Stuff

• This week has ushered in the return of "No!" into Maia's vocabulary. It was on a hiatus for a few months, and, as we've mentioned, we saw "Yeah!" enter her vocabulary recently. Now that she's using both, my goodness does she make her opinions known! :)
• Maia now insists on sitting in regular adult chairs as much as possible. She's still OK with using her high chair at home, but when we're out and about, she wants to be in a regular chair. She's tall enough to make this somewhat feasible even if the restaurant or cafe doesn't have booster seats.
• If she gets a good night of sleep, it appears that Maia is making the typical (for this age) transition from one daytime nap to two. If she doesn't get a good night of sleep, though, all bets are off as to what our schedule will be, and we just fly by the seat of our collective pants during the day!
• New additions to Maia's vocabulary recently: strawberry, bread (the word replacing the sign), dance, truck, elbow, meat, tomato, thank you (another returning phrase that had disappeared for a few months), belt, PJs.

Other than those specific things, we just have a general sense that Maia's going through some sort of major intellectual or emotional upheaval, developmentally-speaking. There's some big stuff going on these days. It's hard to describe where this feeling comes from, but I'll try. Her sleep has been quite disrupted over this last week in a new way; it feels like a new sort of separation anxiety that's growing out of some new developmental milestone that we can't yet pin down. Perhaps she's starting down the road towards weaning herself off of nursing? Or perhaps she's coming into a new sense of self, a new understanding of what it means to be a toddler in the world. Maybe another language explosion is right around the corner? It's hard to say.