Uncle.

Okay, okay. I cry Uncle. I’m here, and I’m alive, and All Is Well. Or relatively thereabouts. Or somewhat thereabouts.

Thank you for checking up on me. Which many of you did. I feel a little bit like quoting Sally Field (as in, “You like me, you really like me“), but then you’d have to shoot me.

Speaking of, is anyone else as annoyed by Sally’s osteoporosis commercials as my hubby is? Because R. remarks to me at least twice a week that those can’t really be her grandchildren she’s trying to pass off as her grandchildren. I’ve got to say, I’m a little less than sympathetic as to this line of questioning. I’m trying to keep some brain space left alive and kicking, and Sally Field doesn’t really factor in to that effort.

The Bee is doing fine. Fine as in Great. We discovered in early December that she knows all her capital letters (this was a bit of a shock since…good mother that I am…ahem…I did not teach them to her). And now she knows the lower case letters, too.

Speaking of, do you realize it’s really like learning two separate alphabets? ‘Cause until I stopped and thought about it, I didn’t realize that I have seamlessly internalized the upper and lower case letters into a single alphabet system. But think about how different an upper-case A looks from a lower-case a. Or a G from a g. And it’s really like learning two individual sign systems, and then re-integrating them. I took a bunch of graduate linguistic courses and should have thought about this before–but, again, meager brain space. So, cool.

She’s almost reading short words like “cat” straight off the page. She can spell her name. And she now says “no,” loudly and clearly, I might add. Heh. The other linguistic thing she’s doing that I find pretty interesting is that, if she doesn’t have a sign for something, she’ll use the closest sign she does know that rhymes. I swear she’s a poet. So, for instance, when we visited the lovely Maia and family in December, The Bee had no sign for her new best buddy, Spike. So she started signing “bike” when she wanted Spike. Or “more bike” to be exact. When she wants rice (which we do not know the sign for), she signs “ice.” When she wants Dora on Noggin, she makes the slamming “door” sign. I love the way she uses cognate sounds to draw relationships between words. I’m totally clueless on that sort of language acquisition, so it’ll be interesting to watch how her habits change and grow.

My only disappointment lately in her language development is that she’s stopped saying “uh, um” and started (correctly) saying “uh, oh.” I guess that should please me, but I really sort of liked her “uh, um” stage…it always sounded to me like she was sort of questioning whatever topsy-turvy thing had just happened. I miss the wonder of the “um.”

As to the wonder of Em, here are a few shots I’ve collected over the past two months…most of them are holiday-oriented:

At my parents’ house in early December–the money shot:

With “more bike” in New York:

The Santa photo on Christmas Eve (Should I complain that Santa is missing his hat? or that he’s a bit too patriotically adorned for my taste? I like to see some white fur and big buckled belt on my Santa. Call me crazy.):

Helping to write Santa a note on Christmas Eve:

Christmas Morning Chaos:

Visiting grandparents in California, the day after Christmas:

So, she is doing really, really well. She is so happy, so adaptable. She started going to the KidZone at the YMCA, a drop-off-your-kid-for-an-hour-or-two-at-daycare-so-mommy-can-work-out (more on that part later). As soon as she figured out that I was coming back for her, she was just happy as a clam to get out among her peeps. And she started Tots Gymnastics, in which she IS the social butterfly, holding all the other kids’ hands as they bop down the trampoline together (although, me suspects this is merely a ploy to finagle more jumping time…yep…my girl’s a master charmer already). And it turns out she doesn’t need more surgery right now. So, way cool.

I took a little HY-AH-TUS just to get my shit in order. I had a pretty emotional visit home the first 10 days of December to see my parents, and my dad is in a severe decline from the Parkinson’s. And mom is killing herself taking care of him. And there’s no remedy for any of this in sight, and it sent me reeling a bit. But me and my serotonin are re-discovering our balance, slowly but surely.

Oh, and we’re moving. I think I probably mentioned that before at some point–that R.’s new job with the family farm means a move to California. But the plan’s shifted a bit. Like, to March. As in, six weeks from now. Heh. And we’re going to Pasadena, rather than the San Diego area. More on that later. I’m deep into trying to find a house to rent and a preschool to pay thousands of dollars to. If anyone knows anything I should know about Pasadena, please leave a comment. Or two.

And in the midst of all this, R. and I decided it might not be the right time for us to be thinking about expanding our family. So there was also the anxiety and the heart-wringing and the hesitations and the second-guessing and the decision-making process on that front. In the end, we ended up not going forward with a second adoption, although we hope to revisit this subject again in a year or two.

I have been keeping up with my blog reading, by the way. But my commenting has been in poor shape. So, sorry for that. I think that NaBloPoMoCo whatever the hell it was did me in. And I wasn’t even blogging.