4/28/08 The mornings

Katrina had a great time in music class today -- and no mini-meltdowns!

My days go so, so much better now that I've given up trying to beat traffic in the morning. Sleeping later helps, but really, the biggest factor is spending some time with Katrina in the morning. It's not all fun and games; she can be a pest with feeding, and I don't like getting banana splatters on my work clothes, or dealing with a stinky right before getting in the car. But it makes me feel so much more connected to what's really important in my life.

Katrina is "speaking" in full sentences. She looks right at you and utters a series of words, with lilts and pauses and intonations that sound just like real speech. Too bad they're not in English!! They're a complete mishmash jumble of sounds. But they seem to mean something to her.

Today she came in to find me and "said" some sort of sentence, looking at me intently, then looking to a different room. For the first time, she clearly was trying to tell me something, so I followed her into our guest room where she'd turned on the TV. Ah. Then she "explained" to me how she did it.

Julian helped me get Katrina to eat a whole bowl of pasta stars (shh, with broccoli bits) tonight. She rejected it outright at first, until Julian and I chanted together: "Spoon goes in the moooooouuuthh!!" and she'd giggle as she shoveled a huge spoonful of food in her mouth as we sang "mouuth!" She ate the whole bowl in about 5 minutes -- the difference between a paltry dinner and a nice big satisfying one. This left us with a charming adorable happy toddler for the rest of the evening. It's funny that I played that game with Julian when he was a toddler, and now he was helping me play it too.

Gabriel was too busy during all this with his new distraction: chess. Dave showed him the very basics on a Mac chess game, and now he plays it again and again and again and again and again and....well, this is Gabriel we're talking about. He's learning all about the game from the computer program and having great fun with it. Oh the modern age -- he'll be pretty surprised to find out that real chessboards with real pieces exist!

4/28/08