Fearless

I love how these boots make her look like a fishmonger.

It’s such a wild exercise to pay attention to everything my kids are doing as they grow and develop. I worry sometimes that “blog summaries” of them oversimplify their personhood into bulleted lists, but for now, this is still better than not writing anything.

Before I picked up blogging again with regularity, I was only remembering to capture things here and there, and it really felt like a chore. Now I’m a bit quicker to jot something down in my Notes app.

Knowing that my collections are headed somewhere (and that you all really seem to like these! Especially you, Molly, it’s your lucky week!) makes it feel even more worthwhile.

And I know that in 20 years (or even just next year) I’ll be really grateful I did that. (Ha, I just used the word grateful and it didn’t make me gag. Maybe it’s because I’m being grateful to myself, not to some vague Other.)

Oh, you didn't know that monkeys are marsupials?

So, without further ado, a little update on Emilyn.

She started walking just shortly before our trip to Virginia, so I’d say that was right around the beginning of April, after she turned 15 months. (Is this so classic second child, that I don’t have the exact day written down?)

Theo was walking just after his first birthday, but nobody was worried about anything with Emilyn. Nonetheless, I am so happy that the days are here now that I can take her more easily to the playground and know that she’s not just going to shred up her pants from crawling.

I didn’t entirely wait for her to be fully walking before letting her play outside with Brother, though. For the last probably two months, I threw her out and let her get dirty in the mud and grass in the yard. (Though we’re still having to constantly tell her “don’t put nature in your mouth.”)

Speaking of playgrounds, she is FEARLESS. She discovered the slides, and she will climb up and go down, multiple times. Even if it knocks the wind out of her, she is almost always grinning from ear to ear and ready to do it again. She loves to try to climb up the slides backwards as well.

She still loves to tickle people’s feet, all while jibber-jabbering the phrase “ticke ticke ticke” which means “tickle tickle tickle” if you didn’t catch that.

In general, she talks like R2D2. It’s hilarious when she opens a book and “reads.”

Speaking of Star Wars, doesn't she looks like some SW princess wearing my puffy vest? (And May the Fourth be with you!)

The funniest thing she started doing this last month is squinting her eyes at us. Technically, she thinks she is blinking. She did this after seeing David’s dad putting in eye drops, and blinking to get the excess out. As soon as she saw him do it, she closed her eyes like a squint and got laughs out of all of us.

It almost looked as though she was trying to close her eyes while simultaneously watching to see if we were watching her. That’s what made it look like a squint.

And so obviously now that she knows it bowls us over with laughter, she keeps it in her back pocket to lighten the mood.

It looks a little like this.

She continues to have the utmost patience for Theo, but she can be more stubborn with me, David, or even Kathy.

One day I told her, “You’re so easy, until you’re not.”

Other names I call her besides Emily: Emi,  Emi-baby, Dolly / Dolly Pie (mostly when I wake her up), Sister, Sissy Missy, Miss E, Princess Emilyn.

We look at her and wonder, How can you be so smart for someone who has lived on this earth for little more than 1 year?

It’s this crazy mixture of her being a second-born and a girl that makes her incredibly quick and it constantly surprises me how much she knows and understands. I’m always like, “who taught you that?” Ohhhhh.

She often stays near people / conversation / food, whereas Theo may run off to bigger and better things. (Read: monster trucks.)

Both of them love to dance, but she dances like an old man: both feet flat on the ground, hand on tummy, and swaying to the music with her shoulders. If the song is faster, she may bend her knees to bounce. She gets a glimmer in her eyes when she is excited.

Says: mama, dada, hi, bye, ball, doggie (duck-ga), nuh-nuh (for nuna/Kathy); I think she calls Theo “da”; I’m really trying to get her to not just go “ehh ehh” while waving her hands towards anything she wants. Sigh.

Signs: please (by rubbing her protruding tummy, lol), milk, all done, sister, brother, banana, avocado (we googled and learned “sausage” this week which was funny; she did her best to repeat it)

Loves: singing, dancing, blowing kisses

Firsts: being put to bed by David while I went out to dinner with a friend (she kept saying “my mama, mama, me mama” and signing for nursing/milk, but she did eventually go down without a fuss)