Izzo and the power of BA-CHEEK!

Fam 'n friends.

Hope you all are well, swell, healthy, happy, entertained and good. Seriously.

Which is to say, hugs and kisses to everyone. And kisses. And kisses.

Kinda the theme of the week around here. Izzo and her kisses, which sounds kinda like ba-cheek in Armenian. Izzo and the power of ba-cheek.

Here's the deal.

As she's been getting ever more proficient at kissing, actually puckering up, actually successfully making the smacking noise 25 percent of the time, and actually making the smacking noise at the appropriate point in the kiss 5 percent of the time, she's become incredibly, stubbornly, strangely particular about who she would and wouldn't kiss.

Who didn't get kisses: Daddy, Tatik, Robert, Papik, Kit...

Who did get kisses: Momomom.

And Momom got tons of kisses.

Just about every time Izzo sees me these days, she has to kiss me. She's reaching for my hand from the stroller seat and planting kisses on it. She's chasing me around the house, wrapping me up and kissing me. She's sinking her lips into my shoulder when I lift her out of the bathtub. When I return from work, soon as she's finished running a few excited laps around the living room (and, often, finished watching a commercial), I get a big welcome-home embrace and kiss.

Basically, it's like this: Soon as my face is level with hers, I'm getting slobbered like the Ghostbusters got slimed.

Meanwhile, while I'm away and Izzo is hanging with Tatik, who is playing with her, dancing and singing with her, showering her with toys and food and goodies and love and more love, Izzo's decided it's within her rights to cut way back on the kisses. Never mind that Tatik takes her for walks of both varieties (afoot and astroller), just like Momom. Never mind that Tatik will rock her for half-an-hour at a time at naptime/nanik-time. Never mind that Izzo gets so excited every time we get out of the car in the morning in front of Tatik's building.

Izzo ain't kissing.

And so Robert, so used to all his niece's ba-cheeks, resorted to begging.

Still: Noooo kiss.

Which is totally, obviously, a phase. Something, perhaps, tied to Izzo's burgeoning independence. Some new-found decision-making function or experiment. Some toddlerbaby code that only -- or not even -- toddlerbabies understand.

See, I get these e-mails from babycenter.com every week, all of them almost exactly, eerily on-point timing-wise (which indicates to me that Izzo is pretty healthy and pretty normal, in addition to being so pretty.) This week the e-mail offered a list of "eight reasons why your toddler pushes you away."

Here's one of them:

(S)He may be going through an "independent" phase.
At age 1 your child may have seemed glued to your lap. As he gets older he may refuse to even let you near his block tower. This could be because he needs you less, because he's testing you to see if you'll be steadfast in your love if he tries pushing you away, or simply because he's going through a busy stage where his focus is elsewhere (and you're just interrupting his learning time with your requests for kisses).

How to respond: Try not to take his rebuffs too seriously. He still loves you but may not need your hugs and kisses as much right now. If it seems like you're bothering him when he's hard at work, save your hugs and kisses for bedtime or when he's not so occupied. As long as he's sure you adore him, he'll know where to find you when he's in a cuddly mood.

(That's from Susanne Ayers Denham, developmental psychologist.)

Maybe?

Anyway. I won't lie. I'm glad I wasn't on the kissing black list.

Goodness, that would kill me.

Izzo, see, has been giving me kisses since the morning she turned 13 weeks old -- one of the finest mornings of my life, to be sure. It's one of the few areas Izzo was thoroughly ahead of babycenter.com's schedule. There was a kissing break for about a month sometime before she turned 1. But otherwise...

I don't, however, always get a kiss when I ask for one. But I get so many I end up not having to ask.

What I'd prefer, though, Izzo, is for everyone to get lots of kisses from you.

And she's showing signs of thawing, thankfully.

I worked Friday night, covered a prep football game in Ontario. Meanwhile, Hamlet worked Friday night football, too. Laid out both the Daily Pilot and News-Press, and thanks to updated technology, got to do it from home. Still, we needed help with Izzo. And so Robert, ever the cool uncle, was on hand taking care of a well-behaved Izzo, still asking for kisses... and finally getting one. After Daddy got one.

Whew.

G'girl, Izzo, g'girl!

...........

As I write, Izzo's in the living room, jamming out to Dave Matthews, putting on a dancing recital for Badu, who is perched on the TV stand watching intently. Kinda how it's gone all week, there, too, with those two.



Izzo's become slightly less distinctive in her dance steps. For a while there, she was nailing each and every genre: shaking her booty to hip hop songs, waving in the imaginary breeze to hippy faire, twirling ballerina style to classical compositions.

Now she's streamlined. She tap dances while spinning to just about everything.

It's fierce and fabulous expression/experimentation.

............

Our pre-work morning (w)alks rarely incorporate a stroller anymore.

Instead, I go, "Izzo, wanna go for a walk?"

"Alk! Alk! Alk!" she shouts while running (yes, literally) to the front door.

The doors opens and we hop (yes, literally) out. She'll stand still, for a split-second, once she's standing on the alley that serves as a driveway and our front yard, her left arm extended toward me. She knows she's not going anywhere unless she's holding Momom's hand (finger), so hurry up, Momom, gimme your finger so we can go!

And then we go! Her grinning, ear to ear, off to the corner across from the bustling junior high playground and back. Stomping crunchy leaves, waving at passing cars and buses, greeting too-cool and not too-cool high-school strangers, stopping, of course, to talk (yes, literally) to sweet ol' David, who gamely lets an appreciative Izzo inspect his walker from her new two-footed perspective, and ... pointing, each time, at the pair of black and yellow Jordans hanging from the big tree near David's complex.

Shoes that clearly have been there for months, they're so faded and ragged. Shoes that I never noticed and probably wouldn't ever have noticed, if not for my observant daughter.

Funny, amazing, and so, uh, duh obvious, that she has such a fresh, unique perspective. That she sees the world differently than I do. That she can show ME things.

Whoa. Duh.

I wonder now, how long she's been looking at those shoes from the stroller. How she might've tried to show me before, even, except that I never got it. But how, on our actual, literal walk, she was able to stop in her tracks and point upward and tell me, in her jibber-jabber toddlerbaby talk way, to look up.

"Hunh, Izzo, yeah, someone's shoes?!"

Smile. Finally, Momom, you see.

...................

The ever-expanding vocab now includes these following solids: Lakers! Hot! (And if I didn't mention it before, I will italicize it now) GOOD GIRL!

...................

Feel like I didn't get anything especially constructive done yesterday, except that I don't feel bad about it, because I spent the whole day playing and chillin' with Izzo, which is inherently constructive, big picture.

I slept in, too, this time. Till 9. So we got off to a late start. And because I was out of coffee filters, we made our way to our Starbucks, where I got a cappuccino and Izzo got a little carton of vanilla milk that we brought up to the quiet park at Casa Adobe De San Rafael. (Izzo finished the whole cartoon without making the slightest bit of mess for the first time. Good girl! Big girl!)

Anyway, about the park. Here's a quick description from the City of Glendale Web site:

Casa Adobe de San Rafael is registered as California Landmark #235.

The casa is believed to have been built in 1865 by Tomas Sanchez, and has a New England style of architecture.

In 1875, the property was sold, left abandoned, and fell into a ruinous state.

In 1930 the Casa was purchased by the California Medicinal Wine Company who planned to tear down the structure and to remove the large eucalyptus trees on the property. Local neighbors and community members stopped the demolition and began a campaign to preserve the house as a historic landmark.

The City of Glendale purchased the adobe in 1930, and by 1932 La Casa de Adobe de San Rafael was completely refurbished.

Today, the adobe includes a Monterey-style corridor (covered porch), beautiful sunken garden, brick patio, gray shake roof, and long narrow front windows adorned with green shutters. Interior furnishings are from the 19th century.

It also happens to be the spot where Hamlet and I had our wedding pictures taken. We were shocked when we arrived at the serene little spot then, which feels as historic as it should, because it was hidden up in a Hoover-area neighborhood, a real buried treasure... well-known, though, to wedding photographers, judging by the must-have-permit signs posted all over.

It really is a neighborhood secret, though.




Enjoying the (finally) coolish fall day, and the breeze that blew Izzo's hair around, she and I were there for an hour yesterday, and except for the Mommy and daughter who showed up for two minutes, long enough to see the building was closed, snap a photo, and leave, Izzo and I had the place to ourselves. A rarity in L.A., a rarer rarity when you consider what exactly we had to ourselves.

It's such a beautiful, interesting park. Two levels of grass; benches; little busy ants; all sorts of plants and flowers -- and, woo-hoo!, leaves; AND the building with its hollow-sounding, old porch. Izzo loved all of it, but especially the porch. She led me around the building several times, even though I would've prefered to play in the yard.

But that's only 'cause I happend to look up into one of the usually shuttered windows and get a short scare when I saw a pair of eyes staring back at me. A mannequin, from a display inside. Flanked by another few mannequins. All of them covered in blankets (?), staring our way. Creepy, for a moment. But not to Izzo, who happily passed back by that window eight more times...

... until the next time, when we'll surely make more laps around the building and past those staring mannequins.

..................

At this moment, Izzo's in her bedroom, cheering on Daddy, who's doing his morning pushups and situps on the carpeted colorful hopscotch squares that cover most of the floor there.

Hamlet just told her, "Thank you, Izzo. I sure appreciate your support. You're the best daughter in the whole world."

I think I heard Izzo singing "Aaaaah" in response.

.................

OK, now Izzo's at my elbow, telling me she's tired of watching me write about playing with her and that it's time to go play with her.

So.

More later.

Love and play!

Us