October 8, 2009

2 1/2….Well Almost ³

by Wendy • Catherine Ellen Mei, featured

Catherine turned 29 months on the 5th and she has been developing by leaps and bounds over the last couple of months, even more so over the past couple of weeks.  Every day I am amazed by what comes out of her mouth.  She is such a parrot.  She has been mimicking us for a long time but now that her communication is getting better, she loves to copy everything we say.  John and I will be having a conversation and she will repeat the conversation as we are talking.  She is forming sentences that are just blowing me away.  And we are now starting to have small conversations with her.  We are still working on annunciation but she is definitely trying to communicate with words more.

Her imagination is really starting to kick into gear.  We went to the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago and the highlight of the event was the lion and dragon dances.  The loud drumming freaked her out a bit but ever since then she has been pretending that she is a dragon dancer.  She also talks about them incessantly.  We watch them on You Tube, look at photos, and read books about them. I can’t wait until we have a chance to see them again.

Catherine is also really into riding horses.  We have had a few chances to ride ponies and she  talks about that non-stop too.  She watched the care-takers give the horses water in big buckets and clean up their poop in buckets.  Now, in the bathtub she fills up a Halloween bucket with water and says it’s the horsey water and then holds up another container and says it’s for the horsey poo-poo.  Did I mention that she is obsessed with poop and animals pooping?  It’s really strange and a bit embarrassing when she hollers half way across the store about going poop.

Her teen and early twenty months were extremely difficult for the both of us.  She seemed miserable most of the time and I was pretty miserable too because I didn’t know how to help her.  It seems like the difficult behaviors that we wrestled with for nearly a year have started to subside quite a bit.  I don’t know if she is growing out of it or being in school is helping but I feel like I don’t have to keep holding my breath because I am waiting for the bottom to drop out again.  She has been happy, and funny, likes to ‘joke’ and is enjoying life.  She is not nearly as clingy or whiny, she plays by herself for a while and is starting to play around and with other children (which is a huge step for us).  It’s so sad to say this, but I am finally able to enjoy being a mother.  I feel like I’m a better mother.  I look forward to being with her instead of always feeling I needed to escape because she couldn’t stop ‘raging.’  I am loving this stage that we are in right now.  I hope that we are finally moving past through that long rough patch and into a phase that is just toddler stuff.  I can handle the toddler stuff.

I am looking forward to seeing how she grows and develops over the next few months.  At the rate she is going, she will be solving large math problems by December.