Our little Maia’s verbal prowess just gets more amazing every day. What’s really interesting is her attraction to colloquial speak. Saying things like “Oopsa-daisy!” “Oh man” and “Oh goodness” and “silly guy”. It’s fun how she shortens words too, like “pop” instead of “papa”, “sis” instead of “sissy”, and “babe” instead of “baby”. As her language skills increase I think so does her patience…a little. She still gets quite fierce when she’s not understood, and of course when she’s tired or hungry, but being able to say what’s on her mind better is definitely helping with that. I’m also glad that she still has those cute “kid” sentence structures. For example, the other night she came walking into our room at 3 a.m. saying, “I good sleepin’ Papa!” to which I could only respond with tired laughter and, “Not exactly baby,” before putting her back in bed. Maia also doesn’t quite have “I” and prepositions down, so she says things like, “Granola bar me?” and, “Mama sleepin’ me?” Another example is how she says “dat” and “dere”. One of my all-time favorites now is how she says, “Who dat?!!” in a super-excited voice when she sees anything that she doesn’t know the name of. And it isn’t just for people, she phrases the same question for objects and actions too. Hilarious.

Language is definitely entering into her own play as well as she narrates things like taking care of her babies, much like Keana did when she was this age. Maia is really sweet with her babies, often rocking them to sleep saying, “sh-sh-sh-shhhh” or singing a made up song like, “I love you, I love you…”. It’s fun to be reminded of the similarities between them at various ages and it takes us back to some of our favorite Keana moments as well. Keana and Maia have also been playing really well together the last couple months. Sometime in early December a switch flipped and they’ve been having a lot of fun together. Before that, they often played together, but conflicts would arise quicker or they just wouldn’t have quite as much fun. I attribute some of this to Maia’s ability to communicate better verbally with Keana. Keana can ask her lots of questions and figure out what she wants to do as well as tell her what she wants to do. Maia no longer feels the need to bite when she’s frustrated, though there is still the occasional punch or hair pull, but from what I understand about sisters, that doesn’t go away until one of them moves out.

This leads to our issues around sharing. As they play more together, this issue comes up more frequently. Maia is actually pretty good about sharing her toys, it’s Keana who has trouble realizing there’s plenty to go around. I’ve been reading about this in Becoming the Parent You Want to Be and have found some very useful tips in there. The tough part is remembering these tips and having the patience to execute them when you’re tired, trying to get work done, or brokering a deal between them for the 20th time that day. I’d like to think it is getting better though, and the less angry I get around these issues, the better they deal with them as well. Surprise, surprise.