Sunny Maia

From Sunny April Day

I added just a few photos that we took outside yesterday. Our grass is getting greener, the tulips in front of the house are getting ready to bloom, and all is well in this little corner of the world. :) We are all so happy that the weather is warmer. Brian's taken Maia on a couple of bike rides around the neighborhood, and she's becoming quite proficient at going down the slides at the park just down the street from the house.

We saw the pediatrician this morning for Maia's 15-month visit, and, aside from a bit of residual post-nasal drip from a cold she's had this week, all is well. She continues to be really tall for her age (about the 90th percentile), and a bit skinny (about the 40th). Our doctor was also quite surprised when I went through Maia's list of words; she says that it sounds like Maia's really verbal for her age, which wasn't a surprise to hear for those of us who spend time listening to her chatter all day. :)

This morning, as we were waiting for the nurse to give her the two immunizations that were on the schedule this month, Maia was looking around the exam room and saying her favorite three-word sentence, "It's a book!" or "It's a box!". Although she knows that "book" and "box" are words that signify an object in the world, I don't think that she realizes that "it's" and "a" are also words--I think that those two are more mimicry of a sound pattern that she hears adults saying. I was trying to get a video of her saying that sentence yesterday, but, of course, she wasn't interested in cooperating.

I feel like I've made a shift in my parenting style that makes life quite a bit more relaxing. We don't really have any What to Expect-type books for the toddler years, and the e-mail newsletter that focuses on toddler development inevitably just gets deleted from my inbox every week rather than read. There really isn't much of the first-year anxiety anymore about when Maia's meeting various milestones. In large part, I know that this is because we've been extremely fortunate in that Maia's development has been at a very normal rate thus far, and so we haven't been conditioned to feel concerned. But, even with that, I think that there are things now that we experience as an ordinary part of parenthood (a 101-degree fever, a drop in her weight percentile, a week-long cough) that would have worried me much more several months ago than they do now.

This afternoon, Maia will have time to play at the park with her best friend Harper (whose name she recognizes, and hearing it always makes her smile). Maybe after dinner Brian and Maia and I will go out to get our first ice cream cones of the year, and wander around campus and downtown a bit? We'll see. My impulse is to be outside as much as I possibly can.

An interesting new book I'm reading: Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.