Monaloca

We’ve had a fun start to summer as our littlest girl takes on toddlerhood. (Or, as Melina calls it, waddlerhood. She’s in the Waddler class at daycare, after all.)

Nalani walks FAST, so fast it could count as running at times. And she is into everything! Favorite games include pulling things out of trash cans, and putting non-trash items (books, toys, cans of food) in them. She loves to run away from her parents, and will always give us a sly grin. She adores her two siblings and any other kid around her size. The other day she followed a fellow little sib across two rooms and out the back door at Melina’s preschool.

Nalani has also gotten the hang of basic routines, and in fact seems to thrive on them more than our other two kids. She’ll help us put away bath toys as we sing the clean-up song, and even closes the baby gate behind her after crawling up the three steps to the kitchen. The other day as I was talking to Jeanie next door, she decided she was ready to go home so walked along the sidewalk and turned up the driveway to head to our front door. All by herself.

Our baby adores music, and just started a music class for tots and parents. She’s the littlest one, but has a blast and knows the hand signs for “twinkle twinkle” and “head, shoulders…” Music aside, she also knows the signs for more, milk, and water. She uses “more” often when eating! She talks quite a bit (in fact her teacher at daycare says she tries to “chat” with kids in the next crib at nap time), and now has a repertoire of bona fide words. She says “mo… mo…” (more… more), “mo ma” (more milk), “aaa duh” (all done), “book” and at times “boo boo” (blue blue, for blueberries, her favorite food these days).

Our big girl is also growing and maturing almost daily. Sometimes I look at her and wonder where my baby went, and who put this kid in her place. She’s still a night owl who loves ease into sleep with batches of books, and ease into her day with lots of hugs and giggles. She almost never wears pants, and now likes “all the rainbow” in addition to pink as a favorite color. She writes her name beautifully, and knows how to spell all of her preschool friends’ names.

Melina has a wonderful sense of logic, some of it due to how a four-year-old’s mind works, but I’m sure plenty innate to her being her. In a commonplace example, the other day I got a huge scrape on my nose. (Short story is our new minivan attacked me.) Melina noticed immediately and expressed concern, and when I said “I’m not sure what to do about it, I can’t put a bandaid on my nose,” she responded, “I know! You can use neosporin!” And she was right.

Her curiosity also continues to flourish, like in this recent conversation.
Mina: When was the first day?
Me: The first day of what?
Mina: The first day of everything.

In sadder news, good friends of ours recently lost a baby just two weeks before her due date. Melina knows them and helped me make banana muffins for a care package, so I told her what had happened. Her response, “but how can a baby die before it’s born, when it’s not even zero?” sums up perfectly the question we’re all grappling with.

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