LarkFamily

I know, I know, it’s been a month since the last Pluot Update. I understand life is hard for those poor Ryan-deprived souls out there. Here is an update:

• Thanks to some very impressive eating, Ryan is putting on weight again, but she’s still very small for her age (~5th percentile). However, the doctor is not worried; she has apparently staked out a perfectly reasonable growth curve of her own and is sticking to it, which is apparently what’s important.
• Ryan has started preschool (daycare, I guess) one day a week. Her teachers report that she eats enthusiastically and is always bringing them toys (”Look! A cool toy! What joy!”).
• Laura and I counted the other day and Ryan has more than twenty signs now, including some new, more complicated ones like “bunny” (which we made up), “hat” (which she made up) and “help” (standard ASL). We made a little reference sheet of her signs for her preschool teachers to use to figure out what the heck she’s saying.
• Ryan has a freakish ability to recognize animals. I guess maybe this is something young humans are good at, since in the wild, being able to distinguish those animals that taste good from those animals that might eat you is probably an important survival tactic. At any rate, Laura showed Ryan some pictures of bunnies in a picture book and later on Ryan got all excited and made the bunny sign when she saw a small cartoon rendition of a rabbit on her cereal bowl. Laura also reports that she identified some random water bird as a “duck” (close enough) while watching it swimming around underwater at the aquarium. Laura found this remarkable since apparently a bird swimming underwater doesn’t look a whole lot like a bird flapping around in the sky.
• Ryan has started saying various proto-words: aside from “mama” and “dada”, she says “Teeeee” for “Timmy” (the cat), “Baaah” for “ball”, “muh” for “more”, “mah” for “milk”, etc. She also does a really good “bye bye”, which sounds like “buh bah”. This morning when Laura and I dropped her off at preschool, she turned to me and said “bah, dah” (bye, Dad).
• Hilariously, when she’s fed up being somewhere, she will often make preparations to leave (like picking up her jacket or hat) and saying “buh bah” to everyone nearby. We take this as “I’m outta here, suckers”. Once, Laura was leaving the house but Ryan was being clingly and wanted to stay with her. So, Ryan headed off down the front steps after Laura, waving to me and saying “buh bah”.

Here’s Ryan with “Teeeee”, the Freakishly Tolerant Cat:

I almost forgot: we had a wonderful, relaxing holiday season with family. Here is Ryan with Uncle Jono:

After New Years, we spent a few days in Whistler, as a family. The snow was fantastic, and we had a great time hanging around the Village. It was cold and snowy, so we bundled up Ryan in multiple layers of coats. We might have gone a little overboard:

’tis all for now.

It’s the darkest day of the year, so that can only mean one thing — I am a year older.

I figure year #32 is off to a good start already. This morning, Ryan decided what I really needed to start the day were some kisses on my cheek. Then, while I was waiting for the bus, there was a brief sunshower and an enormous rainbow over Capitol Hill. Right now, the sun is shining, and I stopped by Fuel on my way to work to get some delicious coffee.

Mmmm, coffee.

Here is the tyke. She’s been eating mountains of Cheerios lately, so hopefully she’s packing on the pounds.

Laura doesn’t have a devilish look, and I don’t have a devilish look, but somehow Ryan is developing a trademark mischievous grin. It looks like this:

I wonder where she got it?

Ryan’s had one cold after another for at least two weeks now, so Laura took her by the doctor’s office this morning for a quick look-see.

The doctor told us to quit worrying, and that colds are perfectly normal, even when they come with phlegm-y coughing fits like Ryan has been having. Their routine weighing, though, did show that Ryan has lost nearly a pound of weight since her one-year checkup!

I found this piece of information quite alarming, but the doctor seemed unfazed. She said that given that Ryan has been sick and that she’s started walking, which takes a lot of energy, it’s not entirely unexpected for her to lose some weight.

Still, Laura and I now plan on stuffing Ryan at every opportunity.

Here’s Ryan being silly:

Ryan is walking a lot now.

As an aside, my apologies for not posting more frequently. Laura and I seem to have had a more or less uninterrupted sequence of colds for about the past three weeks. I blame our little bundle of joy.

Speaking of the bundle of joy, she is walking up a storm. I would estimate that she now crawls less than half the time to get from one place to another. She can stand for many seconds in one place, and is getting more and more confident in just standing up and going. It’s really cool to watch!

Sadly, I don’t have any pictures of this yet, although it’s been weeks now. Bad maiken.

By way of penance, here is a random picture of Ryan and her blocks that I took as a lighting experiment. Note to self: iron bedsheets before using them as a backdrop!

Ryan has learned the sign for “more”, which she uses enthusiastically even when she hasn’t had any of something yet! She also has her own customized version of “cat” (she does the sign over her chest instead of near her face, for some reason), and a heavily distorted “duck”, which we made up (I have no idea what the correct sign for duck is).

It’s looking like Ryan Marie’s walking was not a freak occurrence. Laura reports that she got her to walk a few steps again today, and I got to witness a few unsteady steps myself! She’s still pretty unsure of herself, but it definitely seems as though Ryan has entered toddler territory.

Laura called me this morning, around 9:45, to say that Ryan had taken her first steps, at a cafe in Madison Valley. Apparently, she decided to walk instead of crawling not just once but twice, and managed to take two or three steps each time before falling. Yay! I’m only sorry I wasn’t around to witness the event.

It’s interesting that Ryan chose today for this milestone, since Halloween is the one-year anniversary of her having been discharged from Swedish Hospital, by a doctor dressed up as a giant duck, no less.

Film at 11.

Ryan and Laura went swimming on Ryan’s birthday at the hotel in San Jose…

Bonus picture for the day:

On our trip to California, I got some shots of Ryan’s distorted sign for “Daddy”. Here’s Laura doing the sign (more or less) correctly:

…and Ryan’s version:

Here’s a different view:

Laura says that when I got home this evening and Ryan heard the front door open, she looked at Laura and signed “Daddy” with a big smile.

It sure is nice to have such a sweet little girl to come home to.