She's nearly 16 months...she walks, well, runs pretty much anywhere we'll let her. She talks all the time, though not everyone else will understand her. She can say book, dog, mama, dada, nonna, poopoo, booby, bottle, baby, eyes, nose, belly button, bubbles, itchy and others that I'm sure I just can't think of.
She's a rashy kid. She's always got some rash or another (rarely contagious)...this week it's eczema and a wicked diaper rash. Good times.
She does the funniest things. She plays peekaboo by putting her hands over her eyes, but peeking through her fingers. She points to eyes, ears, nose and mouth and like to kiss her toes goodnight before they get zipped up into jammies. She also likes to touch her toes to her ears, because it makes mommy laugh! She holds her nose and shakes her head when I say stinky, she covers her ears when things get loud, she signs more for EVERYTHING, puts her babydolls in her sling and rocks them, dances everytime she hears music, tries to jump (one leg at a time), does "flops" which closely resemble sideways somersaults, and truly enjoys playing in the dog's water bowl on the deck.
I am constantly amazed at the joy and awe she brings to use daily. It really does seem that if I blink for a minute, she's grown another inch. She's now almost able to reach the top of the kitchen counters. I looked at her today and wondered when she got so big. And grown up, really. She's not been a baby for a while, but more and more each day, I watch her change into a little girl. And of course, I'm crying writing this, because while I'm so proud and pleased at the fantastic job we've done raising her, I'm not really ready for her to be a girl yet.
Time sometimes seems to simultaneously slow down and speed up. It's like red light and green light at the same time, and though I can freeze moments with photographs and videos, I still seem to find moments that I missed. Moments in my memories that are there, clear as the day they happened, but already getting a little fuzzy. Example: I don't have a single photograph of me nursing Ryan, and I never will. I'm crushed by this realization, and cannot believe that I took every single moment that we spent together like that for granted. We nursed 3-12 times a day for 13 months and I don't have a single photograph. I can recall so many moments where we just say quietly looking at each other in the dim green glow of her room, truly relishing in the moment, and I wish that had been captured as I saw it, or as I see it in my mind: as the lovely, dimly lit archetypal photograph of mother and child. But it will have to survive in written word and memory, and I can only hope that will be enough.
I'm working on my final culmination project for my Senior Seminar right now, and as I read more and more about the mana of clothing and memories located within garments, I can't help but recall all of the treasured moments of past events. I'm going to be creating a photo essay of garments that hold import in my life, including my wedding dress, my favorite pair of jeans, my cherished, holey, green cashmere sweater, RE's Brit Bat dress, Michael's favorite excessive pocketed cargo shorts, and other storied articles of clothing. I'm really looking forward to the final product, and hopefully, with the help of my photographer friend, the essay will actually look like I envision it, and not be a dissappointment to my overly perfectionist self.
Speaking of school, and me, for a minute, my research cohort and I presented our undergrad reserach at the UW Seattle today and what is apparently the larget symposium of undergraduate research in the country. I guess it's something UW is renowned for, and being the entirely oblivious student I am, I had no idea really. But anyway, we created a poster based on the countless hours of research we've done on Myth, Media and Post-Apartheid South Africa over the last 5 months. It was really interesting to be at such a meeting of the minds, and I'm really going to float on the academic high that gave me for a while. Our research is slightly controversial, not playing to the general partyline that many have of Nelson Mandela, the ANC and the transition from the aparthied state, and we were called on to defend our research, and actually able to intelligently do so. Not to mention, the poster that I spent a week working on ROCKED, looked really professional, and pretty much blew away most of the others around us. And we drew many curious onlookers to it, but it was so well constructed that most could understand our point without much explanation from us. Honestly, I'm just really proud of the work we've put into it and look forward to wrapping up this quarter and beginning work on the actual article that we hope to write.
Oh, and I graduate in 3 weeks. Sure, I have a truckload of work to do before then, but it seems everytime I'm faced with an excess of academic writing to do, all I want to do is barf words onto a page, and thus becomes another blog entry. Or sometimes, an actual paper; it's a wonder I'm managing to graduate with a 3.76.
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