What a remarkable thing to have your youngest daughter begin to have conversations with you. Elia will respond to questions and ask for things. An example might be when Curie asks to watch something and Elia will chime up with “mine!” meaning “how about me? Where is mine?” We respond with, “Elia would you like to watch too?” to which she says “yes.” “Would you like to watch Harry the Bunny?” She replies “Baby!” meaning “Babies (the French documentary which is her favorite movie – it was Curie’s too at a similar age),” or “Roh roh,” meaning “Feast” or “Ret Roh!” Meaning “Frozen.” She says “yea,'” “What do you say? Say ‘please,'” “P’eas.” “Okay, here you go, say ‘thank you,'” and she says “tu-tu.”
She says “mama” for “Ah-ma,” her maternal grandmother, and when Ah-ma says “do you know I love you?” Elia says, “yes.” She can say “Pa-pa” for “Pop-pop,” and “Anma” for “Grandmom.” She can repeat any word you say, she was yelling “cannonball!” when jumping into her playpen from the bed because Curie was yelling “cannonball!” while doing the same. We play a game in the car called “make Elia say a word,” where you say a word to try to get Elia to repeat it. Her vocabulary is approaching 50 we think.
Her conversation and communication has grown more sophisticated and specific as well. She will go up to Curie and make deliberate eye contact and ask her to do things “ji-ji, jump.” Or she will walk up to Curie and hold out her hand to hold hands when we ask them to while walking. She identifies the little blue push car as hers and the tricycle as Curie’s. When Albert got up at one point to get something, she held her hand out to catch him and push him back down and said “Da, no.” She is attached to Dada lately (Curie went through this phase too, Curie would stand at the top of the stairs and yell “A-Da!” For Albert, just as Erin would) and calls for “Da-da” a lot or will look at Erin and as “Da-da?” To ask where he is.
She is a daredevil still with no fear of any slide. While in California, she would slide down the steepest slides even when other older kids wouldn’t. And after coming down the scary slide she would have a scared look on her face and then ask for “mo” to do it again. Her favorite thing to do on the playground though is to climb up and down the stairs and walk across the bridges and shaky parts independently. We would follow her around the playground to spot her but she just wanted to walk up and down the stairs on her own.
As we said, for Halloween she was dressed up as Elsa like Curie and we would tell people that she was dressed up as Curie. Albert has taken to dressing them up in the same outfits which is something he was not going to do before we had kids. Elia uses more sign language than Curie did because her language development is more normal but because it is more normal, she is starting to act up a bit more as she enters the ‘terrible twos,” a time where kids get frustrated at not being able to communicate yet. Still it is pretty cute, she throws her tantrums flinging herself prostrate on the floor. She blows bubbles into her drink even though she is not supposed to because it is fun. If she doesn’t like a food or drink she has tried, she will just open her mouth and let the food slowly fall from it. She continues to take one bite of each thing and puts it back. She will push Curie down the slide at home if Curie sits too long at the top of the slide with her hands or her head, and she has to be warned not to try to climb up the slide and go around time and again as she tests her boundaries.
At 20 months she has learned to jump to get some air and then land on her butt. She learned to do this on the trampoline but will do it on a bed, or a couch, or a floor with equal abandon. And because Curie has started jumping off stairs Elia does as well – okay one stair but still scary for he parents. Both Curie and Elia like to sit on top of our couch which has a high back and fling themselves off to land on the seats. It was very scary at first, but it is now commonplace for them to do. When Elia would land Erin would make some remark of concern and she would cover her mouth with both hands and laugh rocking back and forth. This was so cute we had to make a video of it.
We should have taken more video and need to take more video. We do a good job documenting our children’s lives through photographs and entries (though we need to go back and write more for Curie’s early ones), but when we unearth a video from even a few months ago, we are reminded of the joy in the timber of their voice and the reactions in the split seconds as they encounter new things. We have a clip or two from here or there (and we know we have lost more than a few), but we need to do a better job capturing some of these memories, or soon all we will have are pictures and unreliable memories to go with them. All of this is because we know that when you have kids, it isn’t so much the beginning of family, but a twenty-year block that you get them, and then they become their own people and have their own families and after that you are alone with each other again and all you have are appropriate, and hopefully often, phone calls and visits, your memories captured in whatever way you did and however you saved them, and, of course, the love in your hearts.