I can't say much for June or July. I spent most of the that time working my tail off, to be honest. But I've got higher hopes for August. And it started out well: we finally got out camping with the kids (one of our summer goals) and it was great! Jonah was so excited about the tent, and loved running around the campsite and hiking on the trails. And Hava only ate a little bit of dirt. (And, trust me, that was a major accomplishment -- this girl puts everything in her mouth right now!)
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Hello from Big Basin Redwoods!____________________________________________________
Meanwhile, so much is changing with the kids I hardly know where to begin. Lately I've been pressed by the somewhat uncomfortable feeling that Hava is growing up before I can realize it. It's like some kind of premature nostalga, perhaps bought on by having two kids. But I look at what Jonah is doing, and I realize Hava will be there in the proverbial blink of an eye, and I wonder if I'll have time to register it -- really be there and experience it -- before it passes.
One change that's been on my mind a lot lately is language. If you want it in bland clinical terms, I'm currently fascinated by "language development." But saying it that way really takes the life out of it. What gets me is the question of how our little brains get from the primitive emotions of an infant to the complex and (becoming) adult-like ideas of a toddler in such a short span of time.
Hava, at six months, has just moved past the monotone set of cries produced by young babies and discovered that she can make a wider range of sounds. Now she coos, gurgles, grunts, bleats, and occassionally shrieks like a miniature pterodactyl. It's cheerful and cute and completely age-appropriate. But it's not yet anything that would pass for adults communication.
Fast forward two years and you're to Jonah. He's still got some of the cute mispronunciations of toddler-hood: "Jamanas" for pyjamas, "alligator" for elevator, and my personal favorite the "PUS man" for the guy in the big brown truck who delivers packages. But he's recently graduated into more complex sentence structures that really drive home how much he's becoming a fully-developed little person. If left to his own devices, he will often pour forth a loosely-connected torrent or words and ideas. It's fascinating and a little befuddling. Maybe I'm just slow-witted, but it's never clear to me how I'm supposed to respond to this verbal onslaught. Typically the best I can do is repeat it back to him, like I'm the drive-thru cashier at McDonald's ("So you saw the fire truck with Woody and Robert and the lights were flashing and it was loud?" "Would you like fries with that?")
Ruth Ann swears that Jonah recently told a riddle (Ruth Ann was trying to get Jonah to say "Webster Street" and he asks this one: Q:"Where do the spiders live, mommy?" A:"On Web Street"). The ability to appreciate double meanings in language and play with words doesn't develop in full until much later in childhood, but even if the riddle was a fluke, there's obviously a heck of a lot that's happened in the last two years to get from Hava to Jonah.
Often, I try to remember how we got from there to here. At a certain level of generality, that's easy enough: I can look back at blog entries and read my snapshots of baby sounds, first words, and so on. But at another level, it's like the change of seasons. I know it's happening, and occassionally I'm struck by little signs and reminders. But there are few obvious points of demarcation, and, at its essential core, it's just a series of daily experiences.
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