By the time Curie was 22 months, we were already pregnant with Elia. There is not another bun in the oven and that does make us a little sad. It is with that eye that we watch Elia’s growth with that much more sense of holding on.
They say that when kids hit 50 words, their speech explodes. Elia is just at the cusp of this and will repeat almost any word you say to her almost as if she is trying it out. And every new word she learns is an achievement that she indoctrinates with hand clapping and repetition. Just the other day she learned “yellow,” not “lellow” like Curie says, but fully articulated yellow and could identify it as a color. Her face completely lit up and when she knew she had it right and immediately identified a yellow car parked near by. We gave a few more colors, “blue” and “purple,” but these she just repeated without the same depth of understanding.
Curie was speaking at this point, so when we interact with Elia, it is different; there is an amazing and heartwarming mix of non-verbal and verbal communication, somehow more intimate, that makes Elia even more remarkable and cute.
She loves to identify “Jie-jie,” “Mama,” and “Dada,” and when you ask her she will point to them and will point to herself when you ask her to identify “Elia.” Her favorite word is still “My! My!”meaning mine and repeated like the seagulls in Finding Nemo. “Thu-thu,” thank you, “bubbo,” bubble, “mo,” more, “mo-mo” milk. Says “neigh” for horses, “mao” for cats, and “cack” for what ducks say.
Elia knows when we give Curie something first and we have to work on not making her feel like a second class citizen. When we give Curie an iPad, Elia will chime up and say “mine? Mine?” until we give her her own. She asks for “wuff-wuff,” the Disney short Feast, or “Ah-ah,” for Anna or Elsa for Frozen, and asks for “Moue” (the same way Curie used to say it) the most, Mickey Mouse (she can do the little games in the Mickey Mouse Road Rally game). Her favorite show though is Harry the Bunny, which is a little sensory show a couple minutes long that ends with “bye-bye Harry the Bunny, bye-bye funny bunnies,” where Harry waves. Elia waves with him and will run to the TV to point at the icon to play him. Her other favorite show is Play with Me Sesame, which she calls “E-mo,” for Elmo. She will follow Ernie’s instructions looking up and down or raising her thumbs, and she loves clapping along with Grover.
Elia’s “yesh” for yes, has transformed into a “yawp” for yup recently which is accompanied with her single head nod. She understands so much more than before, she loves to clean and will take your plate away from you to put in the sink even if you are not done eating yet. If you tell her to throw something away, she will put it in the garbage. Her OCD makes her ask for napkins every few minutes to clean her hands as she eats, but it does not compel her to use her fork or spoon necessarily. When Erin went on a trip she cried inconsolably, but when we told her “Mama is on a trip,” and she replied “ohh!” as if it was a new thing to comprehend. She understands talking on the phone now instead of someone in or behind the phone.
Elia continues to be fearless, standing on chairs and lowering herself off of high places. She loves to ride on our backs and shoulders, Mama, Papa, and Curie too (well not on Curie’s shoulders). She is fearless on even the tallest slides, and wants to go wherever Curie goes. She IS afraid of dogs though, even though at the same time she will go out of her way to see them. She has been walking into doors and falling a lot recently. She fell off the bed, off a slide, off a chair, the little mark on her forehead is not a shadow, but a bruise that seems to be ever-present.
We waited until the day Curie turned three to give her a hotdog and popcorn, but Elia has already hijacked Curie’s hotdog at 21 months and will eat the entire thing, when Curie will only eat half. She wants her own things now and wants parity if Curie gets something. This has meant that she has claimed the little bicycle in the living room as hers and Curie’s Minnie Mouse jacket as well. At Great Country Farms, when we bought animal food in little sealed cups, Elia needed to have her own which she held like a prized possession. While Curie fed the animals with her feed, Elia clutched the cup in the crook of her elbow and would not give it up. She did not end up using all of her feed.
The best thing recently is when she sings to herself when she doesn’t know anyone is listening. Her favorite song is a rendition of Let it Go that you can just make out. She raises her hand to one side and tries to twirl when she sings, if you catch her she will grin and continue, but when she doesn’t know you are looking, it is positively adorable. Parenting is stressful and you forget to take care of each other as spouses, if you are not careful, you take each other for granted at best and hurt each other at worst. It is balanced by the beauty and joy of children, and we are careful to make choices that protect the family the most. We must practice what we preach – when we tell Curie that beauty comes from within, sometimes that means sacrificing personal ambition and success for the sake of family, and that doing the right thing makes us beautiful right?