mamajoan

(This post is locked so my mom won't see it because it's about a surprise for her.)

Here's a letter that Isaac wrote to his grandma last night while she and I were at chorus rehearsal. Apparently the story goes that he and the babysitter looked at the calendar to see which day of the week his birthday will be this year, and the babysitter, forgetting that Isaac spends Wednesdays with his grandma, said "cool, it's a weekday so you'll get to celebrate with your friends at school," and (she said) his face fell as he realized, "but I don't go to school on Wednesdays!" so she quickly turned it into "cool, you'll get to celebrate with your grandma," which cheered him right up. :) Whereupon he dictated this letter to the babysitter and then proceeded to write it out exactly as he had spoken it (with, she said, very minimal spelling help from her), which impressed her mightily. :)

( A scan of the letter is behind this cut because it's on the large side. )

And here's a transcription:
"Dear gramma I know that I love you and my birth day is on a wednesday and I get to celebrate with you and later in the night Im going to invite all of my friends from school and you and we are going to eat the cake. Love Isaac Isaac" And on the back it says "From Isaac For Gramma." :) ♥

We're going to give it to grandma when we see her tomorrow. :)

what goes through their heads sometimes? :)

Tonight, out of the blue Isaac says "when Ruthie was in your belly, could you not eat anything?" LOL.

I tried to explain about the stomach and the womb being two different receptacles, but I don't think that went anywhere. Finally I just said that you can still eat but not as much because there's not much room. And then:

Isaac: What did I do when I was a baby?
me: Um...you cried.
Isaac: And what else?
me: um, and you nursed.
Isaac: And what else?
this went on for ages...he kept asking me to tell him other things he did when he was a baby and I couldn't think of anything, LOL, I suck.

Then later we were discussing what words he could spell with his floor puzzle. I suggested that he spell something with the fridge magnets, because we have more of them so he could make a really long word.

me: How about "antidisestablishmentarianism"?
Isaac: No. I want something with the P. How about "window"?
me: There's no P in "window."

Finally we agreed on "paint" and agreed that it starts with P-A. Isaac ran off, only to return a moment later.

Isaac: Mama, there IS a P in apple! There are two!
me: (confused) um...well, yes.
Isaac: Yeah because it's A-P-P-Y.
me: No, it's A-P-P-L-E.
Isaac: Yeah, A-P-P-L-E. (confused)
me: I thought you were spelling PAINT.
Isaac: Oh yeah! PAINT!
me: P-A...
Isaac: (runs off)

I always remember how, around the age of 18 months, Isaac had what I call a language explosion. Some of you may recall me posting about it incessantly here at the time. He literally learned new words every day, and it was so fascinating and fun to observe (and occasionally frustrating when I couldn't figure out what he was trying to convey). Right around the time that he was 19 months old, the age Ruthie is now, I wrote a post here on LJ in which I said that I had put together a list of all the words Isaac could currently say, and it was over a hundred. (I still have that list on my computer, too. Of course I do.)

Well, Ruthie is nowhere near a hundred at the same age. And just to get this out of the way at the beginning, I am not worried about this. I know it's normal for the second child to talk later, and I know that Isaac was actually fairly precocious in this sense -- actually he has pretty much always been ahead of the curve on verbal skills; even now I can see it in his preschool friends, most of whom are not nearly as articulate as he is.

But Ruthie is definitely in a bit of a language explosion of her own at the moment, and it's just as much fun the second time around as it was the first. :)

So some of Ruthie's new words are jacket ("dack-ee"), off (yelled whenever she sees someone remove an article of clothing, or wants one of hers removed), applesauce ("ah-ba-ba" and I'm pretty proud of myself for figuring that one out), baby, bag, night-night, truck ("uck"). My favorite of the things she says now is something I can't really express in letters -- I guess it would be like "dee-ee!" but you can tell from the tone that it means "There it is!" It's hard to describe, but it's quite clear what it means; she says it whenever she spots something that we were looking for ("Ruthie, where's your shoe?" "Dee-ee!") and it's totally adorable.

Also she is starting to comprehend, and try to express, possession; after identifying an item, she'll say "mama!" meaning, this is mama's whatever. And sometimes I'll say, "no, that's Isaac's shoe" and she'll say "ah-dee!" (Isaac!) She doesn't seem to have a word for herself yet, although she quite definitely has "mine" down pat. ;)

Also, the other day Isaac told Ruthie that her diaper had a picture of Elmo on it, and she went "elbow!" and pointed to her arm. hee hee. She also says "knee" whenever she bangs/bumps any part of her leg on something, and "bonkie" when she bonks her head.

Oh, and speaking of her arm, she got bitten on it by another kid at daycare -- this was last week sometime; it made a mark but not a very dark one -- and now any time she hears anything that sounds even vaguely like "boo-boo," she'll say "boo-boo" and point to her arm.

She still sometimes says "up" when she means "down" (e.g. if I'm holding her and she wants to go onto the floor) which I think is too cute. And sometimes she'll say "uh-oh" for no discernable reason, usually leading to Isaac saying "no Ruthie, nothing is wrong and you didn't drop anything!" And try as I might, I can't get her to say any actual word for nursing -- she'll still sign for it, including if I say "Ruthie, say nursie!"

Anyway, this I say to those of you who are expecting babies or who have not-yet-talking babies: what a treat you have in store. :) This language-acquisition phase is really one of my absolute favorites. It's just so much fun, and so fascinating, like watching your baby blossom into a whole new little person -- a person who can communicate, which is really huge in terms not just of the child's development but also of your perception of the child. At least, that's how it has been for me. That, and also of course a really interesting window into the way the human brain works and how amazing it is.

You know how sometimes you have a dream about someone, and then the next time you see them you feel all weird and have to keep reminding yourself that it was just a dream? Yeah. So, it's a kind of a good thing that one particular coworker is offsite today. And no, this has nothing to do with sex in any way.

( details of the dream, plus a digression about Ruthie, sleep, and songs )

ahh, dreams. go figure.

This morning as I walked through Harvard Square, I was given a free copy of today's Boston Globe. It was part of a promotion to let people know that there's a new Qdoba restaurant in the Square, which opened today. I don't know much about Qdoba except that they make Mexican food and sandykidd is apparently a big fan.

Anyway, so they had taken today's Globe and folded an extra sheet of paper over it, mocked up to look like the front page of the Globe, but instead of actual news stories it had a press release/advertisement for the new Qdoba. And just skimming over it in the last two minutes of my walk to the office, I found at least six errors. :P Some of them were basic, stupid typos of the "should have run a spellcheck" variety ("coummunity", "suport") whereas others were more subtle grammar/punctuation issues (like a quotation without a close-quote at the end). Lame.

Yeesh, if they were going to spend all that money on getting the Globes, putting together this faux front page, hiring people to hand them out, etc., why not spend the extra $30 for an hour of a copyeditor's time? Come on, people.

Also, below the fold there are a couple of other "articles" about Qdoba's activities in the community -- and those are even worse. I couldn't even get beyond the first paragraph of any of them. I think Qdoba owes me a free burrito or something, for the pain they've caused me. ;)

Oh, speaking of which, after I managed to wrench my bleeding eyes past the text, I found a coupon at the bottom of the page -- buy one entree, get one free. Awesome. I sense a burrito in my future. And I don't even like burritos! :)

So sandykidd and metafrantic gave me a magnetic poetry set based on Motherhood, which is cool. I can't find my camera, so instead, here is my best attempt at a textual representation of what my fridge looks like right now:

this boy can make laundry exhaust ing
motherhood beautiful
between	like new born mother always change
first child every day surprise
know how funny never quiet
warm little girl cuddle breast      more than nourish
embarrass cook
give up control be happy

Behind the cut is a fairly large photo of what Isaac has been up to with the alphabet fridge magnets.

( Mama, what does 123456789 spell? )

As I was typing this, and he was still trying to spell "lollipop," he came to me and said, "mama, what does L O L spell?" I swear to god I am not making this up.

Still in lieu of the long-overdue update, a brief rant: Isaac got for his birthday a set of 50 nice wooden blocks with letters on them. This past couple of weeks we just finally took them out, and now he is totally into making words with the letters. This, of course, is great! However, the problem is that the letter distribution is wack. At first, all I noticed was that there was only one A -- which is a problem when trying to spell Isaac's name, or "mama" or "grandma," etc.

So today, after Sally took Isaac away, I finally got a chance to line up all the blocks and see the situation.

Of the letters A through J, we have one of each. Of the letters K through Z, we have two of each. Then we have five blocks representing the numbers 0 through 9 (two numbers on each block), and then there's a block with plus and minus signs, a block with times (x) and divided-by signs, and a block with an equal sign (which Isaac calls eleven :) ) and a question mark.

This of course means that we have two Qs, two Xs, and two Zs ... but only one A, E, and I. *headdesk*

I know you'll be shocked to learn that the box the blocks came in says "Made in China." Yeah. Here's a hint, toy-making companies: if you're going to outsource your learning-to-read toys to a country where they don't speak English, you might want to give them some freaking guidance. ARRRGGGHHHH.

I have been googling the company that makes these blocks, with no luck yet. The box says "produced for the Target Corporation" but I don't find these blocks on target.com either. I may wind up looking for an 800-number for Target and just calling them. (I shall also ask the person who gave them to us to confirm that he did indeed get them at Target.) I'm sorry, but this is just bullshit. Two Xs and only one E?!?! WTF!!!!!!!

OK, that rant turned out not so brief after all. *blush*

On the positive side, Isaac is now very good at looking through all 50 blocks and pulling out the I, the A, the C, one of the Ss, and lining them up properly to spell ISAC. I am very proud. (But we have GOT to get us another A soon, before he too deeply internalizes the notion that that's really how you spell his name!!!!!!!!!!!)

I am coining a new term "spamglish" to describe language found in spam email that was obviously written either by a computer or by someone whose first language is not English.

Tonight brought a prime example: I don't want you to torment yourself any longer, you are owed an highly delicate chronograph! In a spam with subject line, "Make the holidays truly unique." Um, which holidays would those be exactly? The ones that ended almost two months ago? ;)

I knew it was trouble when I got back from lunch and had a message from the nurse at my midwives' office saying to call her back. And of course, when I called back, they were closed for lunch. And when their lunch hour was over and I called again and got through, of course, they put me on hold.

But finally I did get to talk to the nurse, and not very much to my surprise, it turns out that ( I failed the gestational diabetes test. Details on what this means behind the cut. )

In other rage-honing news, I just took two online surveys and they both had ridiculously awful errors. One contained the sentence: "Which of the following beers have you drank in the past month?" It causes me almost physical pain to even copy-paste that here.

The other contained the question: "Which of the following statements best describes you?" and the options were: "a) I am trying to gain weight b) I am not trying to lose weight, so I don't give much thought about what I eat c) I am actively trying to lose weight so I watch what I eat d) I am not trying to lose weight, but watch what I eat because I don't want to gain weight." OK, aside from the awful grammar in "b," where's the option for "I'm not trying to gain or lose weight, but I watch what I eat because I want to be HEALTHY"???? Yeesh.

OK, now I'm totally pissed off and grouchy. Today sucks.