Lucy seems to get bigger every day. People who didn't see her during Christmas break keep telling us they're sure she grew six inches during that time. All of the 18-month clothes have been moved upstairs now. The 2T clothes are now in her dresser with the 24-month clothes. Some are a little big, but she's growing into them.
Lucy is also showing new skills nearly every day. She adds a couple of words a day to her vocabulary. Yesterday she looked at her wrinkled fingers in the pool and said, "Mama, me pruney." I probably should have taught her the word wrinkled first, but it works. She is learning more verbs and making more sentences. She still refuses to say her name. The other day I asked her what her name is, and she said, "Me." Well, yes, me is "a name I call myself" according to The Sound of Music. She is starting to build with Duplo blocks all by herself. I typically join her and add to the complexity of the sheep house that she's building. That's what she always builds. She attaches the rooms to the Duplo table and adds other blocks and puts people and animals inside. She has also gotten into playing with the Little People House and her magnetic doll house. She "measures" everything with her measuring tape. She still recognizes letters and numbers. The other day she was scribbling on a chalkboard and suddenly stopped and pointed to some of the marks she had made and told me it was a Y. She was right. She didn't make a Y on purpose, but she recognized she had done it.
She is making progress on showing self-control and patience, even though she's still independent, strong-willed, and two. She tends to help clean up her toys, sometimes without prompting. Every once in a while, she'll refuse to help for a few minutes and sometimes pitch a little fit, but when asked again later, she'll eagerly jump up and help. If we could just fix that occasional pitch-a-fit stage, she'd be pretty well behaved. She's still energetic and doesn't sit still for long, which some people would consider being poorly behaved, but I'm OK with her need to go and do and move at this point as long as she isn't hurting anything or anyone and is making progress in controlling herself. She doesn't tend to hurt, and she is making progress, so I can be somewhat content with that for now.
Since Lucy is getting so big (and our lives are about to get more complicated), we've been working with Lucy on a couple of life skills. Getting Lucy to sleep has always been a problem. Since I'm expecting to live in a recliner for a couple of months after another C-section, we needed to get Lucy to a point where she could get to sleep without my lying next to her. We have succeeded! Matt and I both go to her room with her for bedtime. I sit in the recliner, and Matt sits next to her mattress on the floor. We read books until she gets tired. I offer hugs and kisses, and she grabs her water bottle (her comfort item) and lies down on her mattresses and falls asleep. Some nights are better than others, but she's doing really well. A couple of nights she has needed more human contact to fall asleep, so she has cuddled up to Matt on the floor and fallen asleep. That's fine with us. She even gets into bed herself on Thursday nights when Matt is at game night. It's pretty fantastic. The freedom makes me a little giddy. I tend to fall asleep in the recliner, sometimes before she's asleep.
The other training we are doing is potty training. We haven't pushed her. We've just kept talking up life without diapers and giving her opportunities to sit on her Elmo potty seat. The training has been stalled for a while. She was willing to sit but almost never peed in the toilet. Yesterday she started refusing to even sit on her Elmo seat. I was OK with stalled but not OK with regression. So today I stripped her naked from the waist down and made her stay on a vinyl table cloth in the dining room for a couple hours. We played together, building sheep houses, and we ate snacks. She didn't like being confined to the table cloth, but she stayed fairly well. She peed on the table cloth twice and was horrified both times. The first time we dried the table cloth with a towel, and I took her to sit on the toilet and reminded her that she should let me know if she needs to pee so that she can do it on the toilet or on a potty seat (two of which were on the table cloth with her). The second time she peed, she immediately jumped up and said, "Mama, pee! Agh!" We dried it and sat her on the toilet, and she peed on the toilet! She had stopped herself when she realized she was peeing and finished on the toilet! She was praised lavishly and given a sticker to put on her shirt. She stayed diaperless until Matt got home from work (the deadline I had given her). Then she got to wear a diaper again. I thought we could do that every day for a while and gradually increase the amount of time she spends without a diaper. Today was successful. I hope this method continues to work for her. I don't have a time table for potty training her. I'm just glad to be making progress again. I just ordered a huge supply of her size of Elmo diapers (Pampers) from Amazon, so we're ready for however long it takes her. And if she doesn't use them all, we'll save them for Emmie.
Speaking of Emmie, she is quite a kicker. I told Matt that I think she's gone from wiggling and fluttering to full-blown kicking faster than her siblings did. And boy can she kick! Yesterday, she kicked me hard enough to knock my hand off my belly. She was also doing somersaults, which feels like my organs went on a roller coaster without the rest of me. She appreciates it when I rest and when I eat, but I haven't noticed any other preferences yet.
I've been talking to Emmie, typically saying, "Hi, Emmie," when she kicks. Yesterday Lucy said, "No Emmie!" I explained (again) that Emmie is her baby sister. I then told her for the first time that Emmie was in my belly. Lucy refused to believe that. I informed her that she had also once lived in my belly. She refused to believe that, too. I don't blame her. It's weird. Lucy doesn't get the baby sister idea yet, but we're working on it. I bought a baby figure for her Little People house. We already had baby gear (high chair, changing table, cradle, stroller) but not a baby. We've started playing baby and big sister with her Little People. She loves putting the baby on the changing table to pretend to change the baby's diaper. I'm hoping that we can provide enough story lines about babies that will become familiar to her so that when a baby comes home she'll have an idea of what's supposed to happen. She hadn't really experienced snow before, but when it snowed a couple weeks ago, she immediately made and threw a snowball. She knew what to do in the snow because of Curious George and Shaun the Sheep. I'm hoping we can do the same sort of thing by playing scenarios that will tell her what to do with a baby. We'll see how it goes.
No comments:
Post a Comment