molly

Running Scared

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Molly is usually curious, and often brave.  She will climb, grab, or throw any unknown object with the best of them.

But Molly does at times get scared by ordinary things.  For instance, she used to have a paralyzing fear of shredded paper in her old classroom as a baby.  When they got out the shredded paper for a special festive play activity, Molly reportedly screamed and cried and crawled out of the area as fast as she could.

Apparently she still holds a fear of unexplained, colorful, festive items in the classroom.  The picture below appears among dozens of others from Molly’s classroom.  In the picture, you can see a teacher wearing a colorful parachute on his head, surrounded by delighted toddlers.  When you look a little closer, you can see Molly, alone among her peers, running away as fast as possible.

Molly seems to be thinking…

That man has a poisonous octopus on his head!  No, wait, that IS his head!  Run for your life!

Happily, later photos show Molly contentedly playing with said teacher and parachute, so she was able to calm down after the initial panic.  I should not make too much fun of Molly, though.  This quick, irrational fear may have been useful for some long past ancestor when, say, a colorful snake appeared in a tree above.  While her fearless friends stuck around to see what it was, maybe this ancestor ran for her life and was able to produce a long line of similarly panicked and embarrassed offspring.

Knuffle Molly

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Molly’s favorite book right now is Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale.  Today alone, we read it to her six times, and each time she asked for more.  She loves this book.

Molly loves big books with lots of fun pictures, and this is indeed a big book with lots of fun pictures.  But she also seems to enjoy the actual story, which she can probably relate to.  In the story, a toddler girl named Trixie goes on an errand with her dad and ends up with a personal crisis on her hands which only she sees and which she tries desperately to communicate to her dad.  Trixie screams and cries and yells things like “AGGLE FLAGGLE KLABBLE!”  She is frustrated and sad but doesn’t have the words to tell her dad what is wrong.  Eventually, they figure it out, and in a toddler happy ending, Trixie says her first words ever.

Trixie is a good stand-in for Molly, who spends a fair amount of her time frustrated and unable to tell us (bone-headed) adults exactly what is wrong.  Molly’s version of “AGGLE FLAGGLE KLABBLE!” is “AGGIE!”  She’ll yell “AGGIE!” or sometimes “HAGGIE AGGIE!” adamantly, over and over, often pointing at something which either cannot be specifically located or has no inherent meaning to us.  That said, one time during a bath, we successfully narrowed “Aggie” down to a bottle of Claire’s strawberry-scented shampoo.  But Molly did not want the shampoo when I offered it to her.  In fact, she tried to slap it to the ground.  What did she want us to do with it exactly?  Further, “Aggie” is a mercurial term; once you have it pinned down to a bottle of shampoo, it changes into something else, such as “something on the shelf over there, dammit!”  The thing on the shelf cannot be specifically located, though, and besides, from our perspective, nothing on said shelf can possibly have anything to do with anything.  But that is just our crusty old adult logic, I guess.  Maybe that stack of paper on the shelf is the key to Molly’s happiness.  Maybe she wants to build a paper airplane or write a thank you note… Maybe a thank you note to Mo Willems for writing Knuffle Bunny, a book that really “gets” frustrated toddlers.

As a side note, Molly’s other favorite books at the moment are The Pout Pout Fish and Go Away, Big Green Monster.

Hugs All Around

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When Claire’s class comes in from the playground at school, they pass through the “activity room”, which is a shared, open space that different classes use throughout the day for things like gymnastics or just some indoor play time.  Apparently today, as Claire and her friends came through the activity room, they discovered Molly in there with her class.  Claire ran over and gave Molly a big hug.  Several of Claire’s friends also thought that looked like a good idea, and maybe they should give Molly a hug too.  Eventually,  Molly’s teacher had to seal off an area around Molly to protect her from the horde of hugging friends.

“No more hugs, people!  Nothing to see here!” I imagine the teaching saying.

Molly does have many fans among Claire’s friends, but she usually doesn’t have to deal with them all at once.

Little Baker Molly

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Molly has been pretty good about entertaining herself lately while I make dinner.  Tonight as I was chopping tomatoes, Molly waddled through the kitchen.   She was wearing a winter hat that resembled a baker’s hat, and she was carrying a bag of uncooked pasta in her arms.  She looked up at me without stopping, smiled, said “Hey”, and proceeded to wander around the corner with her pasta as if she were off to make her own dinner.  I still don’t know where that pasta ended up.

Musical Maniac

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Molly loves listening to music.  On the drive to school, I sometimes put on a few tunes from the Countdown Kids, as I did for Claire when she was a toddler.  They do a nice crisp version of all the kids’ classics, everything from “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” to “Frere Jacques”.  Molly is crazy about this music.  Whenever a song ends, she says “more” repeatedly and quite emphatically, even signing “more” with her hands for emphasis.  Molly’s very favorite song is “Six In a Bed”.  She loves this one so much that she can get pretty mad and frustrated when this song is over, if it is not repeated pretty quickly.

Occasionally I like to listen to grown-up music to teach the kids about sharing and taking turns, and different styles of music.  Plus sometimes I just want to hear a certain song.  Today on the drive home, I had the urge to listen to “Love Reign O’er Me” by The Who.  This is not a kid’s song by any stretch.  In just over five minutes of play, this sad yet uplifting song from 1973 features some discordant instrumentation, some lively strings, some restrained singing, some impassioned yelling, a classic rock groove, and a wild crashing end.  At the end of this odd song, Molly insisted on hearing it again.  “More!” she said, adamantly.  Wow.  I wonder what she would think of Radiohead.

Molly’s First Swim

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Molly had her first ever dip in a pool today.  Somehow we never took her swimming last summer, or to the kids’ indoor pool at the YMCA over the winter. But today, water finally beckoned.  We wanted to get away from the house while the painters finished up outside, and we opted for a swim in lieu of the Art City Austin festival, which for Kit was definitely a case of putting the kids’ interests ahead of her own (not so much for me).

Suits and smiles

Molly’s first swim was a good one, on a warm day, but not too hot, at Deep Eddy Pool.  The really great thing about Deep Eddy, besides being spring-fed, non-chlorinated, and apparently the oldest public swimming pool in Texas, is that is has a really big, really shallow, shallow end.  The shallowest point is only 9 inches deep, which is good for small waders like Molly.

At first, Molly did not know what to make of the pool.  When we first tried to lower her body into the pool, she quickly lifted her feet and legs out of the rather cold spring water.  She did this a few more times, not crying or getting upset, but really just not caring to get her feet so cold and wet all of the sudden.  Why would anyone want to do that?  But after Kit “slurshed” Molly’s feet through the water in a fun way, Molly started to get it, and within a few minutes she was splashing and squealing with delight.  Pretty soon Molly was literally trying to throw herself head-first into the water.  Now this is what we were expecting!  She did get away from me once or twice and ended up successfully throwing herself head-first into the shallow water, coughing up a mouth full of water when I pulled her out, but that did not stop the fun (not for very long, anyways).  Molly even used some of her new words while splashing around, namely “more” and “happy”.

We promise Claire had fun too, just not while taking this picture.
It meant stopping freeze tag.

It was also a fun outing for Claire, and it was her first swim in a while (she had burned out on those indoors YMCA swimming lessons months ago) and her first visit to Deep Eddy as well.  Claire liked the shallow water and opted to play “freeze tag” most of the time, with me as well as with some friends she met in the pool.

It was a good way to start out Molly’s swimming career and the summer season.  Now if Deep Eddy would only bring back the diving horses, zip line, and Ferris wheel, we could have spent all day.

Pinned Up

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Molly’s picture was featured, along with a few other kids, in a display that everyone sees right when they enter the day care.  And she is, of course, wearing her signature “HOLA!” T-shirt.

Packing it on (sort of)

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Molly had her 18-month well check today.  Mainly, we were interested to see if her body was actually growing.  Last time we had her weighed at the doctors’ office, during a visit for a cold back in January, she had not put on a single ounce over the few weeks since her 15-month check.  She was stuck at 18 pounds.  If we did not see any movement on her weight this time, we might have to start with the blood tests, which besides being a troubling sign, might get ugly, based on past experience.

We did not go in with great expectations, either.  Molly had been on another “down cycle” with her eating lately, apparently due to a cold and/or teething, both of which seem to badly suppress her appetite.  She is often hostile to the very idea of food.  Most mornings when I set her down for breakfast, Molly looks like this:

Back to the well check…we had some cautiously good news.  Molly now weighed in at 18 pounds and 12 ounces.   She’s small, but definitely growing, and the doctor was happy about that.  Coupled with a lot of walking and talking, the doctor was pretty encouraged with the way Molly was coming along.  After all, Molly also looks like this once we get her away from the high chair:

More Words

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Molly has been learning more real words.  She has picked up many on her own, and we have also been working on body parts and some picture books.  I wanted to take a moment to record all the words she can say at the moment while such an exercise can even be attempted.  These are the words that she can say and whose meaning she seems to understand, in alphabetical order.  
  • apple – she does not eat a lot of these, but she likes the way they look
  • bye bye
  • cheese (“chee”) – sometimes used in combination with “muh” (see below)
  • doggie
  • dada
  • ear (“eee”)
  • happy
  • hi – sometimes said as “hey”, sometimes combined with a person, such as “hida”
  • mama
  • more (“muh”) – usually accompanied by the “more” hand sign.  She seems to think this actually means “I want it”.
  • mouth – (“mou”)
  • nose (“no”)
  • no (“nuh”) – often repeatedly many times for emphasis, ie “nuh nuh nuh nuh nuh”
  • yeah – informal affirmative, used in lieu of “yes”
Then there is “elmo” / “emo” / “emma” which may refer to any or all of:
  • The annoying Sesame Street character 
  • Grammy’s dog Emma
  • Grammy Joyce
This word is a matter of some debate, but in my recollection, it started out with a very clear “L” sound in the middle (“ellllmo”) and evolved towards the “Emma” variation when said dog was in town.
Molly has not even begun to figure out what to call her beloved sister Claire.  We have attempted to plant “Kay Kay” or “Sissy” in her mind, but these seeds have not born fruit, perhaps because they are stupid ridiculous.