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)

Maña

Mariana has 4 syllables. That can be a mouthful when your mouth is only 18 months old. So Mariana has adopted her friend Chandra's pronunciation. Chandra who is 2 1/2 started calling her Maña (pronounced Manya) because I think it was a little easier for her to say. We thought about Mari or Ana but Maña seems to be the nickname that's sticking. It's how she refers to herself anyway. Here are Maña and Chandra sipping yogurt.

She doesn't like to eat very much. She has a tendency lately to say "all done" as soon as she sits down in fact. Or maybe I should say that she whines it with anguish in her voice. She's in that stage where she'll ask for something to eat, say cereal, then reject it after 1 bite or maybe no bites at all. She can say a lot, but she still can't explain herself. I think half the time she doesn't even know what she wants, just that she don't want to sit in the chair and eat when there are crayons to lick or toy bins to be dumped over. And now that I mention it, she loves to dump over bins. Is it just to make a mess? Seemingly, but then that's the parental way to look at it. To her it could be just another learning experience. I want her to grow up to be a person who cleans up after herself or just as importantly, to know what a mess even is but I want her to learn how to make a mess first.
I get the same feeling watching her color in a coloring book. My hyper anal job makes me want to always color inside the lines. Mariana could care less about the lines already there, wantonly scribbling back and forth just to torture me and poke at my OCD. The truth is that I want her to know the "rules" and then to put them aside and make her own rules.

And thanks for the encouragement folks. Mom's 70th birthday was yesterday and there's already so much to tell her.

Oy

I have been wanting to write but just not feeling it these days. Hopefully someone is still reading. Mariana yields more stories every day but life intervenes. Oy. Believe it or not having my Mom pass away took some of the motivation out of it for me. This blog was a way for me to tell her stories that I knew she could relate to but I wouldn't necessarily remember when we spoke. I know others are reading occasionally too but I'll always think of her when i'm writing.

Mariana is constantly getting colds. Sometimes her nose runs but she doesn't know how to blow yet. Sometimes she's just clogged and needs a little saline shot up her nose to loosen things up. This is what's known in our house as a "spritz". Then we have to use the "nasal aspirator" or as we call it, the booger ball. Affectionately known as a "spritz and a suck" - it's definitely not her favorite activity (or ours) but it does help so it must be done. The other day I sat her on my lap, gave her a spritz and then took out the booger ball. She looked at it and sighed and said "oh boy".

A New Year

It's been hard to get back into writing again. Once too much time goes by, there's too much to tell about all the little things that Mariana does to amaze and astound.

We went to visit Grandma and Grandpa Carlson in Florida over the New Years holiday. Mariana has officially nicknamed them "Gummy and Paka". Where those names come from I have no idea but that's what she's going with. Paka won big points by always having pretzels at the ready and Gummy giggled away as Mariana ran around in circles for her amusement. It was warm enough the first couple days we were there so were able to go to the beach. M was then obsessed with it thereafter, even when it 45 degrees. Agua! Agua! Agua! anytime we passed a body of water. It's convenient that she loves the beach because we do too.

Recent milestones:

Reaching up and opening doors

Talking more everyday and starting to repeat without prompting
Pulling off her own socks
Putting things in the garbage, including stuff that doesn't belong there
Understanding "please"
Her first fat lip thanks to a wipeout on the kitchen floor
Requesting a song to be played for her ad nauseum- the current obsession is "The Hello Song" from the Putumayo cd

Mariana got multiple sound producing toys for Christmas. There is a dog that sings Christmas songs and a sheep that plays a banjo and sings "Thank god I'm a country boy". As you can see in this youtube video below she wants them played continuously and in unison from the time she gets up until she goes to bed including when she eats. She also anticipates when they are going to turn off and asks for us to turn them on again before they even stop, lest one second should pass without a racket. And to add insult to injury she makes US press the on button even though she knows perfectly well how to do it herself. It's just the beginning, I know, I know...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWdH5mCX7-I

see this picture of my beautiful wife and daughter, happily on the plane ride home

Goodbye Mom, I love you

Today I said goodbye to my Mother. In a time full of difficult moments it was very difficult to hear my niece reading out the grandchildrens' favorite memories of Nana. It made me realize more clearly how Mariana will never know her. That's so hard to comprehend. How is that possible? She'll never get to taste Nana's pizza or make cookies with her. Mariana's more aware everyday and such a delight to be around and Mom will never get to see that. She won't see her first missing tooth or her graduation or her wedding. Mom bought her some gifts on the last day she felt well enough to go shopping. She was loving and giving right to the very end. Mariana will never even know what she's missing and that makes me saddest of all.

I was feeding Mariana the other day and it made me think about my Mom feeding me and I wept. I stare at Mariana so often with a wondrous drunken haze of love and admiration, like how can there be such a perfect creature? Did my Mom look at me like that? Holy cow, that's powerful. I can hear Mariana making noise in her sleep just now and it makes me smile. On a day like today, probably the worst day of my life, that little girl can make me smile and forget everything for a moment. Is that the way my Mom felt about us 7 kids? Does she know how much I really loved her back? It's easy to have regrets and think about all the opportunities I missed to express it.

click here for 2 silly new videos that cheered me up and I hope will cheer you up as well:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC5L1eL3xZg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgCOhHtC_gw