Accelerando

We posted a while back that it seemed like Evelyn was leveling up every day or two. We'd grown accustomed to the punctuated equilibrium of the first year and a half where each leap forward was followed by a plateau period of consolidation.

But all that went out the window 3 months ago, when Evelyn hit warp drive. We're now in a period of continual advancement. So we've had our hands full and it's taken a while to realize that we may not get any breathing room to write up a tidy blog summary any time soon.

I've also been doing some thinking about the blog itself, and where we want to take it going forward. Two factors militate for a change. The first is that at some point in time Evelyn is going to want to control how she is portrayed publicly (this blog is "hiding in plain sight" - it shouldn't turn up in search engines but it is technically public). We think the stuff she does is cute as heck but for all we know she may be embarrassed by it when she grows up a bit. And I feel strongly that we need to respect that.

Further, there's my increasing queasiness at the temptation to turn these postings into a brag-fest. Yes, Evelyn is awesome. And yes, as her dad I'm entitled to feel proud. But a few tiptoe steps away from pride lies vanity, and anyway there's a lot more to life than clobbering your toddler developmental milestones. There's ethics and compassion and wisdom and humor and self-awareness and discipline - all qualities that will take years to manifest and solidify and which are largely independent of intellectual capacity. Basically, we need to avoid this sort of thing:



We like blogging in general. Even though her family is far-flung geographically we want all of you to feel as close to Evelyn (and us) as feasible, and the blog helps. Also we now realize that the blog serves as our family journal. It's a tangible record of a period in our lives for which we will someday feel deeply nostalgic. I've heard it said of parenting that "the days are long and the years are short." So true. Time distends and your memories quietly slip beneath the surface while you're distracted. Each new day erases the last. I'm amazed at how poorly I remember baby Evelyn. It's not that I wasn't paying attention. It's just that Evelyn keeps on Evelyning in new and surprising ways, and I lose the ability to remember the old versions of her - instead my mind transposes current Evelyn into the past. The photos and blog posts help us sort it all out and for that reason they would be invaluable to us even if no one ever viewed them.

So. I'm not sure what this will mean in concrete terms. Maybe we'll take a page` from Team Bacon and create a new, private blog that requires a password to access. And maybe, someday, I'll cool it with the bragging.

But not today. Here's a lightning recap of the highlights of the last few months, starting with the aforementioned crushed milestones. Evelyn:

• Knows her ABCs. She can sing the alphabet song and recognize any uppercase letter.
• Can count to 10.
• Can count objects to at least 4, possibly 6.
• Knows her colors, including black/white/grey and pink/magenta.
  
• Speaks in sentences of up to 8 words.
• Uses plurals.
• Uses multiple verb tenses/gerunds (no past participle yet)
  
• Differentiates between men and women.
• Understands and correctly uses prepositions in, on, under, through, behind etc.
  
• Sight-reads some words (exit, open, cat, dog, stop, no, possibly others).
• Correctly uses "polite" words: please, thank you, you're welcome, I'm sorry and excuse me.
• Understands the concept of taking turns and waits patiently for her turn when prompted.
  
• Understands abstractions such as nobody and somebody.
• Understands possessives such as mine/ours.
• Sometimes uses definite and indefinite articles.
  

-- Mike

Pictures ala Nataliia

Post #3 for the day (and really, I'm just beating around the bush because I still need to write "the big one" and get caught up on news).

Daddy's not the only one rocking the cell phone cam. Nataliia has been been photographing Evelyn too, and was kind enough to share with us. Here are a few of my favorites.

Can we have too many pix of Evelyn swinging with Kitty? I think not...



I'm so happy that she got this next one. I believe everyone (especially as a child) has idiosyncratic poses and tics. Who knows why? Just something about a particular physiology and a particular nervous system, minus any of the self-censorship we develop as we grow up. This is a very "Evelyn" look. She does it quite a bit and it's always fleeting. Big ups to Nataliia for snagging it, and bonus points for catching E sporting her cape.



Love this one. Not much else to say.



Daddy and Evelyn enjoying Lap Time at the local library. Actually, this was the last time we went. It's nominally for 1-2 year olds but by 18 months Evelyn had pretty well outgrown it. Soon we'll see if we can sneak her into the 2+ reading group.



Big Bear gets some love...



One thing Nataliia does a lot more than Liz or I is observe Evelyn playing with other kids. They frequent 2 parks and a play structure within walking distance and since they're out and about during the day they meet a lot of the other children in the neighborhood (along with their pets and parents/guardians).

We like to hear stories about these encounters over lunch and dinner. Although she's still not really playing with the others ("parallel play" as it's called should come online soon) she is very sociable and gets excited when she sees kids she recognizes.

What's interesting is that she gravitates to older kids and that they gravitate to her. We've noticed ourselves (and Nataliia confirms) that Evelyn is often the ringleader. Other kids pick up on what she's doing and imitate her. We'll be watching this closely as she gets older to see if it continues to hold true.

Here's a picture of Evelyn with two local friends. I don't know their names, and I sincerely hope their parents don't find this picture online and sue us for publishing it...



And one more big smile for the road:



Our thanks to Nataliia for taking these wonderful photos!

-- Mike

Verbal Pyrotechnics

Proud Papa transmission #2 for today. Since Evelyn began speaking in sentences we've recorded some of the more interesting ones for posterity. In the last ten weeks she's progressed from using the occasional 2 word sentence to routinely speaking in 6-8 word, 2-3 sentence paragraphs.

For the record, her longest sentence to date is 7 words and her longest paragraph is 12. Not that we obsessively count or anything! OK, maybe we do.

When you read these in sequence it's kind of like watching her mind evolve in time-lapse photography.

• 5/7 Green light go.
• 5/7 Daddy doing...working.
• 5/7 Stop swinging.
• 5/7 Now ladle doing.
• 5/7 Bada song.
• 5/10 Put kitty on dress.
• 5/10 Time to eat.
• 5/11 Water ice in it.
• 5/11 Evelyn not here.
• 5/11 Where Evelyn? Hiding!
• 5/11 Two badas.
• 5/11 Kitty down table sit. Sit down.
• 5/12 Gymbo clown goes bye bye bye.
• 5/12 Try again.
• 5/25 (sings ABC song! Misses M,N,O and X)
• 5/26 Light green go now our turn.
• 5/27 Open door see kitty.
• 5/29 Mama eat honey. Daddy eat honey too. Evelyn!
• 6/2 Daddy put cinnamon. Mama do it too.
• 6/3 K. did it. Evelyn did it too. (K. is Evelyn's friend. Name redacted to preserve privacy)
  
• 6/11 Cardigans song sometimes can listen to it.
• 6/23 Help ask Daddy open door see hot dogs.
• 6/24 Buy some more towels at store.
• 6/25 Sitting in bathy tub, play with duck.
• 6/25 (Recites Go Dog, Go!)
• 6/30 Knock door say "lunchtime." Yeah!
• 7/2 Something else might be fun. That way! See Sassy!
• 7/6 Back in playroom. Read it. Go Dog Go book.
• 7/15 Daddy wrong. Not Paul sing that one. Beatle John sing that one.
• 7/18 Buoy got more bubbles on side.
• 7/20 See toothbrushing. No daddy there. Probably in kitchen.

-- Mike

A Portrait of the Artist as a Toddler

Trying to get back in the swing of things here on the blog. This post has been sitting unpublished since late April!

Evelyn's creativity has been blossoming. We first noticed it in her tendency to organize things. If you watched the video Liz posted a link to you saw Evelyn arranging packets in the kitchen. That was a favorite activity for a while. Around the same time she also liked to assemble collections of spice bottles on a chair in the kitchen. I'm bemused to discover we don't have any photos of bottle-opolis but here's a pic of what was a daily occurrence for months:



She also really enjoys the pin sculpture. It's a bit heavy for her but she spends a lot of time playing with it on the kitchen floor. Here's a mixture of her hands and dad's:



These next shots depict a typical scene from Spring '08, with Evelyn creating a "sculpture" on the slide from wood chips and rocks. The process was very deliberate; she would make multiple round trips to gather her materials and organize them carefully into separate piles.











She also got very interested in drawing on the whiteboard at 17 months. Here's one of her first efforts (dad contributed the star):



And here's another one from just a week later. Notice how much better her pen control had become:



A couple days later, circles:



Her magnetic tablet is a perennial favorite. We discovered that her magnetic letters work on it, and during the period when she was learning her ABCs Evelyn made a number of these collages (for lack of a better word):



Here's a scribble that looks just like a bird (Evelyn drew the one on the left. Liz copied it on the right):



Now things get a bit more interesting. I was watching as she drew this image and then said 'bird.'





And then with this one, she first said 'bird' and then drew the picture. In both cases she had her face down very close to the tablet and was concentrating intensely on what she was doing.



Around the same time, we discovered the fun of "pens!" Since she's more interested in drawing on herself than on paper we would wait until just before bath time so we could undress her and let her go to town on herself.







Here's what she drew. As you can see, the pen control continued to improve.



Finally, paint! The local Gymboree offers art classes. Liz took Evelyn and she created this. The theme for the day was "barns." Liz gave Evelyn some suggestions in terms of what colors to use and roughly where to put them on the paper (for example, the yellow in the upper right is the sun). I know I'm a doting daddy and this sounds ridiculous but I genuinely love this. The brushstrokes are confident, there's compositional balance, the whole piece is alive with energy. I've hung it on my office door and there it will stay until another masterpiece displaces it.



A few weeks later she went back. This time there was no direction from the teacher (or dad, who was far too busy anyway trying to keep the paint off of her nice clothes). This is a lousy low-light photo with a tie-dye in the background but you can see the confident, calligraphic brushstrokes and once again a nice sense of composition. Another keeper.



Cheers y'all! Hope you're enjoying summer.

-- Mike