Riley is growing up, by leaps and bounds, daily. She is so not a baby anymore. She is squarely a little toddler. She talks an assortment of words, mostly animal sounds, and at this point, can open her bedroom door knob by herself. The latter has made bedtime routine fairly difficult, esp. when after bath, the naked baby can break loose of her bedroom and run free around the house until this mamma chases her down to get her PJs on and off to bed.
She's also begun enjoying the Tickle Game. I'm a big fan of tickling, but I know some folks (like my husband) are not, so I try to do so with reserve. Riley never seemed ticklish before, but now she plays a couple games with us. The first is when my husband teases her "I'm gonna git ya..." and makes the tickle hand gestures. R has such a great reaction. Her eyes widen. She turns on a dime and runs away full throttle, usually toward me, the "base" in this tag game. She will climb onto my shoulders if I let her just to get away from the tickler.
The next evolution of fun tickling is in the fact that she also knows and does the sign language for "More." So, we'll start down the tickling avenue for fun and then I will stop. R immediately signs for "more." So we do it again. Stop. "More." It's a really cute interaction.
Another cute thing she does is say the words "Okie dokey", which sound more like "cookie cookie." I'm not even sure what possessed me to ask her to repeat the phrase back to me at one point, but it is now the reigning favorite phrase next to "go-ga" accompanied with a downward facing dog pose or her tongue flick/fishy face for "what does a fish say?"
Her hair is so long too. We used to be able to pin back the bangs with barrette, but now she knows that word too and pulls out all barrettes as I put them in. She holds them and says "barrette." She doesn't even seem to notice she's pulling out her hair. Good thing she has a ton of it.
Each day brings new things she does and another one of those is saying "No." It actually sounds a bit more like a nasaly "nawh." It hasn't become a terrible thing yet, but she is definitely rejecting food or activity suggestions lately. We make due. She's a lovely little girl, who kisses all her stuffed animals and squeals with delight when I get back from a few errands. She makes me feel loved by signing "I love you" or blowing me kisses.
Something turned when she became this toddler who interacts with me more. Sometimes I find myself just watching her talk to herself or figure out how to turn the lid on a water bottle by herself. It thrills me that she's doing this all for the first time. I watched her for 15 minutes moving candles onto the coffeetable and back down to the floor over and over again, like some elaborate game or code she was trying to crack. Maybe all that newness has helped to inspire me to write more, not only this blog, but also music. I've embarked on a couple new collaborations that I hope will lead to a new album. More on this when it has materialized into a fuller concept. I'm happy to have our respective discoveries feed off of each other. I know that's assuming a lot about her, like that I might be feeding her discovery process, but it would be nice to think of our journeys as symbiotic in a way. Who knows... until more stuff is revealed...
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