Fam 'n friends: Hello, hello.
So, last night, Izzo and I were having dinner together (Daddy was off jammin' with some drummer, 'cause Izzo's still too little to do that, for now...) and she holds up her sippy cup for me, to tell me, naturally, that she'd like more juice. I see this, and as I take the cup from her, I ask, "Do you want more juice, Izzo?" And she says, "Yeah!" And so I proceed toward the kitchen -- until I realized what she just said.
I stop in my tracks and look back at my daughter looking at me, and I ask her, "Did you just say, 'Yeah'?"
She doesn't miss a beat: "Yeah!" As in, yeah, I said yeah!
And then she starts doing her crazy Izzo cackle that she reserves for moments like this. Moments when she's pulled a new trick out of her hat, moments when she's tickled herself by catching Momom or Daddy off guard again, moments when she sees any of our faces light up when we register that she registers.
Yeah, she said yeah.
And then, in between fits of laughter, she goes, "Yeah! Yeah!"... "Yeah!"... "Yeahyeahyeahyeah!"
One of those moments that had me calling Hamlet, calling Kit, calling home and thinking, "Oh, this will totally be the lede of our week-in-review (if I get around to writing it tomorrow)!"
One of those moments I wondered about, before Izzo was born, when I heard other newish parents talk about their newish children. Things that would seem so trivial and so totally basic are so anything but. Like the first time Izzo responded to my asking her what she wanted to eat with "IceCream!IceCream!IceCream!" to the time she let me wipe her off after breakfast on the condition we go "Alk!Alk!Alk!": these first tangible moments of true back-and-forth conversation are so freaking cool. Feel like a small crystal-ball glimpses into the future, almost.
Also so freaking cool: Watching Izzo interact with another little one about her age at our park yesterday.
Fourteen-month-old toddling around at Casa Adobe De San Rafael, little girl named Sophie, who brought her Tatik along to play. Tatik spoke about as much English as I did Armenian, but she seemed to get a kick out of the fact that, every now and then, I'd throw in an Armenian word as we followed our two little princesses around the yard there.
"Duu!" (which is certainly NOT how it's spelled, but how I say it...) I told Izzo, asking her to bring me the sun hat she decided she didn't want to wear anymore. And she did.
"Tsapik! Tsapik!" I said, at another point, when the two girls were dancing and clapping together. (See, I'm tellin' you, this was a party!)
And finally, "Bacheek!" I told Izzo, when the little girl, after 20 minutes or so of play, decided to wrap her arms around Izzo.
Little kids like this are so funny, when it comes to interacting in general, but especially when it comes to touching. At least mine is.
Izzo is not shy about getting up close and personal, about studying the other one from as short a distance as possible. And will Izzo ever obsess over their clothing! (Yesterday, it was the little patches and buttons on the bottom portion of Sophie's T-shirt.) Izzo'll reach out for them and talk and talk and talk to them, just bare her little soul with volume after volume of impassioned, demonstrative speech. But the instant one of them reaches back to embrace her, or to just simply return a gesture, Izzo rears back, afraid they'll make contact WITH HER.
And she certainly isn't the only baby I've seen with this touch-but-don't-be-touched mechanism. Like yesterday, it was simply comic, watching the little Sophie attempt to hug Izzo only to have Izzo withdraw and then return the favor by trying to kiss Sophie, only to have Sophie pull back and, after giving it a split-second, try to kiss Izzo, who would step backward like, "Oh, I don't think so!" before going in for a fruitless hug of her own... and on and on.
Talk about awkward. And cute. They sure were trying.
Sophie ended up following Izzo most of the time. Like, Izzo wanted to go up the short flight of steps separating the bottom part of the yard from the top. So Sophie wanted to, too. So while I helped Izzo up, Sophie's grandmother helped Sophie up. And then we brought them both back down.
"Uh, no," the babies said.
First Izzo started screaming in protest. Then Sophie started screaming in protest. Like, the same specific screams. First one, then the other.
So, laughing, Momom and Sophie's Tatik went back up the steps with the girls, who happily played on the upper level until Izzo decided she wanted to go back down. And then the same thing happened, with first Izzo and then Sophie complaining loudly when it didn't happen just how they'd anticipated it.
I guess perhaps Izzo and I don't do enough interacting with people Izzo's size, because it was so fascinating to me, in a real Animal Planet sort of way, watching how these two behaved together.
And a good kind of distracting too, because before Sophie got there, Izzo and I were racing on the grass. Izzo almost beat me, actually, but then she was still going fast when she reached the end of the patch of green stuff and ended up tripping on the sidewalk. Tripping and skinning her right knee. Her -- and my -- first boo-boo of that nature.
I know I shouldn't, but still, I always feel a slight bit guilty when something like this happens. I feel like I got this perfect little angelic creature almost 17 months ago, without a blemish to speak of, and here I am, constantly allowing her to get knicked up and damaged. Silly, I know, but still... it helped that Izzo handled it like it wasn't a thing, pointing down at the scraped spot on her knee a few times as if to make sure I knew, because, apparently, so long as I told her it was going to be OK, it was OK. Really, that's what it seemed like. Which is also pretty freaking cool.
Talk about empowering: "Momomom, this stings!" "Oh, I know, Pookie, but it's gonna be OK, I promise." "Really? You sure?" "Yeah, my love, you'll be fine. We'll get a band-aid on it when we get home." "OK, Momomom."
Of course, SHE didn't say that -- c'mon now, we're still celebrating "Yeah!" -- but that's pretty much how it went.
Izzo's just so cool like that.
We went to lunch at Santa Anita today. To Izzo's absolute delight, we met Caitlyn, and then Kit met the three of us and led us up to the fancy Frontrunner restaurant where he does his thing. He told us not to order, that he'd send out a sampling. I've done this a time or two before, but still, it feels weird to be sitting a nice restaurant with the waiters constantly coming by dumping high-end food on your table, each delivery a surprise, each kind of trumping the last, when normally I'd order the cheapest thing on the menu and be great with that.
Kit had servers bring us, oh gosh, fancy starter bread; shrimp and corn and potatoes; a huuuuge crab cake; short ribs; paninis (with bacon); pizza (with bacon); fruit... and so on. Only thing: They also brought us two massive chicken salad sandwiches, sandwiches that apparently were supposed to go to a table nearby, which we learned after we'd started trying to eat them. Oh, snap.
So, there we were, the three girls sitting at a prime table for six, directly overlooking the finish line, being treated too generously to start with, and then accidently even more generously than that.
Izzo wasn't the least bit troubled by it, though. She CHOWED. She looooves corn, you see, so she ate through both little cobs. She looooved the fruit, strawberries and pineapple and mellons, mmmm. Totally dug the different types of bread and the crab cake, too, but not so much on the short ribs. Too salty, perhaps? She's not big on salty.
She was a great sport the whole time, basically, seated there for almost an hour and a half, until the first race ran. Then she wanted to get up and at 'em, so I brought her down for a walk in the heat and a viewing of the next race, before she started getting tired and we took off.
She fell asleep in the car... and is still sleeping! Or should I call it hibernating? (This is a three-hour nap we're workin' on, folks.)
So, in summation, I'll just say we had a fantastic midweek weekend together, she and I.
............
Other random Izzo tidbits:
Izzo loves... Izzo! Her favorite book these days, beside the Very Hungry (and very played-out) Caterpillar? The little photo album of HER!
Izzo has figured out that the power of magnets extends beyond the fridge. She's got them stuck on the coffee table, on the wall heater in the hallway, on who knows what else. Man, our tiny apartment is in a constant state of crazy. And then I go and spend my free time writing to youall...
After a few promising days of going to bed at a decent time, Izzo's back to fighting it. I can just imagine it now, really I can, she and her kindergarten classmates will be talkin' 'bout their favorite television programs. The other ones will go, "Sesame Street." "Mr. Rogers." "Curious George." "Barney." Izzo'll go, "The Daily Show." And her teacher will go, "Doesn't that air way past your bedtime?" And Izzo'll go, "What's a bedtime?" About the only way to really get her to crash is for me to lay down with her. Then she'll be asleep, konked out and down for the count in minutes flat.
Only dilemma there? I, too, fall asleep. Which is no fun for Hamlet.
We'll figure it out.
Probably.
And you know I'll let you know when, or if, we do.
Till then.
Love!Love!Love!
Yeah!Yeah!Yeah!
Us
