Girly girl

Most of Mariana's clothes are pretty basic - built for comfort and rolling around on the (not so clean) floor. So when she puts on an outfit like this I have to take videos.

Swimming

This past Saturday Mariana and I had our 1st swim lesson at the Bed Stuy YMCA. It was a little chaotic because there is only 1 "family" locker room. It was nice and quiet on the sign up tour but packed on swim day, go figure. I'll be dressing us at home from now on.
Everyone is required to wear a swim cap in the pool and I thought this would be an issue for M. I bought the caps a few weeks ago and had been trying to get her to try it on in the bathtub since. She has not been amused. I hoped that once we were by the pool and she saw the other kids with them that she'd get over it. There was so much activity by the pool that the swim cap turned out to be the least of her concern. Kids, parents, instructors, coaches, swim team members- the place was busy and M wanted to stay close, very close. That's one of the fringe benefits of taking her to something new; lots of cheap hugs for Daddy. They sectioned off part of the pool for our group and once we got in the water it was all too much and she started crying. I tried to distract her by telling her much fun she was having. We were led through introductions and few songs and I bounced around trying to pacify her. I started to think about quitting the pool for the day if she didn't enjoy it- after all that was the whole point. Slowly she stopped crying and tolerated some of the spinning and splashing. By the end she had relaxed enough to kick a little and point out the babies swimming next to her. It gave me hope that next week she'll be more into it.

One Year in the books

Tomorrow, March 4th is the 1 year anniversary of our meeting Mariana and taking the reigns as parents. Overall I find it an agreeable situation. I hope she does as well. Outwardly she's doing very well but now that she understands so much we have to start introducing the idea of adoption the her. It would be easier to just roll along and act like everything is as it seems; ie we're her parents. Of course that's true but there's more to the story and it should be a part of her earliest memories.
We've now interviewed 5 babysitters and hired 2. Bianca we let go after a week and a half because we found Marcela. I felt a little sleazy about it but Marcela just seemed like the better fit. First of all she's from Bolivia and speaks Spanish. Plus she's familiar with the neighborhood and knows the playgrounds and library play groups . She's also a mother herself and said she'd closely follow whatever routines we have for Mariana. Besides, Mariana seemed to like her more than the others right off the bat. We called one babysitters reference and the woman said she was surprised to hear that she'd been given as a reference because she had fired the woman the week before. Apparently they came home to find her asleep on the floor and it took three times calling to her to rouse her. Yikes.
We're starting to look at pre schools which really makes me feel like an adult. Believe it or not, almost a year into this adventure, I still feel like a kid acting like a grown up. In New Providence there was 1 public school option and that's where you went. In Brooklyn there are tons of options, public and private but the best options often have waiting lists and lottery systems to get in- and we're talking about pre schools here, forget about K-12 for now.

Mariana has recently been trying to sing along to her three favorite songs: "Rock a bye baby", "Twinkle twinkle little star", and "Take me out to the ball game". She's starting to string words together and sing them at the appropriate times. It's pretty cool. Hmmm, what else? She's starting to draw so her mother and I are being careful not to encourage the art curse too much. "It's only nice as a hobby dear". She's makes requests and always asks us to draw cats. She is picking up our expressions like "here you go" even if they're a little jumbled still. "Here you go Mommy" becomes "See go Mommy, see go Daddy". She's also started shortening Mommy and Daddy to Mom and Dad. Where the hoot did that come from?! (By the way, our curse curbing is starting to work, making us sound like nincompoops)