in his ability to interact with us. Then it was all giggles and play. Now it's a positive explosion of words. Gavin talks all the time. He learns new words every day, and he's starting to figure out sentences. He can ask for what he wants now, and he can definitely understand most of what I say.

It's so much fun to watch him turn into a person and start to discover his likes and dislikes. He has recently become obsessed with Elmo. He often requests that we play the theme song to Elmo's World and then dances and sings along to it (sort of). If the song comes on unexpectedly he stops whatever he's doing and gets excited for Elmo.

We ended up buying him a stuffed Elmo, and he's been sleeping with it every night. This is actually something of a relief to me. Up to now he hasn't shown any interest in stuffed animals or blankets. He doesn't insist on carrying them around or sleeping with them or anything. He likes books and has his favorite toys, but he hasn't gotten particularly attached to anything long-term. He still forgets about Elmo half the time and is content to leave him behind when he wants to do something else, but it's nice to see him snuggling a stuffed animal.

He also getting better at a whole slew of physical activities. He's learning how to use a fork (which often results in a lot of frustration, but he's getting better). He can almost go down stairs on his own now, so long as he doesn't get distracted by anything. He can climb up on our couches and continues to love jumping and anything that involves him being upside down.

But he balances all this physicality really well. He's still a very observant and deliberate baby, who will often watch for a while before jumping in on his own. And he still loves to read and will happily hang out in my lap with a stack of books for as long as I'll let him.

It is so much fun watching him grow up and start to be more independent. I have to rein it in a little here and there - Gavin is pretty upset that I don't let him walk the dog on his own. But it's mostly exciting to see what he can do and how much he's willing to try.

Words

Gavin is currently going through a bit of a language explosion, and it's a ton of fun.

A few weeks back, the only world he really solidly knew was "no". He said it to everything. He would shout "mama" if he was very upset, but he wouldn't say it on command. Everything was just no, no, no.

But now he's picking up words like it's his job. And the best part (to me) is that it's so tied to books. He's not reading yet, but this is certainly a sign of early literacy. So here are a few of the words Gavin knows and the circumstances he says them under.

• Runs into the kitchen saying "nanana" and pointing towards the fruit bowl. This means he wants a banana.
• In the kitchen, points to the island and says "ma ma", which means a teething biscuit (the brand we get is mum mums"
• Points to the fridge and says "ma ma". This means milk. The pointing is the key distinction.
• Opens a book to a picture of a cow and says "moo". This works with two or three different books that I know of, so it definitely recognizes cows.
• In Jimmy Fallon's "Mama" book, Gavin recognizes and says "ball" on the page with the soccer ball. He also identifies his own soccer ball as ball. It's unclear if this extend to other types of balls yet.
• In the same book, Gavin will point to the picture of the owls and say "whoo".
• In "Go Dog, Go", Gavin knows to say "dog" on the first page. He loves dogs. He knows that Kina is a dog, and he can almost always identify dogs and call them such
• I think he may also know "duck", but it sounds exactly the same as "dog" at the moment. But he will point to pictures of ducks, say "duck", and laugh when I quack. The goal is clearly to make me quack, so I think he knows the difference between the two words. He just can't quite articulate it.
• I can't transcribe this next one. It's about five or six syllables long, has lots of p's and t's in it and means "blow bubbles". He may also be able to say "bubble", but it sounds a lot like ball and he'll only say it about half the time. I don't know where this came from or why this phrase is three times as long as it needs to be, but it is very clear what he means.

This is all I can think of for now. It's so exciting to watch my kid figure out language. He still has trouble communicating sometimes, and more often than not it seems like his tears are because of his frustration about this. But he's getting there, and it won't be long now before he can express himself. He definitely understands almost everything Kevin and I say, and now it's just about figuring out how to do that himself.

Anticipation

Every year I donate to Pat Rothfuss' Worldbuilders annual fundraiser for Heifer International. My motivations are probably equal parts charitable altruism and anticipatory greed. Every $10 donated gets you entered in a lottery for thousands of fabulous prizes. Companies donate books and games, as do authors and individuals. This year the prizes also potentially included jewelry and collectibles.

Usually I don't win. This is my fifth year donating, and I've only gotten a book once. It ended up being a lackluster book. But there's always a chance that I would win a complete series by an author I'm interested in, or the collection of everything Del Ray published over the last year, or an autographed first edition of something cool. So I keep donating and being mildly disappointed when April rolls around and I realize that once again I haven't won anything.

Not super disappointed. I still donated a chunk of change to a good cause, and that's something to feel nice about. But prizes are nice, too.

This year, I got an email in late December letting me know that I'd won something but had forgotten to fill out my mailing address and could I please provide that. I got excited, sent off my mailing address and settled in to wait.

This is a long process. I cycled around from wondering what I had won to wondering if I'd been taken in by a phishing hoax to wondering if I'd even remembered to fill out the form or if I'd just been meaning to and forgotten about it. The organization finally announced that they were beginning to ship out prizes, and I resigned myself to the fact that I hadn't won anything after all.

Until my shipping notice came.

This is a new feature this year, and it's nice, because it pushed my anticipation right back up. I have no idea what I won, but I won something. And it will be here sometime in the next month (with all the prizes they ship out, they use the cheapest, slowest shipping available, which I can't even fault them for).

I'm incredibly excited to find out what I won, even if it ends being another book that I'm only lukewarm about. But maybe it'll be something exciting. It's a bit like Christmas, except I don't entirely know when my present will get here. This anticipation will probably be more exciting than the prize itself, so I'm going to savor it.

RIP Camry

Our Camry died last week. I knew it was coming. The Camry's been acting up for a while, and we've been putting off maintenance because we knew we were going to replace it soon. I was hoping it would make it through the safety inspection this month and last until September, because that's when we'll finish paying off the Elantra. But there was no such luck. While Kevin was driving home from work, it died. We knew we weren't going to pay to get it fixed. The tow truck driver accepted the car in lieu of payment for bringing Kevin home and presumably went to dispose of it.

It's a little sad. I bought that car not long after I moved to Virginia. It was the first car I ever bought on my own, and it even came with a free bible. But, like I said, we knew this was coming, and I've been looking forward to getting a bigger car for a while now.

We have some time before we need to buy a new car. Kevin's mom is leaving town for a month, so we can borrow her's. Then Kevin will be out of town until mid-March. So we have six weeks to do some research and figure out what we want. Which is good, because right now all we really know is that we want something with 3rd row seating, to accommodate our growing family and our kids' future friends. And the dog. It'll be so nice to have a car that Gavin and Kina can both fit in at the same time.

So now it's time to do some research and figure out our budget. I'm excited to get something shiny and new, and I hope it's not too hard (or expensive) to get what we want.

Tumbling Class

At fifteen months old, Gavin is now enrolled in his first class. We've got him attending a weekly tumbling class at a local gym. Part of me still thinks he's a bit too young for structure like this. But another part of me wishes we'd done this months ago.

Gavin is growing into an incredibly active kid. Ever since he started walking, he's been unstoppable. He runs and bounces, and worst of all he climbs. He can get up on most couches and chairs at this point, and he loves climbing up and then jumping. Or just standing close to the edge. He's completely fearless, so I'm carrying around double my share to make up for it.

We enrolled him in the class in the hopes that it would give him a safe space to burn off some of this energy and start providing structure so he's less likely to injure himself. It's been somewhat successful, though I probably shouldn't hope for results after only two weeks.

The class is a good mix of structure and free play. Gavin absolutely hates the structured parts, and he often goes running off to climb on the mats when he's supposed to be walking in a circle or singing a song. But that's to be expected with toddlers, and even if he's the worst at paying attention the instructor never seems too put out by it. I hope that in a few more weeks he'll get more into the rhythm of the class and have fun doing things with the other kids.

He loves the free play part. There are mats to climb on, rings to hang from, and a whole big room to run around in. The instructor brings out balls or bubbles or other things for a few minutes at a time. Last week Gavin loved running around under the parachute, which brought me right back to my elementary school days.

Gavin also loves the various flips and rolls we're learning to do. And even better, some of them are safe to do at home. It's a nice ace to have up my sleeve when he's on the verge of melting down.

We're only a couple of weeks into the class, but so far it seems like a success. I don't know how long this will last - if Gavin will ultimately become interested in gymnastics or not. But it's nice to have a thing to do with him and a place where I'm lass worried about him cracking his head open every time the urge to climb takes him.

Love of Books

Last night, I spent the entire evening reading books to Gavin. I picked him up from daycare, and he was reading books with the provider. They told me he'd been doing so all day. When we got home and I put him down, he immediately grabbed The Biggest Cookie in the World and crawled into my lap. We read it five times before Kevin came up for dinner. Well, we read it twice. The rest of the time he flipped through willy-nilly, stopping on the pictures he liked and stroking Cookie Monster's fur. (There is no fur to stroke, it's just a picture book. He does this with pictures of cats, too.)

After dinner we moved on to his current favorite, Llama Llama, Red Pajama. Then he grabbed Quantum Physics for Babies from the couch and we read that one, too. When he'd exhausted his appetite for those books (and the cookie one again) he ran to his room and came back with another book.

I have to say, it gets a bit tedious reading the same book over and over and over again. We cycled through five or six books. Each of them takes less than five minutes to read. But we sat on that couch for nearly an hour, working our way through them again and again.

Sometimes Kevin took a turn reading. Sometimes Gavin grabbed a book and flipped quietly through it by himself for a while, until he decided he wanted one of us to read to him again. It was an evening full of books.

This feels like my biggest success as a parent so far: Gavin's love of books. I'm not entirely sure how I managed to instill it in him. Some combination of reading to him all the time and reading in front of him the rest of the time. I hope it continues for the rest of his life. I'm looking forward to telling him that he's always been a reader, right from the beginning.

Year in Review

This is late, but the holidays got a bit crazy. We hosted people, then we left town, and my computer broke. I'm hoping to start blogging more regularly again in 2018. In the meantime, here's a look back at 2017, since I wrote very little this year.

• What did you do in 2017 that you’d never done before?
• Can I say parenting? Technically Gavin was born in 2016, but he didn't really start turning into a human until 2017. He did everything from learn to roll over to start running around and climbing on things this year, and I learned how to constantly readjust my expectations, savor the moment, and carve out time for myself. There were so many firsts this year that I can't even count them all, but they almost all come back to Gavin.
• Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
• I don't remember what my new year's resolutions were last year. I'm not sure I made any. I think I was still in shock and doing my best to ignore the world at large. But over the year I slowly remembered who I was before I was a mother and re-integrated most of that back into myself. For this year, I'm planning to speak up more in the moment.
• Did anyone close to you give birth?
• A few Facebook friends from high school did, but no one in my immediate circle.
• Did anyone close to you die?
• My husband's grandmother
• What countries did you visit?
• Mexico, right at the end. Though we also made it to both Hawaii and Alaska, which kind of felt like different countries. America is vast and contains multitudes.
• What would you like to have in 2018 that you lacked in 2017?
• Someone to clean my house for me.
• What dates from 2017 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
• I should probably remember things like Gavin's first steps and all that. The truth is that all of his learning has been more of a process than a sudden thing, so it's occasionally hard to point to a definitive first. The eclipse was amazing. Gavin's first birthday was a lot of fun.
• What was your biggest achievement of the year?
• I got a promotion/raise at work. I did a decent job of balancing my life as a parent and the parts of my life that don't include Gavin.
• What was your biggest failure?
• I didn't always ask for help when I needed it.
• Did you suffer illness or injury?
• I was sick so many times I lost count. Damn those daycare germs. Mostly it was just colds of varying severity. There were two bad stomach bugs, though.
• What was the best thing you bought?
• The Switch and Zelda: Breath of the Wild were great, though Kevin definitely got more joy out of them than I did. We also got this fantastic beanbag chair that converts to a Queen mattress. Kevin remains skeptical, but I love it.
• Whose behavior merited celebration?
• Gavin. He's moody and mercurial and he can get crabby like any toddler. But he's mostly happy and loving and easy-going. 
• Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
• Trump, and pretty much all of the currently elected Republicans
• Where did most of your money go?
• The house. We spent a ton of money on new windows, but also the mortgage and various smaller repairs. 
• What did you get really, really, really excited about?
• Hallowiener. It was fun to come back to it after a year off. Also traveling to Hawaii in the depths of winter and Alaska during the summer helped balance the extremes of those seasons. 
• What song will always remind you of 2017?
• I will always be a bit bitter that Sia's "The Greatest" wasn't a bigger hit, because I think it would have been the perfect song for 2017. The truth is it's hard to know this until a few years have passed. But my hatred for Ed Sheeren really crystallized this year with his three singles that got played constantly, so maybe it'll be that?
• Compared to this time last year, are you: (a) happier or sadder? (b) thinner or fatter? (c ) richer or poorer?
• I am happier, thinner, and richer. So a win on all counts.
• What do you wish you’d done more of?
• I wish I'd found more time to ride my bike and write in this blog.
• What do you wish you’d done less of?
• Cleaning the damn house. It wasn't a big deal when I was only working 18 hours/week. But now that I'm back up to 30 it seems to be eating up all of my free time.
• How did you spend Christmas?
• We hosted Christmas with my mom and brother and Kevin's mom and sister. It was fairly low-key with lots of food and booze and very little sleep.
• Did you fall in love in 2017?
• I keep surprising myself by loving both Gavin and Kevin more with each passing day.
• What was your favorite TV program?
• One Day at a Time, which I mainlined last January. It made me laugh and cry and was basically a perfect sitcom. I cannot wait for the second season.
• Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
• Probably, though no one specific is springing to mind
• What was the best book you read?
• I'm not sure I can pick just one, so here's the top five instead
• Radiance by Catherynne M Valente
• Among Others by Jo Walton
• Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende
• The Likeness by Tana French
• The Dispossessed by Ursula K LeGuin
• What was your greatest musical discovery?
• Nothing new, but I started a Britney Spears Pandora station and have fallen in love with her more recent work, and also with Kesha and Rihanna. It's been a pretty solid station.
• What did you want and get?
• a flexible work schedule, time to read and travel and visit with friends and family, a ton of snuggles and kisses from Gavin
• What did you want and not get?
• Paid sick leave and paid holidays
• What was your favorite film of this year?
• I didn't see very many. Probably Thor: Ragnarok? It was a lot of fun.
• What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
• I turned 31. I don't remember what I did. Kevin and I probably went out to a nice dinner, because that's what we always do.
• What one thing made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
• My kid could always make me smile and laugh and forget about the world at large for a bit, no matter how bleak it got.
• How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2017?
• Comfort. Though I did manage to trade in the yoga pants for blue jeans eventually. And I even got back to heels, block not stiletto. But I'm a mom now, after all.
• What kept you sane?
• Finding time to read, giggling with my family
• Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
• I've been actively trying not to hero-worship any celebrities of late, and this year certainly proved the wisdom of that goal. 
• Who did you miss?
• We have a ton of friends that we don't see often enough, particularly the ones who don't live within driving distance.
• Who was the best new person you met?
• One of our neighbors up the street. He seems like a genuinely good and thoughtful and fun person, and I'd really like to get to know him better.
• Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2017.
• Life keeps going and things change faster than you expect them to. All you can do is keep on keeping on.
• Quote a song lyric that sums up your year
• This phase is gonna fly by/So baby just hold on/It won't be like this for long