Celie: 22 Months and Counting...to 12

Celie is going to be turning 2 at the end of August and I can’t get over it.  I can’t get over it, I can’t get over it. I keep saying that, don’t I?  “I can’t get over how big she is!”  “I can’t get over how much of a kid she is!”  I still look at her and am mesmerized that she came out of my vagina, the thing is I have a hard time realizing JUST how much smaller she was then (hopefully!).  I keep lying to my friends.  I’ll say, “Oh the baby is napping!”  Such LIES!  LIES!  The baby?  She is not a baby.  She is damn near breaking free!  She opens the deadbolt and lock on the door.  She’ll leave if you don’t watch!  An escape artist already at 22 months! 

She is incredibly agile and I was watching last night how she will just go up and down stairs like they are nothing at this point.  “I run!” she says, going across a room at full speed.  Outside, ideally, it would be nice to have one of those electric boundaries like they have for shock collars on dogs??  Now, now, I JEST!  Please, don’t take my daughter away, I’m joking.  I mean, we don’t HAVE a shock collar for her.  Don’t get me wrong, I think it would be a useful tool in parenting to say the very least, and if they marketed them I might buy one, but it would be set on the LOWEST setting!! I’m not a monster!! :P  Here's how I put it.  Celie outside is...have you ever seen Funny Farm?  If you haven't, you are missing out.  Legendary Chevy Chase.  Anyway, they get this dog, an Irish Setter, and bring it home and as soon as they sit it down in the yard it just takes off sprinting, chasing the ducks in the pond, running circles and then just ultimately running off.  They see it periodically just running through fields off in the distance.  That is Celie outside.  That is why I could use a collar.  All I can say is I am glad I am out in the woods and not along a road or highway!  She is a spirited child! 

Celie is quite the conversationalist.  She goes on and on pretty much all day long.  That is the first thing she does in the morning. It is as though her eyes open and she just starts talking.  I hope she is talking to her stuffed puppy Scout, because she will wake up and say, “OH, hi!!” and continue to have a full conversation. 

She knows so many words that I couldn’t possibly begin to make a list.  I tried months ago and have stuff jotted down but now she will basically repeat whatever.  She likes to say the “[listening and dancing to music] iiiiss awesooome!” part from Yo Gabba Gabba!  So we were listening to Stevie Nicks the other day and she started saying “Na Na Nicks”, so cute.  Then at the end of a song she cheered and said “Na Na Nicks awesome!!” I don’t know if a mother has ever been so proud.  Actually, I’m so proud so often it’s a weird feeling for me.  I guess I haven’t felt all too much pride for myself in my life, so I’m still getting used to the feeling, ya know?  I am awfully proud of her, though, and I knew parenting, if done well, would be the source of most of the pride I would ever have in my life.  She simply blows me away.

She is so smart.  She communicates so well.  She loves music and you can catch her intently listening to and memorizing songs.  She has been singing the past couple of months.  She would always sing along with things with me or on TV, but she has recently been singing songs all on her own.  Before her first birthday she was rocking out to Black Sabbath's The Wizard with me, so much so that she made a sort of dance of sorts up for it and seemed to know and anticipate the guitar riffs and changes and what not.  Amazing.  That was her favorite a year ago.  For the longest time now she was incredibly into that “We Are Young” song by Fun.  She loves the chorus, “Tonight, we are young, so let’s set the world on fire, we can burn brighter than the sun!”  She loves the inflection in it.  She gets into it; it is one of the cutest things I have ever seen.  She also for some reason after only hearing a few times become obsessed with the Damien Rice song “Me, My Yolk, and I”.  This one has me a little concerned, as I am pretty sure the song is either about masturbation or sex or both?  She doesn’t really know the subject matter, of course, of songs yet, but should I be lettering her listen to this stuff?  I’m broadening her.  Yeah, right.  Honestly, I didn’t play the Damien Rice song FOR her, she heard it maybe once or twice when I was playing and came running into the room during the chorus.  Some things she just finds so catchy she is drawn to them.  She really is showing a certain taste in things. 

I’ll also play the guitar and she has learned a lot of the words of the songs I play just from listening to me.  Yesterday I was practicing and she had dug out a Rock Band microphone and I looked down in the middle of the song I was playing and there she was singing the correct words into the microphone. <3  Tugging on the heart, right there!  This girl rocks!

She also repeats and anticipates words and lines in songs that she has heard me play, so in the car, she is singing the words to my friend’s album he recently recorded.  She knows it?  How does she know these things?  I’ve decided that it can’t possibly be because I am that awesome.  Surely an alien came down and stuck some apparatus into my pregnant stomach?  Maybe she was taken immediately after birth and replaced by a hybrid?  I don’t know.  It just amazes me that she is so quick at picking things up.  You can look at her when she is exposed to something new, a song or whatever, and see her “examining” it with her ears or eyes.

She sings Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star pretty much in its entirety, as well as the words to a lot of her favorite songs.  She is able to count to twelve!  She knows yellow, red, blue, purple, orange...she says "I sad..." when she is sad.  She will comment that things or people are "funny", those are concepts that I find funny she even understands.  She knows pretty much all of the main body parts.  She labels everything around her, shouting out the words like some sort of verbal stream of consciousness label maker.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t think she’s a genius or anything, I just think she is very expressive, very quick with learning, very musical, and very emotional.  Hopefully these are all qualities that I can help her control and use to the best of her abilities.  Trouble is, these are most of the qualities in me I am still working on controlling.  I see so many similarities between my daughter and I.  I am beginning to see which things in myself were innately there and not learned by my surroundings. 

The bad thing is that I don't even remember WHEN she said her first word, but I think I have it written down somewhere??  Juice, milk, water, more, food, dinner, noodles, [apple]sauce, yogurt, string cheese, "Pop and Grammy and Kate" "Sorry, Mama!"  "Sorry, Dad!"  She says "Thank You!" "See you soon!"  "Oh, wow, Mama!" "No way!"  "Buster!" "Dolly!" "Bye, guys!" "Where did it go?" "What is that?" "What's that sound?"  "There!"  "There's another one.  There's another one tooo!"  Her first word we think was "Hey!"  So funny.  I guess that's what we'd always say to her.  Hey, you!  Now all of these words are in Celie speak, but they are so clear they are definite.  She then rambles off in tangents that she surely sees are expressing and conveying her thoughts, but we are unable to understand the sounds she inserts.  She knows what she is talking about, that is for sure!  We're getting there.  I can remember her progress, when pone became phone.  When Ya Ya became [So]Fia.  I can't even begin to list the words she knows for things because honestly it still astounds me.  She will point to something and say what it is and I question how often I have even used that word in front of her or told her what it was??  She picks up more from television than you would think, and man...she's REALLY listening to me.  It's a really weird feeling to come to the realization that you are SERIOUSLY being heard. 

I caught her making two of her stuffed animals give kisses the other day and she would say "Friends!"  Her complete innocence and compassion and love astound me.    She is concerned when other kids are crying or upset.  She says "Sorry!" all of the time when she runs into you or something. We really do learn hatred, because I see nothing but a blank slate of love in Celie.  Parenthood is really the greatest classroom you will ever enter in your life. You are both teacher and student, and your child's mind truly is the greatest slate you will ever write on.