As Izzo turns. And turns.

Dear Fam.

I'm simply chasing here, in newspaperspeak, trying to catch up with all the action in an overdue report, and, yes, chasing literally a lot of the time, too.

A lovely Thanksgiving blew past. Enjoyed a warm, growing gathering at Tatik's, where relatives and their significant others kept showing up, which kept giving Izzo a reason to show off: Conscious that she had the floor and everyone's eyeballs, she worked up a serious sweat (I'm serious, about the sweat) boogieing for them all.

Also, with Momom following behind, Izzo marked the day by figuring out how to crawl herself up the stairs, and went back for more more than a few times, giving us both a wicked post-turkey workout. I tried to teach her to go down the same way, for safety's sake, but, really she was more interested in going up than down. Still, I do really want her to learn the hands-and-knees approach, instead of the bipedal grownup way of doing it, because she's not quite ready for that yet and I have a firm hunch she'll find herself alone on those stairs at some point before first grade, and I want her to know what to do.

(And then I learn, this week, that homegirl Katy's baby girl also conquered the stairs on Thanksgiving -- but Sam's all of 9 months young! That's OK, though. Izzo'll get where she's going when she's meant to.)

Another lasting Thanksgiving impression: Izzo and Gigi, the unshy little champion Maltese at Tatik's, chasing each other, circling each other, kissing and hugging each other, just generally loving each other -- and Izzo's uncontrollable heaves of laughter in reaction to the fun. I hadn't seen Izzo laugh quite that hard. She'd simply fall on her bottom and sit laughing for a few minutes until she could get a hold of herse-- then, there came Gigi charging back!, continuing the joke, and my daughter would absolutely lose it all over again.

That, Tatik told me, is how it goes all day around there. And that, I must say, makes it just a little bit easier to leave Izzo in the mornings.

Izzo's all about fun. (And how I'd like to keep it this way for her forever; here's hoping.) Fun, fun, fun. Morning, noon, night. Like, midnight, sometimes.

The bedtime thing.

It's to the point where I think she's probably old enough to have a better bedtime. We've got a routine that should have her down by 9:30. I'd settle for 10. (Remember, we usually don't get home till close to 8 p.m., so...) But this little rambunctious party animal of ours ain't feeling that most nights.

I'll go lay with her, sing quietly and stroke her tummy and her face and watch her appear to drift softly off. Listen to her breathing find its sleepy, measured pace. And then, give it another five minutes or more, just to make sure. Finally, when I'm totally sold on the fact that, at 10 p.m., my toddler officially has conked out, I sllllowly and, shhhhhhh, quietly start to excavate myself from her and the bed and -- BOING! Like a jack 'n the box, Izzo's up, wide-eyed, happy, raring to go: That whole let's play-pretend sleep game was great, Momom, what's next?!?!?!

What's next is that it's Daddy's turn.

And so Hamlet takes his protesting daughter in his arms, into her own darkened room, winds up the music dial on what used to be a mobile and rocks her. Rocks and sings to her. And rocks. And sings. And sings. And rocks. For half-an-hour, until she's good and, well, limp and absolutely done for the day.

Until, of course, her head hits the mattress. Then she goes all jack 'n the box again.

But, nunh-unh, Izzo. That's it. We've had it. You're staying in your crib until you put YOURSELF to sleep. Don't care how much you beg and plead, that's where you're spending the rest of the night.

And so we listen to her (try to) jump up and down in her crib for a few minutes, listen as the commotion eventually settles and stops. Ten minutes of quiet go by, 15, 20, 25... we assume that at, oh, 11:07 p.m., she's done it, that she's actually fallen asleep. So I peek my head in to check and...

... naturally. I'm greeted by a pair of BIG, glowing eyes -- and then a stream of oversized laughter, the likes of which I heard in relation to Gigi at Thanksgiving.

Izzo knew, just knew, I'd poke my head in there eventually, and so she draped herself over the corner of her crib closest to the door and staked me out. And she got me! Ohhhh she got me. And she let me know.

And so, that night, Izzo fell asleep with us, like she wanted, around midnight.

The thing is. She fights for her right to paaaartay most on nights we've worked. Figured before that it had something with the two naps a day she got at Tatik's, as opposed to the one-a-day she gets with me, due to all the running around we end up doing on Momom's limited running-around time. But these days, she's copping just one nap a day at Tatik's too, and so I have trouble understanding why she still has SO much energy that late in the day. And the notion's dawned on me, not that I'm right about it, but I wonder, actually, if it's Izzo trying to stretch her time with us. Like, she hasn't seen us almost all day, and she wants and is gonna get her Momom and Daddy time, darnit. Or, maybe she senses that even though we're trying very dutifully to put her to sleep, that we, also, have missed her all day and that, in the end, we don't actually despise the fact that she so tries to stay up with us. Maybe all this subconscious stuff plays into the late-night quality time?

Or maybe she just takes after Momom as a baby? Or Daddy as a grown person? Or maybe, maybe she's really a rock star in training? 'Cause, lately, getting her up in the morning (ESPECIALLY after the later nights, but not necessarily) isn't the happy-smiley-sunshiny business it used to be, where she'd crack her eyes open, see me, and want to join me in the awakened world again right away, all smiles from here to Holland and back through Armenia.

Oh, no. Now it's like, Are you serious right now? You're waking me up NOW? Well: I. Don't. Want. To.

... at which point, she'll roll over and go back to sleep. It isn't until I've got her in the bathtub or her high chair, gotten some juice into her and some food in front of her that she's back to her familiar fun-fun-fun self.

Whatever the deal, I'm writing it here: I will get this little girl to sleep sooner -- and soon.

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...

Izzo, I think I mentioned last time, became a picky eater faster than you can peel a banana. She's got the talk-to-the-hand thing going for food she's uninterested in. Food that, in a blink of an eye, included the old breakfast staple bananas, her old favorite apples, her regular spoonfuls of late-afternoon soup at Tatik's.

We traced the change to Robert's birthday party, where two things happened. No. 1, she tried her first taste of birdsmilk cake. No. 2, she was teased by relatives for eating everything.

Tatik and I agree that the teasing made her self-conscious, and that, really, that's the problem. But just in case, we've issued up a holiday challenge to ourselves -- so sorry, Izzo -- and sworn of sweets. Sworn them off for Izzo, that is.

Until she gets back to eating almost everything she was eating before, she's not gonna get to split dessert with any of us; there won't be any special trips to the ice cream shop down the street; there won't be any vanilla cookie good-girl rewards; or, because she asked so nicely, bites of chocolate from the bar she somehow managed to spot on Tatik's kitchen countertop. Sorry Izzo, but as Daddy reminds us all, "We're raising an athlete..."
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Always loved how beautifully decorated my house was around this time of year when I was a kid... but never got into it, really, after I moved out. The night before Christmas I'd find myself sticking some ornaments here or there, but generally I was too busy and too cool (no, not really, on the last part) to full-on decorate. But there was a caveat, of course: This lameness would last only until I had a kid.

Now, obviously, I have a kid.

So I pulled out the box with all the decorations I've come to own (thanks, mostly, to my generous, sweet, inspiringly festive Mommy...) and found a spot in the apartment for everything. Looped lights all around the living area, coordinated the eight Christmas stockings (we need more children?) into the fray, found spots for other holiday trinkets and best of all, bought the mini tree I'd promised Oma I'd get, so that every morning, Izzo and I can open the advent box and pull out that day's baggie, containing that day's ornament.

Izzo's starting to catch on, too, now that, for six straight mornings, we've gone straight to the box and the tree and inaugurated a brand-new ornament to our little tree. She's all smiles when we pull down the box and, when the new piece is dangling, she likes to delicately touch all of them, and to tell me just a little something about each. It's becoming quite a wonderful little routine.

She especially totally digs the lights, though.

"Izzo, do you like the lights?" I asked her just after they'd gone up. "LIGHTS!" she glowed, pointing up and following them from one end of the room to the other, "LIGHTS!"

... and so we took her to see the light show near the zoo at Griffith Park the other night, where we walked, with a few thousand other revelers for a half-mile or so, down the road where I used to ride my bike all the time when I was riding my bike all the time, a road converted into the California Museum of Christmas Lights. All the Cali landmarks were depicted, from our zoo to the Observatory to Staples Center and the Hollywood Sign and so forth. They had Christmas music piped in too, and so Izzo sat forward in her small stroller, pointing and waving at the sights, kicking and singing along with the tunes and clapping appreciatively every time every song ended.

It's something, y'all, to be able to delight your child with an outing like that.

...

Izzo's continuing level of comprehension, while perfectly normal, I'm sure, astounds me.

Yesterday I tell her, "Izzo, go get the Dodgers book." Just to see, ya know. 'Cause she's so enjoyed that one lately, I thought, Hey, let's see if she wants to read it now? And so she runs off to her bedroom and disappears for a while. I assume she's long since been sidetracked by any and all of the other books and stuffed friends in there, but nope, she was just digging through the shelves of her library, which isn't, at this point, organized according to the Dewey Decimal system, for the right title, because eventually back she came running, Dodgers book in hand: "Dodgers! Dodgers! Dodgers!"
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Oh, the ever-expanding vocab -- yogurt ("gogurt"), crocodiles ("croco"), etc. -- now features another very important word: Kobe. As in, "Ko-Be! Ko-Be!"

I kid you not.
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All right, so, I know I've gone here before, but here it is again: Izzo is really so sweet.

Girl is just constantly hugging and kissing us.

I mean, yeah, we react affirmatively when it happens, so why shouldn't she be so loving, but still... that my daughter, in the midst of a diaper change, forcefully grabs my arm, tugs me close with all her strength, then latches onto my shoulder, then the back of my shirt, all so she can pull me close enough to settle a big smacker on my cheek, is pretty cool. That she comes running with a big-little bear hug whenever I come to pick her up, pretty cool. That I turn around and see her making a beeline for Uncle Bob, who gets a big-little bear hug too, pretty cool. That Daddy will be teasing and tickling her and that she'll find it in her, in between her screams, shrieks and giggles, to pucker up and kiss the 'Lakers' on his chest, pretty cool. That Daddy will be teasing Momom about something, and Momom will be feigning insult, only to have Izzo rise and come wrap me up and drop a half-dozen big, wet, loving smooches on me... pretty cool.

And so, enough. (For now.)

Big, wet, loving holiday smooches to everyone.

Us