restaurant girl

When we went to Kassab's last night ...

1. She indicated a clock on the wall (clah), fellow customers (daydee for lady, maaah! for man), and the direction of gurgling water (wawu).
2. She fed herself rice, and enjoyed falafel and pita (peetah) for the first time.
3. Several times she offered and fed her food to me.
4. Because her bottle had fallen on the floor, at the end of the meal I transferred water to her mouth with a straw, which caused her to implore for more.
5. After the check arrived, I placed the credit card in the folder and told her to hand it back to the lady after she returns. She immediately grasped it towards a fellow customer, so I said, no, not that lady. She tried another, and I said, no, not that lady either. I pointed to the waitress and said, there, that lady. Her hands and eyes followed the entire time that the waitress walked around the restaurant until she transferred the bill holder.
6. When the credit card receipts arrived, I signed them. She grabbed the pen and imitated me.
   

All in all, she impressed the folks at the table next to us and the waitress. Such a smart and sweet little girl.

things she knows we didn't know she knows

Just about daily, or several times a day, I discover there are things she knows we didn't know she knows.

Yesterday afternoon, as we were driving on an unseasonably warm day from Oakland to the South Side for a treat of Kassab's middle eastern food and Dairy Queen desserts, Beatrice pointed out the window and said, "baby". She had been pointing out "car" and "bus", but from her vantage it didn't seem possible that she could see a baby. I said to her that I didn't see a baby, but she simply pointed again and repeated the word, so I followed her eyes. She was looking at the library on East Carson Street, but still, there were no babies in any of the windows.

"Library?" I said, and she said, "Baby". Mimi and I speculated that she associates going to the library with seeing babies, while Marissa's theory is that is her best attempt at pronouncing the word "library".

The amazing part is that she had never been to that library before, just to the main branch in Oakland, our local Homewood branch, and the one in Squirrel Hill. All that distinguished the brick building was this sign:






Earlier this evening, when Marissa was on the library website, I tested our theory. I brought Beatrice over and pointed to the logo, asking her what it is.

"Baby," she said.

~~~

I placed her down on the floor, and she walked over to the side table, reaching for the toy cookie jar. She removed the lid ("lid," she said), and after I opened the back she started to fit the plastic cookies into the slot on top. I braced myself for her usual frustration, since at least half the time she would orient the cookies in the slot backwards. Instead, I marveled how she would try one way, but then if that didn't work, remove and manipulate the cookie so that she could push it into the jar.

"When did she start knowing how to turn the cookies around?" I asked Marissa. I hadn't seen her play with that toy jar in some weeks. Marissa replied without turning around, in the fashion of someone who is not surprised by such discoveries, "I didn't know she knew that."

attention

As I sit here on the couch with my laptop and Marissa writes email on her computer in the dining room, Beatrice has been removing books one at a time from a white plastic basket. She turns the pages carefully and in order, examining them closely and sometimes at great length. She occasionally speaks a word (such as "baah" when she saw a sheep), but for the most part she seems to be attending closely to the pictures and words, as though reading silently to herself.

Having examined every book, after the bin was empty, she crawled into it and sat down, satisfied. She extracted herself gently, realizing that she had to use her hands on the carpet, because when she tried to step out, the basket started to tip.

As Snowball then crawled into my lap, she said, "Baba-oh", which is her way of saying, "Oh, Snowball". She walked over to the couch, pointing at my Palm PDA, saying "Baba" and "ruff-ruff", since she associates the device with seeing pictures of Snowball and Mookie.

After I turned off and handed her my cell phone, she nimbly opened it and held it to her ear, speaking, "hello". Then she handed the phone towards Snowball, offering it to "Baba". But after Snowball didn't know what to do, she spoke on the phone: "Mimi"; "Lolo".

OK, enough storytelling for now -- she's saying "up-puh" and struggling mightily to join me up here on the couch.

verbal dexterity

Sometime in the last couple of weeks, she ceased calling me dada and now says daddy. This is typically in staccato syllables, but last night when I took a book from her that she was ripping, she wailed my name.

We call her pacifier by the term binky, and a few weeks ago she was calling it mimi. It's an oddity, because that was already the name of her aunt, and she was certainly capable of the b sound (e.g., bhoo for book, bhoon for ballon, baba for Snowball, baboo for bottle, baby for baby, block-block for block, Beata for Beatrice, as well as ba! for her own invented interjection corresponding roughly to "where?"). Perhaps she was modifying mama, which on some level still might mean "something in my mouth" with the "ee" sound from the middle or end of binky. Whatever the case, she's been able in the last week or so to utter something that sounds very much like binkly.

Tonight I played a game with her for the first time that used to delight Kelly, turning cries into laughter. I placed my hand on and off her mouth rapidly because she was squealing loudly as she really was too tired to realize how tired she was. She giggled at the oh-whoa-whoa-whoa, and wanted me to do it again, grabbing my hand. And then she did it with her own hand! This, on top of feeding herself quite cleanly during dinner. She's a nimble little girl.

cc

Today we visited the Cyert Center during their open house; the second visit for Marissa and me, the first for Beatrice, not counting as Twinkle.

She was interested in the books and blocks, no surprise, but also: in the art room, she enjoyed handling sticks, and dropping pebbles into a seashell; in the young toddlers room, where she would be, she kept on trying to climb the barrier to get to the appropriately sized steps, and once I gave her access she enjoyed walking up and down; everywhere, she had no qualms walking everywhere without us, so much that one of the teachers coined her Beatrice the Brave.

beata

Now she has come up with her own nickname. Last week I asked her to say "Beatrice" and she said "Beata": pronounced BEE-tah. The way she speaks the syllables is cute. It's not a name we would have invented for her -- I would have likely continued using "Twinkle" or moved to some conventional shortened form. It's a good name for her, something like the start of her first name combined with the end of her second name (Felisa) or her last name (Alba).

Marissa said that yesterday when she was shopping, Beatrice saw her self in the mirror and exclaimed "Beata!", so she does seem to be able to associate her name to herself.

Meanwhile she is manifesting her toddler nature, Beata, which is bittersweet. In the past week she has become much more prone to negative expression, shaking her head, or saying "no" or "no no no". She is also much more particular about her food, and can get rather loud when she would prefer her "bahboo" (bottle) or "doh-doh" (cheerios). Still, she is very much a good girl.

towers

She has always been delicate with her fingers, displaying a good degree of fine motor control. But as recently as last week, she couldn't build a tower of wooden toy blocks. She could place one block on the of the other, but didn't understand the concept of releasing her grasp.

At the beginning of the week I stacked one large foam cube on the other and clapped, and she immediately followed suit. Then I showed her that you could also place a wooden block on top of another one, and she built her first two-block tower.

Soon she was building towers spontaneously. She would put one block on another, but while turning to look at me and clapping, she would knock one over. If I had built a tower of three or four blocks, with her good coordination she had little difficulty balancing another block on top. But when she started from scratch herself, for a while she was building only two-block towers. With a third block in hand, she would remove the top block before replacing it with the new block, thus creating another two-block tower.

By Thursday, however, she was content enough to focus on tower-building without applauding herself, and I watched her build a four-block tower! And yesterday Marissa said that her mother saw her build a six-block tower!

According to What to Expect the Toddler Years, babies typically "may even be able to" (not "should be able to" or "may possibly be able to") build a tower of six cubes by 19 1/2 months. But I'm not sure if I believe this book. After all, it seems to me that she's blown by a variety of other milestones, from waving bye-bye at eight months to turning pages at ten months.