Sophie is 2 and a half! When she was about 2, I looked at the 2 and a half year olds in her yoga class and thought they seemed so much more grown up. The other moms told me a lot happens between 2 and 2 and a half, and they were right.
She’s so mature these days:
And with such mature tastes!
But seriously, I can’t believe we’re halfway through 2 already. I know this sounds trite, but honestly: for her first year, everything felt so slow, and since then it has just been speeding up all the time. It goes so fast, now! You still won’t ever catch me telling a new mother to “cherish every moment” because I know how hollow that can feel when you’re stressed and so tired you can’t think, but…I tell myself, now, and I mostly really do cherish her all the time. Her childhood feels so fleeting and we just enjoy her so much.
Ryan had an extra day off around New Years, so we all went to Echo together.
The part we are all not enjoying so much is that she is sick a lot. Or at least, she has been since basically Thanksgiving. This may be related to the fact that she takes a daily inhaled steroid now to control her asthma – which works well, but also supresses immune response somewhat. It might also be a random string of bad luck. But it is sad to have her sick so often, and she’s become kind of hyper-aware of medical stuff. On the maybe-bright side, she is now extremely comfortable at the doctor’s office! Sophie and I are both sick right now, and you can blame the lateness of this post on that. This cold? Not fun.
At 2 and a half, Sophie is big into pretending. A lot of her pretend games are based on books and movies. (Her knowledge of movies has expanded somewhat during this time of constant illness.) She flies on her broom, calls herself Mae or Kiki or Little Bear (and her dad Satsuki or Tombo or Papa Bear and me Catbus or Mama Bear). She also likes to pretend that she lives in our closet, and has literally told someone that her home is a closet in my bedroom. (Oh dear.)
She also likes to pretend to be a mama and take care of babies. (Sometimes those babies are her fingers, or a block, or other random objects.) Since her friend Arlo’s mom is quite pregnant, she is thinking about pregnancy lately and says she has a baby in her uterus. She likes to invite me to feel it moving in there. As a big fan of nursing, she also likes to nurse her babies:
Nursing a baby doll, with a Serious Business facial expression
We had a fantastic, cozy Christmas with Sophie’s grandparents in New York. We stayed with Ryan’s parents and saw mine on Christmas Eve and Christmas day. She had such a good time and misses them all so much. In fact, she has seemingly just come into a solid understanding of missing people, and it is heart-breaking! Sometimes she is quite ardent! So she was very pleased when Gramma and Grandad came to visit recently:
Gramma and Sophie, playing with the new dollhouse Sophie got for Christmas.
I am sure there is more to say about 2 and a half year old Sophie, but I have taken far too long to make this post in the first place, and this cold is attacking my brain! So I’ll save it for next time. Happy 2.5 to Sophie!
Sophie pretending to be Kiki, of Kiki's Delivery Service. This is basically her favorite thing to do right now and she spends many hours delivering refrigerator magnets to her dollhouse and "flying fast because it's raining."
I was all ready to declare this a quiet month, and then last week happened! We spent last Friday evening in the ER with Sophie, who was having an asthma attack that was not responding to the rescue drugs the way it is supposed to. She had a few rounds of the rescue medicine in a nebulizer (which makes the drug into a mist she can easily breathe in) and a dose of prednisone. The prednisone stabilized her and she started to feel better, so once she was stable they let us take her home to bed. She was okay after that, other than the fact that the 3 days of prednisone she took to help keep her stable made her wired and unable to fall asleep until very late each night. Now she is off of that and on a daily maintenance drug as well as rescue medication as needed. We are also the proud new owners of our very own nebulizer. In one week, we went to the ER, pediatrcian, or pharmacy basically every day for 5 days, and I am exhausted. But! Our baby can breathe properly now, which is of course worth every second and penny of this draining experience, and I’m relieved to have more of what we need to deal with this now (nebulizer, drugs, an official diagnosis, and so on).
Did I mention we had not one, but two flat tires in the past week, also? None of these events were concurrent, for which I suppose I am grateful, but…really?
Sophie has been a bit stressed and tired because of all this, but she’s still full of verve and recovering nicely!
She relieves stress by busting a move:
Big dance number
Since we lost some time there, Sophie and Kelly and I have been doing a lot of Christmas preparations this week. Kelly has been doing some of my running around for me, and yesterday we all wrapped a ton of Christmas gifts together. It has been great. Here are Kelly and Sophie, matching their outerwear and facial expressions!
Kelly and Sophie rocking matching sweatshirts and funny faces. ;)
Edited to add Sophie quotes for this month:
On seeing a yard ornament of a reindeer pulling a sleigh, Sophie said “Mama, look! It’s a goat…pulling a rack.”
On tripping and faceplanting on the sidewalk: “A big fell camed! But I am okay.”
On waking from a dream: “Daddy, you are a bear!”
She also named her borrowed Playmobil family: Frank (a fisherman), Owen (the presumed mom), Thuthy (the girl) and Jimmy (the boy).
And, Sophie shaking a jingle bell: ““This is a jingle bell! I can jing it!”” (Thank you Kelly, for remembering that!)
As part of learning to use and tolerate the nebulizer, we have been singing Christmas songs while we do breathing treatments. Sophie is now well versed in “Up On The Housetop” and “Jingle Bells”, as well as Tori Amos’ version of “What Child Is This/Nowell”, and Rudolph. We have also been reading a variety of picture book interpretations of “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” by Clement C. Moore, featuring everything from very traditional Tomie DePaola illustrations to a version set in…Africa? and illustrated by Rachel Isadora. Sophie has been waking up spouting lines from the poem. It is super cute.
My little flower child...
We decorated the tree when Kelly’s friends Nathan and Dave were visiting. It was a nice little party, and Sophie was super excited. She decorated the bottom branches in the traditional childhood style – several ornaments to a branch, very close together. Some of them have stayed exactly that way, some were slightly redistributed. We like to light up the tree upon waking in the morning and only unplug it before bed. Sophie is as big a fan of Christmas trees and hot chocolate as I am, so we are having a grand old time around here lately. Well, you know, when we’re not having periods of bizarrely air-themed bad luck!
Sophie took great pride in decorating the tree.
Happy holidays to all, be cozy, and drink some hot chocolate while gazing at some pretty lights, okay? Sophie and I highly recommend it.
I’m a bit late to post this, but hello and welcome to 2 and a third!
Wearing the frog headband, backwards, laying in our bed.
Sophie is quite imaginative, with her frog eyes and her plumbing, making imaginary mushroom soup and seeing dragons now and then…you know, typical two-year-old imaginings. ;)
Sophie enjoys fixing her sink, something she learned from our real-life plumbing problems.
She loves to take her wrench and her screwdriver and fix her sink, just like daddy did a while back. Now and then she pretends to go to the store with her bucket for more “stinkin’ things.” (I feel like I have written about this before, but couldn’t actually find it here – perhaps it’s just that I’ve talked about it a lot. I am amused by and proud of my little plumber!)
Big smiles, big yogurt enjoyment
Sophie’s third Halloween experience was a great success. For the first time, she understood and anticipated “Christmas-treating”, though I had to convince her to actually leave the house since she was sick the morning of Halloween. But after nap and a viewing of My Neighbor Totoro, she felt better – and I’m so glad we went, I had as much fun as she did.
The costume:
Sophie the UPS driver
The cousins:
Sophers and Eleanor, UPS driver and acrobat
The crew:
Photo shamelessly cribbed from Brad. Thanks, Brad!
We went Christmas-treating in a neighborhood near Ryan’s office and our old apartment, where there are a lot of families who get very into Halloween. It was also a beautiful night for it – warm enough that Sophie didn’t need a coat. Awesome!
We had a visitor this month – Kelly’s friend Ish. You’ll find him in the Halloween shot, perhaps, dressed as a very convincing pirate! Sophie loved having Ish here. He was good at playing and reading books.
We miss you, Ish!
We all wore hats to the last Burlington farmer's market of the year, deeming it Haturday.
A Sophie quote, the only one I managed to remember:
Ryan and Sophie were playing with the Playmobil house. The people were having dinner, and Sophie gave them a toy Jeep to eat. Ryan said something about Jeeps not being food, and Sophie responded with “Daddy, Jeeps are food because they are plastic people.” INDEED.
This month we have been sick a lot, struggled with some new 2 year old behaviors, and lost some sleep due to stinking daylight savings time (Sophie was sleeping until 6:30 before the time change – now she has a tendency to wake up at 5:30, we’re still working on correcting for it). But it’s okay – all of that stuff is going to get better eventually, and meanwhile I have a kid who does things like this:
More at Flickr as always, including a bigger version of the Goober Peas video and the other parts of the song (accidentally taken in 3 parts due to Sophie’s lack of co-operation and my lack of ability to not touch the “record” button at the wrong times). :)
I had to include this one too, because look how hard Sophie is posing right there! I cracked up.
The kids weren't the only ones who got to enjoy tree climbing! The view from up there was pretty awesome.
Adele sampling our harvest, with Ryan
Jon, considering which apple to pick next. ;)
Erin, also at the top of the tree!
Kai, who appears to be saying hi!
Sophie enjoyed lounging in the long grass at the orchard while we waited for our friends.
And one from the bonus orchard trip I took with Sophie, this time to Chapin Orchard, where we picked a half peck of apples, visited the chickens and bunny, and bought a carving pumpkin and a piece of maple candy (her first!)
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