Monaloca

The night before her birthday party Melina said to me, “Mama, happy to you Mina.” Yes! And then, “Baa baa black sheep.” Sure! She likes to sing the song but I wasn’t sure what she was getting at until she suddenly ran to the kitchen and called me over to show off the bag full of celery we’d bought for party guests to feed the goats, cows, and sheep. She had remembered how we’d celebrate and was ecstatic just thinking about it. Her smile made my day.

We officially celebrated Melina’s second birthday with a joint “June 1-2-3” party at Tilden’s Little Farm. Her play group buddies Dalia (June 2) and Joey (June 3) also have early June birthdays, and between our three families we filled an entire corner of the picnic area with almost 70 guests. Everyone had a grand time, despite the winter-like weather on the last day of May.

Besides her weekly play group, some of Melina’s guests included her cousins Lucas and Noah, her yoga babe buddies Suli, Raycer, and Julien, plus Grandma and Grandpa Weiss, and a number of family friends. Kai made Melina a birthday crown (which she refused to wear) and had been so excited on behalf of his little sis that he “accidentally” woke her up at 6am. At the party Melina enjoyed munching on watermelon but was most excited to see the animals. According to Daddy at one point she fed a sheep half a celery stick then decided to finish the other half herself.

The fun continued today, her actual birthday. When I wished Melina a big happy birthday as I pulled her out of her crib, she smiled and told me “baa baa black sheep… feed goat.” Besides the song, birthdays must now signify animals to her. Luckily, we’d already planned a birthday trip to the Oakland Zoo with Grandma and Grandpa Weiss. Since Daddy has vacation before starting a new job, he was able to join us, too.

We polished off the big day with a trip to the park for our weekly play group, then to Jupiter for pizza with Daddy and play group friends Joey, Lily, and Tavi and their families. Melina opened a few presents yesterday and today but still has a stack of them on the dining room table. Kai will be excited to watch her open them when he’s with us again tomorrow night. So far his favorite (because at this age the toys are really all for both of them) is a big easel from Grandma and Grandpa. But Melina’s is a tiny board book with Maisy’s favorite farm animals.

Happy birthday, Jelly Bean!

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On Mother’s Day we visited Children’s Fairyland in Oakland. Melina had fun riding the pint-sized train, looking at furry animals (including an alpaca!) and running down Alice’s rabbit hole. Then she spotted a great big pumpkin that was obviously a place where grown-ups could buy treats.

She stood staring at it from a distance for a good five minutes, probably scoping out the hot chocolates and cookies coming through its big window. As soon as the little barstools at the window cleared out, she walked up, moved the pink stool to the center, climbed on, and patiently waited for at least another five minutes. Through all this, she didn’t say a single word.

Joey and I thought it was so ridiculously cute that he stood in line to buy Melina a chocolate biscotti. The little girl got exactly what she wanted and we got a good laugh (and lots of pictures). Manipulative? Perhaps. And a stark contrast to how Kai probably would have demanded a treat (and in the process blown his chances of getting one) in the same situation.

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This Mother’s Day I had a special essay published in the online magazine Literary Mama.

I invite you to read my piece, called “Stepping Into Mamahood.” If the title isn’t hint enough, it’s about Kai and me. And it will give you an insight into one mama’s perspective on stepparenthood.

Happy Mother’s Day to mamas and mama figures everywhere!

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Birthday season is in full swing at our house: We’ve been to two parties in as many weeks and have several more lined up before Meli’s own at the end of the month. Between the parties and a music together class where we also sing “happy birthday” on a near-weekly basis, Melina has the words (almost) down!

Here she wishes buddy Connor, who turned two yesterday, a very happy birthday.

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At Big Two minus one month, Melina is all tenacity and resourcefulness, and most always with a smile.

Her favorite tool these days is the stool she and Kai use to brush their teeth and help us cook. At age two Kai was always content to leave it at that. Not Meli. She’ll move it to any spot where she needs a bit more height: A kitchen or bathroom drawer, our bed, a bar stool en route to the counter, and most recently, our dresser. Daddy puts the stool in “time outs” periodically (usually when he’s tired of re-directing Melina – he simply puts the stool out of her reach and sight). The other day he took it away as she tried to climb to our dresser. She didn’t even blink, but immediately grabbed her toy shopping car, laid it on its side, on started to climb. Only when daddy took that away too did she scream.

She can (and does) open the front door pretty easily, so we always latch the chain when she’s home. If we forget, she reminds us, which always makes me laugh. She’s also figured out how to work the baby locks on our bathroom drawers. She’s been able to open those by yanking for a while (so we don’t keep anything un-baby-safe in them) but she now understands to push and hold the plastic lever down to close. I fear it won’t be long before she’s able to open the real off-limits cabinets, too.

Melina’s been enjoying her wooden puzzles, one with animals, one with shapes, and one with numbers, this past month. She methodically picks up one piece at a time, either says or asks for its name, then positions it back into its spot. Once she’s finished all the pieces she moves onto the next puzzle. She also enjoys packing her own lunch containers into her lunch bags (yes, she eats so much she has two), and loves toting around all sorts of treasures in a purse from Auntie Stacie or in newly-discovered clothing pockets… so much that she now won’t wear any hoodie sweater that doesn’t have pockets.

We finally bought a tot bike seat for the back of my bike. Meli loves it! In fact, she was so excited about the idea of the seat, that before we had a chance to install it she was trying to climb into it as it lay on the floor. Since it doesn’t stand upright on its own, she ended up pinned under it, crying out “stuck, Mama, stuck!” before we knew what she was up to. She wasn’t too keen on wearing her helmet until she experienced the fun of riding the bike. Now whenever she sees it she asks “bike, bike!” I love it too: The other day as I rode her home from a play group she told me knock knock jokes the entire ride: “Knot knot.” “Who’s there?” “Mama.” “Mama who?” “Mamadada.”

Melina is fascinated with busses. Maisy drives a bus in one of her books, and when she wakes up in time, Melina also gets to accompany Kai to his school bus stop on the corner. Every time we pass a bus in the car she yells out “Mama, see, bus!” Downtown Berkeley is especially exciting because she gets to see up to five at once. The other day we passed by a stopped bus picking up passengers and she started tugging at me to go “Up, up bus!” She loves playing “The Wheels on the Bus” song on the CD player in her room, and now knows how to climb on Kai’s bed and push the start button on the CD player all by herself.

Melina still loves animals, especially cats and dogs. She’ll pull Thor’s brush out of its drawer and bring it to him, as if he could brush himself. (Wouldn’t that be nice?) The other day she tried to point out a cat she saw in a window. “What color is it?” I asked. “Blue.” For Melina (and apparently most her almost-two friends) everything is the color blue. I wonder why blue?

She still adores her brother to no end. As soon as we arrive at his school in the afternoons she yells “Brobro Kai! Brobro Kai!” long before he’s anywhere in sight. Sometimes at night she, more a night person than Kai, will try to rile him into staying awake from her crib by yelling the same thing. Once in bed, he ignores her. But he adores her right back at all other times. He visibly relishes the role of big brother. The other day in the car, completely out of the blue, he told us: “I’d like to have another little sister.”

Finally, a funny video of Meli and Kai, all tongues, at the dinner table.

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After a brief spout of April rain I think (or hope) that spring has arrived for good. Meli loves her new sundresses, even though Mama makes her wear stretch pants underneath when she’s running around the yard or a park. And I’m sure the dresses won’t stay springtime clean for long.

Kai and Meli both had fun seeing what the Easter bunny brought, though Kai more than Melina. He was convinced the Easter bunny had arrived after he woke up and was watching cartoons in the living room. “He snuck in so quietly I didn’t even hear him!” Melina was more interested in putting her blankie in her basket than looking at the little toys and Teddy Grahams she’d gotten.

Last week we had our last (for now) in a series of wine tasting adventures. This time we headed over two hours northeast to Amador County with our friends the Zarlings. Peter’s a big fan of Amador zins, and belongs the Vino Noceto wine club. Wine tasting with four kids (ages almost 1, almost 2, 4, and 6) was definitely a challenge, but the bigger ones had fun running around the various picnic grounds and feasting on pizza in small town Plymouth before we headed home.

Finally, Melina can count to 10! She got a kick out of counting “1, 2, 3” before jumping into the warm pool when we swam on Friday. This morning she made it all the way to 10.

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At 22 months we have regular conversations with Melina, and her memory’s growing deeper.

She still asks to go swimming every time we pass by the Berkeley High warm pool (until last week we hadn’t swam since October!) only now she actually says “I wanna swim” instead of just saying “Mama, uh oh!” as we drive by on the way to Kai’s school.

The other day we had plans to babysit our neighbor Max, who’s the same age as Meli. I told Melina first thing in the morning, and until Max arrived two hours later she asked for him by name at least once every ten minutes. At one point she even said patiently and politely, “Mama I want Max please.” Two days later she picked up a computer mouse, put it to her ear, and said “Allo? Mats ome?” (Hello, Max home?) Her first crush?

Other fun communication tidbits:

• “Mama, ALL DONE!” screamed incessantly after just 10 min of “napping.”
• “Mama, see flowers/bus/doggy/people” as she looks out the car window.
• “Thor pop balloon” when she saw the cat a full two days after he popped a balloon.
• “Bachie” for her blankie.
• “Uppie down” for upside down.
• “Cockydoo” for cock-a-doodle-doo.
• Joey’s favorite: “machine” for the grill, which daddy affectionately labeled the meat machine.

Daddy also taught her a cool new trick! Watch the video below.

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Melina is just two months away from her second birthday. I keep thinking I’ll stop writing her monthly updates, but they’re such a fun way to reflect on and archive her growth. I’m going to divide this month’s update into two loose themes that have taken hold: imitation and communication (separate post). Enjoy!

Like most toddlers, Melina copies everything we do and say. Even moreso, she loves to copy everything her big bro does. A few weeks ago we pulled Kai’s old tricycle from the basement for Meli to ride. She got really excited, then ran to grab Kai’s helmet from a shelf and insisted on strapping it to her head as she played with the trike (still a little too big for her to reach the peddles) around the yard. Then she took the helmet inside and wore it half the afternoon. Unfortunately, she’s not as keen on wearing her own helmet, which I bought so I can tote her around town on my bike.

Melina and I pick up Kai from school several days a week. One day the kids were playing in the yard, and Kai asked if he could lift up Meli to hang from one of the monkey bars. I hesitated so he lifted her anyway. She grabbed hold and hung there for a good 15 seconds, then fell to the bark and said “more, more!” Kai lifted her at least four times and made sure to show off his sister’s strength to anyone nearby, including another mom who said to me, “You wouldn’t have thought to try that on your own, would you?”

Melina LOVES to read, at home and at daycare, and has even started reading books to us. She doesn’t have full lines down, but can tell us the page-by-page abbreviated version of her favorite stories (“Hot” for a page where “It’s hot out today,” “Empty” when Charlie’s refrigerator is empty, or “Hooray!” when Maisy and Charlie get to eat their lunch. Yup, these are all Maisy books.) One night Kai even tried to teach her to read by sounding out letters. Maybe in a year or two, Kai. Watch video of Meli reading to us.

Melina only watches Maisy DVDs a couple times a week and only for the past month, but she already knows how to stop the player, push the button to eject the disk, put in a new one, and close the tray – with the button like she’s supposed to, not by pushing the tray. The kicker is she then picks up the remote and points it at the TV like a magic wand that will suddenly make the video start. Then she gets mad when nothing happens. Lucky for us, she still needs adult help to get her small share of screen time.

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Who says wineries aren’t fun for kids?

We’ve visited several, in both Livermore and Napa, in the past few weeks, and Meli and Kai both found plenty to entertain themselves – including a number of things we don’t get to see every day in urban Berkeley.

Mid-month we visited two Livermore wineries with our friends Jenny and Pat and baby Kanoa. Kitt also came along for the ride, and, based on some great Yelp reviews, pointed us in the direction of a more back-country than usual Livermore winery called Boa Ventura. Turns out they’re only open one weekend each month, so we got lucky. The grounds were rural and funky, with a sign to “Watch for dogs: One old, one young, one stupid.”

Meli immediately spotted two of the dogs (turns out the third was hit by a truck earlier in the week), but was then side-tracked by all the chickens running around the yard. She spent a good 20 minutes following them, saying “chee-ten, chee-ten, ‘ere chee-ten.” The proprieter, who had a three-month-old strapped to his chest, even showed us a freshly-laid egg. Melina was fully underwhelmed by what to her looked like something she’d find in our own fridge.

Last weekend we made a quick trip to Napa to pick up some wine from a club we joined last fall. This time we also had Kai in tow. He and Melina both loved the majestic Artesa grounds, especially the cows and sheep on the roadside as we neared the winery and the long series of fountains flowing down the front hill.

The rest of the winery wasn’t quite as toddler-friendly as Boa Ventura (though they did have crayons and a coloring book for Kai), so we soon headed off for lunch at a nearby, uber-yuppy deli and picnic grounds. It was a gray and gloomy day, so we had nearly the whole picnic area to ourselves, including the two bocce ball courts. Kai learned to play a real game, while Meli took over the other court to knock the balls off the ledge then pick and line them up, over and over and over again.

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Today’s the real deal, but Kai’s been busy celebrating his big six ever since last Sunday. We co-hosted a pajama party at his mom’s house, where some of his classmates, my parents, and a few other friends helped him munch on pizza and Spider-Man cake. When they weren’t eating, the kids played Candyland, blew up balloons for air-puffed sword fights, and played “hide from all the adults!” in Kai’s closet.

This morning, Joey, Melina, and I joined Kai at reading time at school then passed out blueberry muffins for all his classmates to enjoy. Kai wondered where the frosting was. We told him it wouldn’t have gone well with muffins or the 9am snack time. And once they started eating, no one seemed to care.

Happy birthday, Kai!

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