Maia's on her way to her second nap at the moment (the first one is usually right around 9:00, the second sometime between 1:00 and 2:00), and I thought I'd take a few deep breaths, relax, and do a blog post. Our family is in the midst of a couple of very busy weeks, due in part to some deadlines at Brian's work, a lot of childbirth classes and client meetings for my work, and general toddlerhood with Maia. :)
This evening, if the snow lets up and it's safe to do so, I'm going to drive to East Lansing to hang out with Mom and spend my first relaxing night away from Maia since she was born. (I was gone through much of two nights last week, working with my client in labor, but that sure wasn't the same thing as going out to dinner and seeing a movie!) I have an appointment at the salon in Okemos tomorrow morning for a haircut and color, so I have to find my way out there one way or the other. I'll probably start a new book, too; since the new year, I've made it a priority to get a lot of reading done on a weekly basis, and so far I've been sticking to that promise to myself. I just finished Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father this morning, so it's time to move on to something new.
About five or six nights out of seven these days, Maia will go to sleep at about 7:30 PM and not wake up until about 6:30 AM, so it's much easier now for me to leave for an evening; most likely, Brian won't need to get up in the middle of the night to warm up a bottle and feed her. She's still asking to nurse several times a day, but we've made that transition from one purpose to another: nursing is largely about a social and emotional need now, rather than a nutritional one. Of course, she still gets my immune system antibodies and good proteins and fats and all that good stuff (which is perhaps part of the reason why she didn't catch our various winter stomach viruses). But, in many ways, it feels like we've entered the toddler nursing stage, one in which it's a form of emotional comfort and re-connection with Mom after all her exploring and adventures.
What else? Well, after my last post (Monday?) in which I listed all of the words and signs that Maia knows, we've added a couple: "car" (word and sign) and "duck" (sign--she was making the quacking sound already). She's also completely obsessed with saying and signing "ball"; we went to Target yesterday afternoon and got her a second soccer ball, and replaced a football that Stella chewed up.
It's really remarkable how quickly she's picking these things up right now. I was looking back over old blog posts to see when she started verbal communication in the form of intelligible words, and it was during her ninth and tenth months . . . she was barking like a dog at nine months whenever she'd see a dog, and then she said "hi" just days after she turned ten months old. This Sunday, she'll be fourteen months old; what remarkable development in such a short period of time! By saying "remarkable," I don't mean that I think Maia's pace of development is anything unusual; I just mean that it's amazing to me to think about how quickly babies take on all of these uniquely human characteristics and abilities. It's very cool.
OK, I think that that's enough for now. It's time to do some laundry and clean up the debris left behind in the wake of Hurricane Maia. Later!
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