Whoa, that month went fast. Here's a newsy update, in case you've been squirming with curiousity about our family's activities.
Frida started daycare, which involved a lot of crying the first week, a bit of crying the second week, and then it was smooth sailing (yay!). She is attached to all three of her teachers, one of them especially; she is learning some new signs (importantly, for "eat" and "more", but given that a classmate three months older than her is signing a lot, and she watches him intently, she'll be picking up many more); she loves the toys there; she naps well on her little mat. I have a suspicion, due to a newly-appeared rash, that she's allergic to the iron-on name labels I spent an hour and a half ironing into most of her clothes last night-- dammit!-- but hopefully I'm wrong about that: we'll see if she has the same reaction tomorrow to new clothes, same label. She and Stephanie are still delighted to see each other when they get to hang out (like tonight, when J. and I went out to dinner to celebrate the anniversary of our engagement), but I think we made a good decision with this place. Here she is on her first day of daycare, wearing a onesie that Stephanie decorated (with Sam in a matching t-shirt that he colored in, after Stephanie outlined the same flag pattern for him):
Frida is funny and mischievous and opinionated. She loves to put things on her head and wear them like hats, including Sam's recently-shed underwear:
A couple of weekends ago I was at the farmer's market alone with both kids, picking up our farm share, and realized I'd forgotten a sling or carrier to put her in. The market is small and in a blocked-off parking lot, so there's no car traffic through it and it's not near the street. I set her down on the ground when I needed both hands to pay, and she took off running in that stiff-legged toddler gait (away from the street, thank goodness). Sam followed her calling back to me, "Help! Frida's running away!" so I jogged over to scoop her up, set her down momentarily to juggle my bags of food, and before I turned around she'd already gotten taken off again for the far reaches of the parking lot, chuckling delightedly.
She likes to rearrange things in the kitchen drawers to which she has access (all of the low ones; we've moved breakables out of the bottom drawers and locked up the cabinets with anything dangerous, so she has free range through the pots and pans, storage containers, and towels/napkins). We find her soccer ball tucked into the towel drawer and one of Sam's shoes in the stockpot. Sometimes she'll bring one of her lunch containers to me, emphatically signing "eat", which means she wants yet another snack. Frida eats tiny amounts at a time still, so she eats many times a day (she's not the only one like that in her daycare classroom-- they've settled on 4 meals a day, 2 snacks and 2 lunches). Between this and the fact that she likes to move move move, she's still tiny for her height at <18 lbs (her height is less remarkable at around the 25th %ile); her 2-month-old cousin Ezra is likely to outweigh her before long! Our pediatrician is fortunately not worried about it, mostly because she's so clearly healthy and happy and active, and because she eats a variety of foods... just never very much of any one of them at once. Now that she can communicate about this, she often signs "eat", is given some avocado or meatball or crackers, has 3 or 4 happy bites, and then is emphatically done. And repeats the process an hour or so later. If we don't give her food more often? she eats the same amount at each meal, and just eats less overall. So, for now, we give her food often.
Frida usually likes to feed herself. Sometimes this gets a bit messy, and once recently she turned into the Swamp Thing and had to go right into the bath after dinner (black bean soup with rice, with a large dollop of sour cream added to her portion-- she LOVED it):
Sam is really liking being in kindergarten for the second time (he was a "junior kindergartner" last year as a 4.5-year-old, so while some of his former classmates went up to first grade, he and the other 3 former-junior kids are in the same classroom this year, joined by a new crop of combined "junior" and regular kindergartners). All the stuff that used to challenge him is
much easier: waiting his turn when he wants to tell a teacher something; staying quiet; keeping track of his stuff. He's developing closer friendships with two specific kids, including one with whom he plays on the school playground most (non-rainy) days, accompanied by Stephanie and by the other boy's very nice but non-English-speaking grandfather.
The class is doing a year-long study of the life cycle of the monarch butterfly. So far they've had 5 caterpillars build chrysalises and emerge as butterflies since the beginning of the school year. This is perfect for Sam, who loves butterflies. One day over the summer, he and Stephanie made this elaborate butterfly exhibit, which they'd taped to the window (I just moved it into a frame to preserve it). They started out cutting out and coloring butterflies on construction paper based on pictures in books that he has, then went to the branch library down the street when they needed more pictures. Apparently Sam marched up to the librarian and said, "We're looking for books about butterflies so we can use them for our exhibit."
Sam's also signed up for a math class ("Math Circle") outside of school; we'll see how that goes. He loves talking about math concepts and, more generally, analyzing things, and Cambridge schools are a bit notorious for being weak in math. I feel like math is something that's hard to make up once one hasn't learned it as a kid (like music and language skills), and we've had friends who've liked the Math Circle as a way to make math alive and exciting (while learning a lot). One of the activities they've done is something he now wants to do all the time with us: a "function machine" in which one person thinks of a function (e.g. "add 3") and the other person has to figure out what it is by putting in a series of test numbers (e.g., 1) and being told what comes out (4, for those of you playing along).
He still wants to mostly read nonfiction. We've spent most of the last month reading two books about space, one on the planets and the other on the search for life outside Earth. He falls asleep looking at one or both of these many nights:
At least these are interesting (vs. the more pre-school-oriented nonfiction books, with lists of unrelated facts about types of trains). His latest favorite thing from the library is Eyewitness Videos (topics we've borrowed so far: Volcanoes; Insects; Butterflies and Moths; Rainforest; Dinosaurs; Rivers and Ponds).
Sometimes I let him decide what we're going to have for dinner. One night when the late-summer bounty of fruits and veggies was at its peak, he picked fruit. I convinced him to add ham sandwiches. So our respective plates looked like this (can you guess whose is whose? and identify the six different fruits we enjoyed?):
He's very articulate about his emotions and his emotional needs, which is a great quality in general, I think, and leads to some very sweet exchanges, but also some funny ones. When he's upset, he does a choreographed Angry Dance that involves a lot of pouting and stomping. One night recently he tried to practice it, but was not quite mustering the emotional expression. "It's hard to practice something that's how you feel," he explained.
And yesterday on the way home in the car (sometimes he and Stephanie take the bus home; other times they hang out elsewhere and meet me on campus as I'm heading to pick up the Bean), he booped her on the nose, as he likes to do (and she sometimes enjoys, and other times is enraged by). "Every single time I boop your nose, a little bit of love comes out of my finger."
He likes to wake Frida up in the mornings, singing softly while stroking her head, "Bean-a, wake u-up! Bean-a, wake u-up!"
J. was gone for most of the second half of the month (he was on TV! among other things. That resulted in someone emailing to suggest that J. might be a perfect match for his daughter-- ha!). We survived, and J's not traveling much for the next couple of months, just hiding away trying to get lots of writing done. I have, as always, a ton of respect for single parents. Whew. I'm applying for a few tenure-track and FT adjunct jobs near here for next year, but I'm not sure how we will deal with the craziness if I have a more demanding FT job (and two of the options involve substantial commutes). But we'll deal with that question if and when it's ours to deal with.
