So Maybe My Baby IS More Advanced Than Yours After All

This afternoon, Libby took Gabe outside for about an hour. Norah won't keep a hat on, and it was a bit too chilly and windy for her without one, and I don't much care for "outside," so we stayed in. Without Gabe around for her to push and kick, though, Norah quickly became bored with only me to entertain her. Fortunately, instead of just tossing tantrums and herself around the room, she remembered her favorite activity--drawing.

Actually, prior to putting her in her booster seat at the table, she DID have a tantrum and threw herself around the room. It was pretty hilarious. I was putting Gabe's Play-Doh away in the dining room and she came in to her booster seat and started grunting. She's regressed pretty noticeably on her language skills over the past two weeks--reverting to sub-human grunts and moans to get what she wants instead of saying the simple words like "up" and "hat" that she'd been using so well for the past month or two.

"Up?" I asked her, trying to encourage her to use her words. "Mmmmmmooooooooohhhhhhh" she groaned, and she lifted her arms up for me to lift her.

So I walked into the living room, pretending not to understand what she wanted. "Waaahhhh!" she wailed in frustration as she looked directly at me. Then she spun around in place, hit her hand down hard on her little music table, noticed that she wasn't THAT close to where I was sitting, so I might not see what she was up to, and came into the living room. Once there, she walked over to the window, pushed herself off it, spun around a couple times, kicked at a pillow on the floor, fell down, hit the pillow, stood back up, and came over to me with blood in her eyes.

I picked her up and said, "Can you show me what you want?" I set her back down and she walked over to the booster seat and said, "Up." Problem solved.

If only it was this easy to teach ALL women just to show you what they want instead of having to interpret crazed signals and supposedly communicative dances.

Huh. That was a pretty good summation/punch line there. Too bad this isn't the end of the post.

She stayed up in her booster seat for pretty much the entire hour that Gabe and Libby were outside. Because she was staying content--making her little groaning "thinking" noise the entire time--I didn't really check on what she was doing except to pick her washable markers up when she dropped them on the floor.

When Libby and Gabe came back in, I finally stopped to look at what she was doing. And I was mightily impressed.

Norah Art.

Now, I'm not sure I can say that this is genius level drawing for an eighteen month old. I don't have MUCH of a frame of reference to draw from. Gabe has never had the patience to do much more than scribble on paper. He's always been perfectly happy just to see the colors appear with no particular shape or form. And then he moves on to something else after five or ten minutes. To give an idea of where he's at, just to see what he would do when I showed him what Norah had been doing, I asked him to draw a circle of his own on the page. His is the blue "poorly torn in half pizza" shape in the bottom left corner (he then added the other squiggles on the page that aren't green--Norah was going through her green phase today and only used that marker).

So there we are--a three year old that can't really draw a circle and an eighteen month old that created, without even knowing what she was drawing, nearly complete circles. The evidence is pretty clear that she's a prodigy to my way of thinking.

However, besides being a budding artist, we also had Norah's eighteen month checkup this week and we discovered that she is advanced beyond her age physically as well--especially in the weight department. Here's a hint. We've decided to only buy her 3T clothes for the time being because she can't keep even 2Ts from riding up her belly and we can't pull the pants up around her thighs. Yeah. She's 95th percentile on height, around 90th in head size, and off the chart on weight. We're not sure how she could be "off the chart," exactly. The chart, presumably, includes ALL children--at least that is the way that I figured something like "percentile" works, basing it on percentages which go up to 100%, at which point everyone is included. So, either their system is broken and stupid, or Norah is the heaviest baby in the history of recorded medicine. Since I've seen fatter babies in Weekly World News at the rate of about every time I've picked up an issue, I'm leaning towards a broken system.

Still, the evidence clearly points to her being a big, beefy baby. Really, I think the combination of artist and linebacker is one that she'll be able to bank on in the future. After all, whose art are you going to appreciate more, the frail, waifish, strap of a girl who is meekly pointing you in the direction of her art, or the burly, hulking brute of a woman who is shoving your face into the canvas? Well, who knows which you would prefer, art being very subjective and all, but you're SURE going to tell the lady who's shoving your face into her art that you like her style best of all. And probably you will buy the painting to make sure she doesn't follow you to your car and break your throat.

And here you can repeat that closing punchline I included in the middle of the post, even though it no longer accurately sums anything up. I just hate to waste it is all, and I'm too lazy to come up with another one.