For a long time, I joked that Maddi was a two-year-old boy in a baby girl’s body. Her hobbies included destroying things, getting into stuff, and head-butting the other babies in her playgroup. Even her toys of choice, cars and balls, were action-oriented. But now, she is turning into a bit of a girlie girl.
I didn’t really expect her to enjoy the dress-up box we gave her and Kaija until she was 2 or 3. But surprisingly, she enjoys this new amusement even more than her sister does. When she sees the Hawaiian leis we got at the local dollar store, she points and squeals until I have no choice but to place one over her head — which is always bowed expectantly by the time the lei reaches her. She particularly loves a fuchsia satin purse encrusted with rhinestones, which I found at a post-holiday sale. She daintily places the purse on her shoulder and toddles around with her arm up so as to hold it in place while she goes about her “business.”
Another activity she enjoys is picking flowers in our front yard. Even as a colicky wee thing, she always calmed down when I pulled out the sling and took her out in the warm sunshine. Between the ribbons of the memory board on her wall are wedged the first flowers we ever picked together, when she was just a few months old. Now, when we look out the front window, Maddi will point at the front yard and I’ll ask her if she wants to go pick some flowers. The question is always answered with enthusiastic nodding and squealing, and she will point out each flower she wants me to pick for her. She usually wants to show her bouquet off to Daddy, and if Chris is lucky, she will generously bestow on him her chubby fistful of manhandled posies.
Unfortunately her girliness does not extend to hair ornamentation. No sooner do I get one ponytail in and begin work on the next, than the first ponytail is destroyed by Little Miss Grabbyhands. And when I put a barrette in her hair, heaven forbid that we should pass a mirror and she should spot the offending clip. She will proceed to claw at her head angrily until the hated barrette — hitherto unnoticed — has been removed from her bangs.
Nevertheless, I’ve been persisting with the barrettes and bobby pins and now she sits still for the most part while they’re being clipped on. Now that she’s got a bit of hair on her head, she looks less like the little round-headed man from Monopoly and more like a wee girl.
In other news, she is walking fairly well now. At first, she would only toddle around at the gym’s daycare, where there were big kids to show off for. At home, it was all about crawling. But soon, she realized that walking with something in one hand was far more efficient than crawling while clutching an object, and got a little practice in while carrying things across the room. Pretty soon, she decided this walking thing wasn’t so bad after all, and she will walk to people or things if they’re not more than five or 10 steps away. She still resorts to crawling when she’s excited or wants to get somewhere fast, but slowly and surely she’s becoming a toddler!
On the word front, she has continued with the girlie-girl theme. Her favorite new words are “fowver” (flower) and “puuhh” (purse). Other new words include “truck,” “what” and “poopoo” — the latter of which is used at some point every few days to tell me she needs to poop. I ask her if she wants to poopoo on the potty, she nods excitedly, sits on the toilet and giggles and kicks, then tries to leap off and poops two minutes later after I diaper her. But even though she hasn’t figured out exactly when that poopoo is coming, we’re still counting “poopoo” as a word. That brings us to 55 words thus far. More will doubtless follow in the coming weeks, as she has been trying lately to say “butterfly” per her fixation on her decor and the protagonist of her favorite book, “The Very Hungry Caterpillar.”
And here is a snap of Maddi and Mommy at the beach last weekend, playing it safe in the shade!