Mega Words, Pictures and Video Post

Sorry to be so quiet lately. I've decided to make up for the irresponsible neglect with a mega words, pictures and video post!

Things have changed so much here in the last few weeks, it's hard to find a place to begin. First and foremost, Sania is an incredible talented walking machine whose exploits seem to have no bound. She is already showing signs of classic toddler climb without regard for her own life syndrome. If she sees any elevated horizontal plane (nearby stepstool, flight of stairs, toilet, tub, trash can, Reid) her feet fly to the challenge. Then she falls down.

She's also developed and incredible personality. I know it's hard to imagine considering that both her parents are such shrinking violets, but it turns out that Sania and Reid are both hams of the highest caliber. It's almost comically easy (unless she's recently fallen down) to elicit a killer smile from Sania. Call her name and give her a grin and she'll flash you a full smile, featuring the same two teeth she's had for most of her life. No other teeth have been added at this time.

This winter started late, so it didn't seem like we'd have a lot of snow. You may have seen that shot from a random snowstorm a while back when Sania enjoyed her first taste of the white stuff. You can see that Reid and K got to frolic in the snow again recently, while Sania and I stayed inside and kicked it in the crib. I took pictures of Sania mercifully un-menaced by her brother.

Sania's primary exploits have been in the arena of bipedal transportation. This week (though I offer no visual evidence at this time), we purchased her a pair of actual shoes. She's been padding around in little moccasins for a while, and she seemed to really have the hang of it. When we first put these clodhoppers on her feet she just stood there, staring good-naturedly like she was vaguely in on some big joke and was waiting for the details. Her expression said, "Good one guys. I can't lift my feet."

Eventually she got the hang of it, of course, and what used to be a pleasant little pitter patter today was replaced by a mini-Frankenstein clomp, clomp, clomp. We were letting her try out the shoes in the house while she got used to them. Before too long, she figured out how to take the shoes off and had a much better time just carrying them around shouting.

The vocalizations have grown exponentially as well. She says all sorts of things, shouted and, well, mostly shouted. As you can see from the video, she hit us with a complex two-syllable construction the other day, spontaneously offering up "bubble" when Reid came home from a birthday party with some bubble party favors. We ran all over the place to get a camera and caught the whole thing on tape.

"Bubble" joins such big words as "duck" and "cat" and "ball." She also rolls her hands when you sing "Wheels on the Bus" and makes strange little hand-motions when you sing "Itsy Bitsy Spider." Her daycare sounds like tons of fun.

Of course, Reid continues to thrill us, especially with his big-brother behavior. He takes good care of the little girl and doesn't mostly mind sharing the spotlight with Sania. What's amazing is his perfect little offerings of kindness. Mostly, they are related to particular things he's interested in getting from me. He says, "You're my favorite dad!" and melts my heart. Then he says, "Can I watch a movie?"

By movie, of course, he means one of the family's stockpiled episodes of "Backyardigans." We've Tivo'd a couple dozen, and they are 26-minute packets of peace and quiet. Afterwards, K and I are treated to waves of newly-scrambled stories in which Reid himself has been woven into the latest, thrilling Backyardigan narrative, perhaps flying to Mars, aboard a pirate ship, accompanied by a mermaid, while swinging through the jungle dressed like a yeti. Or something.

Finally, in a tribute to all the proud Americans who spent yesterday's celebration of St. Patrick's day spinning around, hiccuping and then falling down, check out what Sania was doing Yesterday while Reid attended a friend's birthday party.




Sania, K and Reid got all dressed up recently to attend the Seemantham (that's a Hindu baby shower without gifts but with plenty of naan!) for K's friend Vandana. (Congrats to Vandana and Anil on the birth of cute little Krish last week!) I also got dressed up, but nobody ought to care about that.


During one of our bizarrely warm days before the re-onset of winter (81 degrees on Wednesday and snow Friday afternoon!) Aunt Alia came over to join Reid in a funny face making contest in the back yard while we dined on delicious Salvadoran cuisine. Which reminds me of the food situation regarding Ms. Sania. She has become some kind of crazy omnivore. Tired of the whipped food that all babies are forced to stomach, Sania went on strike. K and I struggled to find things for her to eat, eventually giving her chunks of chicken which initially went great. Then she tired of it. She wants flavor, big chunks of delicious food with rich full flavor. But she has only two teeth. So we give her tiny bits of meat and vegetable which she mostly eats but sometimes spits on the ground (sometimes landing on Dixie, comically). Then we struck upon something which really demonstrates Sania's culinary heritage: Peruvian Rotisserie Chicken! She loves the stuff.

Sania Is a Walking Machine

Sania Keeps Walking on Vimeo

So Sania has continued to walk. It's a lot of fun. Reid took his first steps at a similar point in his timeline, but quickly backed away from the exhilarating new bipedal technology. He first walked in May, two months before his birthday, but didn't really officially toddle until mid-June. Sania started walking, as you'll note in the post below, just before the ten-month mark, and hasn't stop, as the video above will demonstrate.

Reid, of course, still has Sania beat dead to rights on other critical milestones. Despite all the ordinary first-parent paranoia (for which K lets me take full credit), Reid's mouth full of teeth was compelling enough reason for us to be fairly experimental when it came to person-foods at around this point in Reid's life. Our trip to Egypt on his first birthday was largely predicated on the idea that a bunch of people who didn't understand English (or would conveniently forget it if necessary) would be trying to feed him kabobs and tahini and cucumbers and everything else, so we should just get him ready. Sania believes she's about at the same spot in the food development arc, except she's got these two useless teeth in the front and nothing else. She can pulverize a carrot with a relentless, beaver-like shaving method, but otherwise doesn't do much damage to food. Therefore, she is sentenced still to tiny bits of person-food and the pre-digested mush we've been feeding her for months. Poor thing.

I've got some more cute video which I'll be sending up in the next day or so. And some shots of Sania just looking smiley.

Little backstory on this video and the pictures I'll be putting up later: While Reid is still mostly being passive aggressive about sharing his parents with Sania, her little achievements (walking, saying "duck") clearly feed his understandable jealously. We're working to resolve this by doing more things with just Reid, especially on weekends, so he gets to spend time with either daddy or mommy focusing solely on him. It's been going pretty well. It was during one of these sojourns that I was able to capture Sania mostly un-harassed by her brother.

It was also on one of these little excursion this weekend (to a playground, the Target and to take the dog to the park for some off-lead canine-fun) that Reid dropped one of his famous one-liners. I have a little voice recorder around here somewhere, and I'm going to start toting it around to record all these gems. We're in the Target and I've constructed a route to the item we need that avoids contact with the toy section, but I know Reid's no dummy and the toy issue may be raised. Item secured, I ask Reid if there's anything else we need in Target (mostly asking myself, really, but knowing that this is the moment for him to begin asking for all matters of amusement). He thinks for a minute and then says, "I could use some pajamas."

I guess he's really concerned about sleepwear.