First of all, when people ask her age, I’m going to say “one and a half,” and at some point switch to “almost two.” No more of this “X months” stuff.
In many roleplaying games, part of the object is to increase the abilities, skills, and/or powers of your alter ego in the game. In real life such gains happen very gradually, but to represent them in game terms, in many games your character will “go up a level,” achieving sudden, sometimes drastic increases in ability at certain points in the game. This process is referred to as “leveling up.”
What on earth does this have to do with Ella? It seems to me that on those occasions when there’s a change in her normal routine, when she’s faced with a large number of new experiences and people, Ella “levels up.” This was certainly the case this past week at a cottage on Lake Erie. As Suanna noted, her word use has expanded considerably lately, but in Ohio she got a lot more comfortable using words around people other than her parents. She also started referring to other people by name, and, most delightfully, started saying “hi.” But it wasn’t just the talking — in all sorts of little ways, hard to put a finger on, it felt like Ella grew up more in the past week than in the handful of weeks prior to that.
She doesn’t say “hi” exactly, though. It’s more a “haaa.” Sort of a cross between “hi” with a Southern accent and Michael Palin stuttering that first syllable of “Cathcart Towers Hotel” in A Fish Called Wanda if it was “Hathcart” instead of “Cathcart.” In general, her “words” are all monosyllabic and rarely include ending consonant sounds. But, if you grant her that bit of sloopy pronunciation, her vocabulary is enormous.
There’s also a much greater incidence, not unexpectedly, of tantrum-throwing when her will is thwarted. She’s hitting that age. In Ohio one day, she had her heart set on yanking wipes out of the dispenser that was sitting on the coffee table. Even after we had asked her to leave it on the table, she’d walk up to it defiantly, pick it up, and then try to escape with it before we could catch her. When I took it away she’d arch her back, collapse to the floor, whine, kick her feet on the ground — the whole package. And then, the next instant, she’d wander into the kitchen to greet our friends with a chipper “Haaaa!” Then, fresh from basking in their attention and adulation, she’d return to the coffee table for another go at the wipes.
After flirting briefly with taking just one nap a day, Ella has decisively fallen back into a two nap pattern. And while that does make things harder to schedule during the day, I’m not complaining — she definitely sleeps more this way than when she was on one nap. Putting her to bed remains ridiculously easy — it was even easy at a strange cottage in Ohio.
She’s still favoring the same foods, and her eating patterns are pretty much the same. She’s still very picky, which means we tend to fall into feeding ruts with her, given the difficulty of introducing something new. Her appetite still seems small, but people who haven’t seen her in a while always comment on her growth, so I’ll take it on faith that she’s getting bigger. Empirical evidence will arrive tomorrow morning at her doctor’s appointment.
