We had a major accident this morning. I wasn’t there when it happened, but apparently, it was something dreadful. So dire that the Girl emerged from the bathroom with an improvised finger splint.
The accident involved the seal as well, for he left the bathroom/emergency room with not one, but two adhesive bandages (CVS brand, I think, not BandAid).
After some consultation with Dr. L, I feel confident in saying that the seal is expected to make a full recovery.
We are slowly creating a late-winter, Sunday afternoon ritual that is focused on swing time for the Girl. We headed to Southside Park Sunday, and as we sat there, K and I realized it was a better choice than our usual one: less crowded and closer.
The Girl was pleased, too.
Such a change from the first time we were at Southside. Still wobbly-footed and wary of being alone, she wouldn’t let us out of her sight.
And naturally, we didn’t want her out of our reach. Wobbles turning to dangerous tumbles — the nightmare I continually endured at playgrounds last year. “They’re made to bounce,” Nana and Papa say, but my gut isn’t made to bounce: it dropped every time she fell, filling my head with visions of — well, no need to go there.
Now, when she’s playing, the Girl makes the choice whether or not to play near us, and I’m only moderately paranoid. I’m sure that moderate paranoia will continue until she’s in her thirties or so.
Or maybe it is a permanent fixture.
It is the flip side of the joy of seeing her smile, of hearing her laugh. It is the worry that it won’t always be so. And why worry about that? Certainly she’ll have her share of bruises, emotional and physical, and it’s only natural that I want to protect her from them — at least minimize the impact. Yet we learn from the pain. In theory.
L still doesn’t learn from the pain. At least, she’s not convinced. She knows the cat doesn’t like being tugged and violently hugged, and she knows what the cat’s claws are capable of, but every few days, the Girl tests the hypothesis again.
At least now the threats are visible, and the cause and cure clear.
Indeed, this is the only time that K and I can kiss the pain away. Pain floats away, removed with a kiss that is then blown into the empty distance. “Bye bye!” L says after we blow away the kiss that took away the pain.
Broken hearts and disappointment aren’t so easily mended.
But with everyone playing on a cool Sunday afternoon, these thoughts drift away.
The guns are still plastic.
The Girl has always loved dancing. As her coordination grows, so does the intricacy of some of her moves.
Occasionally she’ll get a partner.
The partner is often stiff with fear.
We moved into our house eighteen months ago, with grand visions of how we were going to upgrade, remodel, and improve — and the understanding that would take years.
Many of our accomplishments are sort of like the ASP I would write during my brief stint in IT: no one on the outside has any idea what’s going on under the hood, so to speak. We’re remodeled closets, replaced plumbing, added insulation, installed new windows, installed a new door, fixed every single faucet in the house, changed some of the outlets, and a handful of other projects. Except for the door and windows, the rest is invisible.
We’re not even finished with the initial decoration, though we’re one room closer as of today. The Girl’s room is almost done: two more rugs to buy and a couple of pictures to hang.
K finished the curtains this weekend, with a little help from our friend.
The result:
Perhaps the best part: L loves her room. She loves sitting at her table, putting together puzzles (which, at this age, means instructing one of us to put them together, or better yet, Papa), coloring, having a snack — anything. We return home and she immediately asks me to accompany her to “pie-ku,” her L-ese version of “pokoj,” or “room” in Polish.
“When you wake up,” I told L before her Sunday afternoon nap, “it will be time for ‘Happy to you!'” She’d been waiting all week, and she was too excited to fall asleep immediately, but eventually she drifted off.
When she awoke, it was her day.
First, lunch. In two years she’s gone from milk and mush to shrimp, an all-time favorite.
Papa held the Girl as Nana practiced with their new camera. “It was rated best in this level at this price by this place and that,” said Papa, proudly relating the story of how he got it for a song.
The guests arrived and L became the center of attention. She’s used to it, I guess: she demands it often enough, though fussing or simply asking.
“Mama, trzym,” she says. “Hold” in Polish, but L-ized. She’s not shy about asking for attention, though we we she’d ask for it like that more often.
Candles out and it was time for gifts. L had a little helper, F: the son of Polish friends we met here. He wanted to help with the candles, but L and I had practiced. She knew what she was doing.
F began by helping L with her presents; by the end, he was unwrapping them for her. A year ago, that might have been problematic: the Girl was more interested in the paper and boxes than the presents. This year, she knows what’s inside is what counts. Hopefully, it’s a lesson she’ll apply universally.
The GIrl came away with quite a haul: Tinker Bell, a couple of games, a Madeline book, a Pooh phone. It was tempting to hide some of the toys and bring them out a little later, but for now they’re all out — literally.
Of course, Nana got the sweetest present of all.
Happy to you, L. Two down, one hundred and two to go. Sto lat!
We’re getting ready to go to the zoo — just L and I, a newly forming bi-Sunday tradition. L is excited: she’s chattering on and on in her own way: 10% Polish, 20% English, 70% L-ese. (One of the problems with raising a bilingual baby is that you never know whether she’s trying a new Polish word, a new English word, or just making up something in her own language.)
In the midst of the babbling, L suddenly says, “Mamma, afant.”
“Afant? I don’t know what that is,” K responds, as always, in Polish.
“Afant!” declares L.
“Honey, I don’t know…” K begins, then L switches languages.
“Slonik!” translates L.
“Oh! ‘Elephant!'”
Writers often keep a pen and pad on their nightstand in case inspiration strikes in the haze of near sleep. Poet Luci Shaw, visiting my college years ago, explained that she can never remember it the next morning, and to prevent that thought from being lost, she keeps writing materials by her bed. Some even keep illuminated pens and tablets, thereby saving their sleep by not having to turn on the light.
Inspiration can even jolt some writers out of a deep sleep, I’ve heard.
Twice in last few weeks, I’ve been jolted out of a deep sleep, but not by anything so pleasant as inspiration. I sit upright in bed suddenly, and there’s not a sound in the house, but within moments, I hear L crying. I rush to her bedroom and find her out of her crib, on the floor, stunned to be there, still half asleep herself. What woke me, K, and even L was the thump of her falling to the floor.
“It’s time we buy the foot board to turn the crib into a day bed,” we both say the morning after.
That night, though, it’s all about calming a confused, half-asleep girl, there is only one question: how in the world did she fall out of bed?
The next morning, she shows us. Pointing to the top of the crib, she explains, “I boom!” (She pronounces “I” as the Polish i, which means “and” and is pronounced like our letter “e”. So in fact, she was not saying “I boom” but “and boom.”)
Afterward, she points to the floor, adding another “i boom” for good measure. She willingly shows us as well.
It’s 5:20 on a Saturday morning. K wakes me up: “Can you go get some milk for L and make sure she’s covered up?” If K goes, L starts fussing and crying when she leaves the room; it works out better for everyone if I go.
I stumble downstairs, warm some milk, and head to the Girl’s room. She’s asleep in the corner of the crib, blankets strewn about her but not a single one on her. I pry her sippy cup from her hand, causing her to wake up. With the refilled cup in her hand, L is about ready to go back to sleep, but she has one more request. She raises her head and says sleepily, “Banket.”
As I start to spread a blanket over her, she begins fussing. “Tata, no! Banket! Banket.” “Banket,” you see, is not just any blanket, but her favorite blanket, a soft yellow blanket she’s had since birth. It’s a bit too think for a chilly evening like this, so I spread the blanket over her, wait for her to drift to sleep, then cover her with a second blanket.
L’s vocabulary increases daily, and she’s begun making sentences and even her own shortened versions of words. Often, I’m not “tata” but “tat.”
“Chodz, tat!” she’ll say to me when dinner’s on the table and K’s sent her up looking for me.
Our cat, Bida, is sometimes “Bid.” “Trzymac” (“hold”) is “trzym,” pronounced “cim” (“chym” in English transliteration). “Jacket” is simply “Jack.”
And yet she’ll also unnecessarily extend some things. “Bida” can also be — indeed, usually is — “Bida kicia,” which would roughly be translated “Bida kitty.” And all cats, in books and in real life, become “Bida kicia.” We recently met a new cat named Kissy and tried to explain to L that this was “Kissy kicia,” but to no avail: “Bida kicia!”
“Kupa” and “siusiu” (“poo-poo” and “pee-pee”) are always said together. In fact, L likes to call Bida to the door, open it, and encourage her to go relieve herself in the yard. It sounds like this: “Bida kicia, chodz! Idz! Kupa siusiu!”
When Bida is outside and we ask L, “Where is Bida?”, the reply is always the same: “Kupa siusiu!”
The Girl loves jumping, so we did the logical thing: bought an exercise trampoline.
She wasn’t always as successful as that, though.
One thing is certain: she’ll jump until she’s drenched with sweat.
The Girl has been talking more and more, though the developments are slow. She is, after all, learning two languages. She mainly favors English, but she does use a few Polish words, and as any child her age, she has some of her own inventions:
The budding bilingualism can lead to amusement.
When K went to pick L up from daycare, L’s now-good friend, J, helped L gather her things. It’s a daily occurrence, usually looking for “Baby.” L, however, has become particularly fond of a little teddy bear (“miÅ›” in Polish) and that’s her daily companion.
K entered the room and immediately J, helpful as always, began running around the room, looking for the teddy bear, saying, “Misio! Misio!” And so our daughter is only 19 months old and already a language teacher.
On the way out, K told L she should say goodbye to the frog on the door mat.
“Powiedz ‘bye’ żabie,” K suggested.
“Bye, frog!” L responded.
The Girl looks more and more like a young lady and less and less like a baby every day.
L has begun talking. Single words, mixing Polish and English, but words all the time.
“More” is “ma,” often with the accompanying baby sign.
“Shoes” is “shas.” We discovered only yesterday that she’d learned that word when she was walking about with one of her shoes in her hand, trying to get one of us to put it back on.
“Ba” or “baba” can be a number of things. First it was banana. Then it became her name for our cat. It’s become so ubiquitous that, when in doubt, we refer to something as “ba.”
Of course, “dac” has been around for some time now.
Most of the words she speaks are English, but she understands both English and Polish. The dominance of English is an obvious function of living in the States, but I could help the matter by speaking more Polish at home.
The Girl of late has been doing a lot to shake up my notions of what it means to communicate and all the different ways it’s possible to share a thought with another person.
The biggest preconception she’s radically challenged is the age at which an individual can create novel ways of communicating. We’ve been using baby signing with L, and she’s picked up on several signs that she uses regularly now: eat, more, and bath are among them. She understands a lot more — sleep, drink, potty/diaper change — but that’s not terribly impressive in that she already understands a great deal of spoken language. What shocked me recently about the signing was that L created her own sign for a word that she understands: swing. She waves her right arm back and forth at about shoulder level when she wants to go swing — which is pretty much constantly.
Another preconception: the ability to speak develops much later in children raised in a multilingual environment than it does in a monolingual home. L has a few words that she uses to great effect.
She’s got a few more that she almost says, and at least one L-ism: “baaa” is bannana.
But her understanding of both Polish and English is amazing. We ask her many things in both Polish and English and she understands them both unhesitatingly.
All this culminates in the last unexpected change: an increase in crying. She knows what is possible with communication now — in a word, everything — but she lacks the skills to tell us everything she wants or needs. And the resulting frustration manifests itself in crying/screaming fits more often than we’d like.
The developments of the last few weeks, though, promise a quick end to these fits. In other words, the problem is the solution.
We took the Girl back to the park, where she went down the slide on her own for the first time.
Hesitant at first, she was soon zooming down on her own.
The Girl has had a love-hate relationship with the bath.
She generally liked it until recently. There was a time when she hated it; this was because she had been sick for a while and simply hadn’t had a bath for a couple of weeks. Once we got back into the routine, though, she started liking it again. She wasn’t eager to get in, but she caused no problems; she wasn’t eager to get out, but she didn’t fuss.
No more.
Now she loves it. And getting her out can result in one upset Girl. Bath time is play time — and she’ll play with just about anything.
