What a wild month of dramatic change this has been. We had our first overnight away from baby K. She stayed on Bowen Is. with Nan and Grandad, and F and I came back to the city for a few hours of work, then a fabulous dinner at Campagnolo restaurant at Main and Terminal. I guess that Kalyna was a real trouper - holding her own for 24 hours without mama and daddy - she's solid.
This month, I reluctantly took Kalyna to the doctor's office to get her MMR vaccination as I had been putting it off for 6 months already. She had so many (near monthly) sicknesses (horrid chest colds and malaise) as soon as she started daycare, that I didn't want to hammer her immune system any more than necessary. Anyhow, I decided that it was finally time to just get this over with as the Fall flu season was just around the corner, so off we went. She screamed when the needle went in this time, and I was fully expecting her to pass out shortly afterward as she had done with all previous vaccinations. I also expected 2 days of clinginess, crying and discomfort. Instead, what we ended up with was a day of high energy and good mood. The more curious outcome was that the following night, we started into a 2 week long sleepless phase: Kalyna flat out refused to go to sleep in the day, and night time, and had one to 2 wakings per night. She would bang her foot on the floor of her bedroom, slam against the bedroom door and holler at the top of her lungs. If we left the door open, she would continually (for 2 hrs at a time) come out of her room and stand in the hallway yelling. In the middle of the night, she would patter out to our room and stand by my bedside repeating "mama, mama, mama". This just about killed me as she's been sleeping through the night for 10-11 hours straight for several months now. I was beginning to fear that she was never going to be a good sleeper again.
I was praying that this was a short developmental phase while she worked out some physical, emotional or mental matter. As it turned out, it seems that she was working on her language skills since she started speaking, fairly clearly, right after this tough period. It's really stunning listening to this 18 month old person who's 31 inches tall and 19.5 lbs (yes, we're not gaining much weight these days;only 1.5 lbs in the last 5 months!), say things like appoo = apple, bai = bike, y domo = ydoma = at home, ammie = Lammie, eye, nose, maw= mouth, eeer= ear, bo = boat etc.
The funniest thing happened one morning when we heard the washing machine making a curious loud clunking sound. We stopped the cycle, rifled through the contents and low and behold, pulled out a dripping wet... iPhone!!! Fortunately it was one of our old ones that didn't have a SIM card in it any longer, but it flickered it's last breath, and died right in Francis' hand. He was really miffed and held up the phone, pointing at Kalyna and said "bad, very bad". She looked at him, went over to the washing machine and said, in clear immigrant English "Ay deed it, ay deed it"! It was unbelievable. We bursts out laughing and didn't get through scolding her.
Anyhow, she is running around like a madwoman, and I have to make sure that she spends at least an hour a day exploring the outdoors - even if it's just in the little yard. She must move around and be stimulated this way or else she doesn't fall asleep. That must be where all of the calories go.
No comments:
Post a Comment