A Few Things About Zoe

I just realized I haven’t been posting about Zoe much lately. I’ll try to make up for that with a few photo posts, but let me kick-start the process by sharing a few things:

She talks all the time. ALL THE TIME. Poor Annie’s day is a never-ending stream of chatter, identifying everything she sees and asking for things she wants. “Mama! Eyes! Nose! Mouth! Book? Sit? Flop! Kitty! Nice! Soft! Side? Ball? Kick! Up? Go Go Go! Car? Ride? Park? Maia! Rob!”

She is starting to put together very simple sentences, like “Mama Up” and “Car? Go?” Right now, it’s mostly just stringing together words she knows which are related, but that’s how it starts…

She is opinionated. We are never in any doubt about whether she wants to do something. If we offer her some cheese, she will happily repeat “Cheese!” and take it. If we offer some medicine, she will say “No? No? No!” and swat at our hands, or push them away. She will ask for things she wants (like nursing) and even tell us when she needs a diaper change (”Poop-poop?”). It makes things much easier, because even when she’s completely melting down and screaming, she’ll still talk and tell us what she wants.

“Like all women, she’s shoe-mad.” She has four or five pairs of shoes that she wears regularly, but there are probably 30 pairs of her shoes in the house, some that don’t fit anymore, some that just didn’t work out for some reason, and some she refuses to wear. But she loves them all. We keep them in a tub in the living room, and she can sit there for up to an hour, just playing with her shoes. She also loves our shoes, and has been known to pick out a pair of shoes for Annie in the morning.

She loves her routines. There are two primary routines that I’m involved in. One is getting up and waving bye-bye to me at the window in the morning. She will generally wake up, super-cheerful, and when she sees me putting on my coat, she gets really exited and says “Window? Bye?” That’s our cue to lift her up on the couch in the living room, where she gets really excited and starts saying “Bye!” over and over again, waving and blowing kisses as I walk out the door and down the steps.

The other routine is bedtime. After dinner, we’ll goof around for a little bit, maybe reading a book in the living room, or playing “This little piggy.” Then I take her to her room, change her diaper and put on her pajamas. The whole time she’ll chatter with me. “Diaper! Clean! PJs! Kitties!” The last one is whatever animal is on her PJs that night. Sometimes it’s monkeys, and other times it’s hippos (which she thinks are cows). After PJs, I’ll read a book or two with her (which consists of her flipping pages quickly and announcing what’s on each page - there’s no actual “reading” yet). Then it’s time to dim the lights (which she likes to help with) and then it’s Momma-time. Every night I say “Night-night, baby girl. I love you!” and until very recently she would just ignore me, because she would be busy trying to pull her mom’s top off. The last couple weeks, however, she’s started waving and saying “bye-bye!”

If these routines are off, her reaction depends entirely on her mood. The morning routine is easiest to ignore, because she’s well-rested and ready to eat breakfast. If I’ve already left when she wakes up, she’ll ask Annie about me, and usually just accept that I’m already gone. In the evening though, she’s usually at the end of her rope, and even the slightest deviation from plan can be disastrous. Some nights, we have to avert tears by bringing her upstairs to say goodnight to Uncle Sean, who she adores.

Oh, also, she likes to touch the top of Sean’s head, and sometimes there are little red spots from where he shaves his head, which she pokes and calls “strawberries.”