Bronte 1.6

Walking up the back stairs

Little miss Bronte is learning & growing fast. She's already showing a seriously stubborn, independent streak. She likes to walk up stairs, not crawl, & she insists on using cutlery whenever we do at meals, letting us know if we've forgotten hers by yelling, "Fock! Fock!" She loves to do all the things we do--put on shoes, hats, & other clothes; brush her teeth, often with all the toothbrushes; brush her hair; type on the computer, or just rip keys off;

These days I notice that she's learning a lot of songs--ABCs, more of Twinkle Twinkle, the Goodnight song we made up for bedtime, Will Stroet's "Full of Beans", the ladybug song we sing at the family centre drop-in. She learns most of each verse, one at a time, or sometimes just the first & last words of each verse. She can't really carry a tune yet, though. Bronte's also been learning other sequences like numbers & letters, probably because of the songs. If you prompt her, "1-2-3" she'll either say, "Bokoli" (broccoli, like in "Full of Beans") or "4-5-6". Depends on her mood.

This girl loves birds. She spends hours every week standing at the front window watching the birds at the feeder & will attempt a cheeping noise when I make one. Little birds like the junkos, chickadees & sparrows that we get, she calls "Tikibee". Larger ones like crows, gulls or pigeons, she may call "bood" or "duck".

She's still obsessed with dogs. Whenever she sees one at the park, she heads right over, which is unnerving, since the majority of them are off leash, sometimes even in the playground. I worry that she'll poke one in the face or get too close & get bitten. When we ride the cargo bike past dogs, or she sees one walking by out the window, she screams "dog" repeatedly until it's out of sight, sometimes barking at it, "Woof!".

Oddly, around the time she had a stomach bug, Bronte decided that she would not eat bread crusts. I never cut them off for Linnaeus & I didn't use to for her either, but she just wouldn't touch them. She also decided that nearly every bread type food has a crust--bagels, buns, even pancakes--that she also refused to eat. Then about a week after she was over her bug, she started eating crusts again, just like before.

The things I can always count on her to eat are mostly tropical fruits: mango, banana, avocado, orange, kiwi, though she's never said no to greek yogurt or oatmeal either. She'll scarf down steamed broccoli or yams like there's no tomorrow, plus she's a huge fan of peas, lentils, any sort of beans & chickpeas. Peas are how I keep her occupied (& thus not screeching like a hysterical piglet) at the table. When she gets bored but I am still cooking or trying to eat myself, I grab a handful of peas straight out of the freezer & she'll eat them one by one, quietly, for a few minutes straight.

Though her diet is relatively healthy, she sure wasn't this past month. She'd just gotten over the Month-Long Cold of Doom when she got some sort of gastroenteritis that had her barfing & gave her diarrhea for a week. Thankfully she is still breastfeeding a lot, so she was able to stay hydrated enough & get some calories when her appetite was off. She's also decided that she needs to drink about a litre of cow milk a day too & we've been going through it at double the pace in the past few weeks.

It's been about a month since we got her hip brace & she's adjusted to it well. The first week she was waking up early from every nap & more often in the night because it was awkward to roll over with. Switching back to a sleep sack helped with that & she's sleeping fine with it. She's also stopped struggling so much when I strap her into the thing too. She calls it her "Patty", which I guess probably comes from calling it "fancy pants".

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