23 Months: Talking and Counting

Cecily's talking has been snowballing lately. She is just a non-stop chatterbug and constantly tries to engage whoever is around into having a "conversation" with her. And she does not approve of conversations between others that don't involve her! Her sentences are still quite limited in structure and length, but she manages to get her point across pretty well most of the time. An example of a more "complex" sentence she constructs is " I want Mac n'Cheese" or "Oh no! Broken. Fix it." She says "oh no!" about alot of things, giving a heightened sense of emergency to something as simple as a broken cracker (which, by the way, is very hard to "fix"). She also will call out to toys she is looking for "Baby Cassie, 'ere are you?" and another favorite phrase of hers is to look with shock at something with her palms spread out and say "What happened?" So cute.





She has a very great memory and will remember the tiniest little things about a place or a person. I guess some things that seem insignificant to us may seem very important to her. She can remember parts of books and most definitely songs. She has a new fascination with letters and knows which letter is for Cecily (C is her favorite letter of course), Berit, Addison, Mommy, Daddy, Nana/Nonno, and Grandma/Grandpa. She also can count to 10, sometimes skipping the number 5, and always in a very high pitched voice.

Her playing has definitely changed as well. She is all about "pretend play" and spends ALOT of time doing the following: "cooking" making cake or pasta, coffee in the morning; feeding her babies; playing doctor with her new doctor's kit, and bathing the babies. And still, music and dancing are some of her favorite activities.


And everything has to be done "Self" lately. She tries to accomplish all sorts of tasks on her own, some of which are more achievable than others. Getting dressed is sometimes near impossible for us as she is always wanting to do it herself and changing her mind about what she is going to wear and tearing around the room naked for a long time. Getting to places on time can be a challenge.

Potty training-still not officially started although she pees on the potty almost daily. We did try training pants last weekend to see how long it would last, and well, it didn't last very long. I did a big song and dance about big girl panties and how fun they were and to "just let me know when you need to go potty" I think she got the wrong idea and thought that I was telling her how fun it was to pee IN the fabulous new big girl panties because she proceeded to do so and then let me know right away-proudly-that she peed.

We are now one month shy of the 2 year mark and I can't believe how grown up our little baby Biagini has become!



Playing at Fort Funston

Checking out the Fire truck at our annual block party

At home with Baby Cassie

First Baseball Game

Cecily went to her 1st baseball game last night at AT&T park. Go Giants! She and Addison got My First Giants Tee-shirts (Pink) and baseballs (Pink) and certificates for their first game. It was lots of fun and they were good little girls!

Little Darling

Here is our little darling posing for pictures at Nana and Nonno's house. She is starting to become a bit more agreeable about getting her picture taken sometimes.

22 months old: Wolves, Words, and Won't eat!

Cecily loves wolves. It all started with the Big Bad Wolf in the 3 little pigs and Little Red Riding Hood and went from there. Definitely her fave animal. A little bit of an obsession.





She is talking talking talking lately. She does get frustrated when we don't understand her so I notice her making an effort to enunciate better. Such as she used to call a puppet-puppa which sounded alot like papa (which she calls any old looking man-such as the "papa noah" little person that goes with the little people ark, and she also calls a snowman papa bc of the papa snowman in the "snowbaby cant sleep' book) but now says it with the t at the end. She is continuing to add two words together to make her little sentences such as "come on" (a current fave) "over there" "this way/that way" "another one" "mama fix it". She will throw a bunch of words together in a "sentence" to communicate something such as "Momma, daddy, Blues Clues, off, other one" to tell me that she wants me to put another episode of Blue's Clues, and she's mad daddy turned it off. She is big into opposites and will go around saying "Up/Down" "Open/Closed", etc. She will sing words to songs and complete my sentences. I'll say "the wheels on the bus go...and she'll say "round and round" She knows her colors and will tell me how many fingers I am holding up (as long as its one, two, three, or four). She can name all the animals at the zoo (well most of them) and also all the characters on Blues Clues. Which, by the way, is a current thorn in our side, she is addicted to Blues Clues. I have used this program to soothe her, distract her, entertain her and now it is turning into a big problem. She has had a bad cold with a fever this last week and I let her watch alot of it (we had been previously letting her watch ONE episode every few days or so) Now it is out of control. I did not intend to have my child be addicted to television! At least she still loves her books as well...







Other things I had set out so well doing such as giving her such a wide variety of healthy organic foods and being so pleased with how much she ate and how she ate broccoli, spinach, avocados, etc. Now sometimes I find myself begging her to eat ice cream, just so she'll eat something! My fridge becomes full of all these plastic colored bowls of food she has rejected. Currently she will eat eggs, cheese, macaroni and cheese, sometimes yogurt, berries (especially blueberries), raisins or dried cranberries, occasionally oatmeal on a good day, sometimes black beans, raviolis if we're lucky, and broccoli if we're REALLY lucky and we caught her off guard. And then of course she is all abt the junk like cookies and goldfish crackers. Sometimes all she will accept is cream cheese licked off a cracker and fruit leather. And just forget about trying the cutsey stuff like making a face with raisins or something, she doesn't go for it.

While we haven't started potty training yet, we have had the Baby Bjorn potty seat for several months now and on some weeks she uses it at least once a day (most common time: before bath) She definitely has control over when she pees, and loves to do it and receive the endless praise we give her. But of course, as stubborn as she is, it has to be on HER terms and I am treating this situation very gingerly so as not to create a negative aura around the whole thing. I even went and bought a second potty to have downstairs and some big girl panties (training pants) so that when the time is right, we have the necessary accessories to move this along. But again, Im in no hurry, Im just glad she understands the concept and for the moment, pee pee in the potty is a happy thing for her.

She is big on "pretend play" and enacts all sorts of activities such as shopping, taking her dollies on a walk in the stroller, cooking, making tea and coffee. Her favorite thing must be playing outside however, playing with sand, water, dirt, carting lemons around in her wheelbarrow, going to the beach (no fear of the water runs right for the waves and splashes).
























She's been a little mommy obsessed lately, and is throwing the old "yes mommy, no daddy routine" which is hard on all involved. She's been battling a bad cold and been back and forth to the doctors to make sure it hadn't developed into a bacterial infection, and the extra stress of this has made her even more clingy with her momma. She also insists I bathe with her sometimes, which is fine when we are in the shower, but is not quite the relaxing and efficient shower time that I need. It rather entails me crouching down in a lukewarm shower drawing pictures of animals with the bath crayons on the shower wall.

So we are battling with the dilemma of having to start some level of discipline and firmness as our little girl is on the brink of turning two and is showing signs of needing some "authoritative guidance" and also having trouble breaking away from comforting our little baby and giving her all she needs and desires. Its a tough transition...but we are finding a balance that will work with all of us.

Mendocino Weekend

We had a wonderful 4 day weekend at a house in Mendocino (town of Elk, officially) with the Biaginis and Hagels. Weather was nice and warm when we first got there and then the fog rolled in later in the weekend. Cecily, Lauren and Kaitlyn played non-stop and there was a good balance of laughter to even out the occasional temper tantrum/throw herself down on the floor/jealous rage/tears of grief over stolen toys, etc. She LOVED the beach and wanted to splash splash splash and run run run and fall face forward on the sand. She and Luca would stay at the beach all day if we would let them. She did pick up a bit of a bug at the end of the trip (or just bad car sickness from the windy roads, hard to tell for sure) but all in all a wonderful time!

Hospital Stay

Well we had quite a scare with Cecily this last week and weekend. Last Wednesday she came down with a horrible virus (later determined to be the evil Rotavirus) which led to her throwing up for hours, then getting a little better, then progressing to diarrhea, us desperate for her to keep fluids down, panicked with how weak and listless she was becoming, about 6 calls to the advice nurse, one trip to the doctors office on Thursday, taking her in to the ER on Friday night, and finally being admitted to the hospital, an IV stuck in her arm, and fluids and sugar flowing through her to rehydrate her and restore her sugars and other electrolytes. Her blood glucose level had dropped dangerously low and she was very dehydrated (although besides the weakness and odd behaviour, there were no other obvious signs of dehydration)





Needless to say we were wrecks. I was shaking so much at the ER I thought I was going to keel over. She lay there on the table almost oblivious to the IV being put into her arm. She perked up a bit after the sugar started taking effect and by the time we were upstairs in a hospital room, she was mad as hell. We were grateful in many ways to see a response from her as the unresponsiveness was downright terrifying. I requested a real bed instead of the sad hospital cribs and lay with her as Greg tried to sleep on the pull out bed. The nurses came in every few hours to check her sugar level, which had spiked up after getting a shot of dextrose and then came down nicely to a normal range by morning.





Seeing your baby in the hospital, with an IV in their arm, is nothing a parent should have to see. When Cecily would wake up and realize she was still there at the hospital she would wail in despair. It felt like my heart was being twisted. I just wanted to make it all better.





They didnt want to take out the IV until she could eat, drink, and pee sufficiently, and then we wouldnt be able to go home until she could do all that without the help of the additional fluids. The doctor came and talked to us on Sat afternoon and it looked like we could go home on Sunday morning sometime. As Cecily was starting to feel better, she became increasingly stir crazy and being confined to that room was NOT fun. The nurses were great though, and there was a playroom full of toys that we could borrow (we couldnt actually play in the playroom as Cecily's rotavirus made her a "Contact Precaution" patient) Sunday came around and they took off her IV, thankfully we were now a bit freer to move around (we walked around the halls before too, dragging the IV stand behind us). We pulled Cecily around in a Little Tikes wagon padded with pillows and took her to see the fish in the waiting room upstairs, or to the freezing cold courtyard outside where she could run around. Seeing the other children in the hospital was so sad. I was happy we had an end in sight.





The doctor came in again Sunday afternoon. He said that she looked much better and Problem #1 (the Rotavirus infection) was on the mend, moving out of her system, and she should be able to get better on her own now, without medical assistance. But as for Problem #2...the fact that her blood sugar had plummeted so low (somewhere in the 30s). This was an abnormal reaction. They proposed to do more tests which would be able to rule out a multitude of factors which may have contributed to this. These tests would require us to remain in the hospital another night and have her fast for 12 hours overnight to see what her blood sugar would do as well as a host of other things (such as hormones, electrolytes, etc.) Greg and I certainly did not want to stay there anymore and subject her to further tests and pokes and prods. However, I could not turn away and forget about it, so rather than going home only to come back again another day, we decided to stay and do the test.





It was a rough night, as her schedule had changed and she was not sleeping through the night but woke up demanding milk-which she could not have of course. We wandered up and down the halls of the hospital so that she wouldnt scream. We also watched alot of Blues Clues. They took her blood in the morning and let her eat (huge plate of scrambled eggs and alot of chocolate milk). We were discharged at noon after more consultations with doctors (including the head of Pediatric Endocrinology, the more experienced the doctor, the more nervous I felt). So now we just have to wait for the results of these tests. Most likely is that it was either a single incidence of hypoglycemia that will not recur again, or may recur again if similar conditions are present. This is something she will outgrow and normally effects toddler aged children.



For now I am happy and relieved to see my little girl happy and healthy again.

Father's Day 2008

We had a great Father's Day in Sonoma with Addison, Cara and Scott (Ceci calls him 'Cosh') and Luna, Sierra and Bill. We barbequed and made lots of delicious food and the boys played cribbage and the sand bag game. The little girls ran from the play kitchen to the sand box to the pool to the play house, having LOTS of fun. She loved wearing her new swim outfit from the aunties.

I like cake!

One of Cecily's first sentences, she will chant "I like cake" until she gets some. Here she is enjoying a chocolate cupcake at Cade Cannedy's welcoming party.

Her verbal skills are increasing every day. She is trying to put words to most everything, some are more discernable than others of course. Greg is constantly trying to get me NOT to speak in baby talk to her -as I often pronounce the words to her the way she says them, rather than pronouncing them correctly myself.

She occasionally strings two (or even three on rarer occasions) words together (such as the cake chant). And she mimics things very well such as counting -she will say "one two three..." although I think she is memorizing the order of these words rather than comprehending the actual counting concept.

As she takes on new challenges she grasps at the wonders of her new world with both joyous enthusiasm and deseparate frustration. It is this frustration, and realization that she lacks total control of the world around her, that sometimes leads to dramatic tantrums. So we have had many episodes of her flinging herself on the floor, kicking her legs, thrashing her head and screaming like she is possessed. This may all be over the fact that we presented her with a cookie broken in half, as opposed to the whole cookie which she wanted.

She has a current fascination with The Big Bad Wolf. He is present in both the Three Little Pigs and Little Red Riding Hood of course, both books we have and she loves. She is drawn to the wolf, and the pictures of him hiding behind the trees, snarling and drooling--have I made a mistake introducing her to these things at such an early age? I dont think she quite understands that the wolf is bad, only that he is important. And she quickly turns the pages to find his picture and proclaims "Wolf!"

She is still loving music and dancing and has started a new music class. Berit (her nanny) says she was the only one dancing as the teacher sang the songs. Marches to her own drum. She loves to do the Pony galloping (galloping, galloping...) dance. I need to remember to ask Berit whether Cecily made this up or if the teacher showed them how to do it. Its quite cute.

Below are pictures of her playing with her daddy. She loves to get lifted high up in the air and turned upside down. She squeals with laughter. Little dare devil.

Ceci & Addi

Cecily and Addison (Scott & Cara's little girl, now 15 months old) have been playing alot lately. Although we live an hour or so apart, we often travel up to their place in Sonoma on the weekends or they come down to see us in the City so we all can visit. It is great to have them spend time together as we are all such great friends. It will be fun to see them grow up together.

Here are some pictures of Ceci and Addi in Sonoma on Mother's Day playing the baby pool and being cool in their shades, and in SF at the playground and relaxing with their milk watching Blue's Clues.



~Cool with Shades~

~On the swings at Koret's Children's Playground~