Now making requests

Blaise woke up from her nap saying a word over and over. "Wamanan." This is a new word in her repertoire, and it took me a while to figure it out. Once I did, her response made it clear that I had it right. "Watermelon."

For any fellow short gut parents who are wondering: Yes, we will be seeing all that fiber and sugar again soon.

We're back from our trip to Kansas City, which was very fun and involved farm animals, watermelon, a scraped knee, a screaming fit in the middle of O'Hare Airport, lots of books, grandparents, great-grandparents, an aunt, an uncle, other extended family, friends-n-neighbors and an over-excited dog named Buddy. Oh, and we forgot to bring the camera, so until one of the aforementioned relatives sends me some pictures, none of this was recorded for your photo-viewing pleasure.

When it literally rains, it literally pours

Until Saturday, we hadn't seen any rain for a while and it was much hotter than Boston usually is. Ben is pretty bad with heat and Blaise seems to have inherited that, so hot days are not fun in our house. Then, on Saturday, it rained really, really hard: 4-6 inches in the space of 2 hours. It cooled things off for a bit, but....

Blaise's day care flooded. It's basement level and there's a big ramp from street level to the door. All of that rain rolled right down the ramp and into the day care, which now needs fairly extensive repairs and cleaning. The whole center is closed for 2 weeks and 3 other centers also flooded, so there's not any extra space to shuffle all these kids into. We're pretty disappointed because we were just feeling like we were getting into a solid rhythm with day care and we were all loving it. Blaise is always so happy to see her little friends and even hugs some of them goodbye. Fortunately, we're working on a care share with her friend's family (they use the same day care), so she'll still get some time with a buddy and not just with boring Mom and Dad.

Long summer weekend

We hope you and yours had a lovely, safe Independence Day. But we bet it wasn't as cute as ours.

Blaise and I spent Saturday playing with her buddy Ollie while his parents were landscaping their yard. A kiddie-pool-turned-sandbox made for lots of entertainment. Ollie is 8 months younger than Blaise and very sweet. He would have followed Blaise around all day if we weren't so particular about things like naps. Then Sunday morning we went to play with Siri and her family. There are some photos of a visit to Siri's backyard about a year ago that capture just how much change can happen in a year. They are very big girls now, chasing bubbles and splashing in the kiddie pool and eating their watermelon right off the rind. We had barbecue (imported from KC) with Aunt Kate and Uncle Andrew for dinner, thus ensuring that Blaise hit all of the culinary highlights of the 4th of July (bbq, watermelon and blueberries). She wasn't big on the barbecue, examining a burnt end like it was a strange ancient artifact before nibbling a bit and setting it aside in favor of bread and green beans. We didn't have any Gate's sauce, which might have been the problem.

18 months of Blaise!

We've had a quiet couple of weeks. We're in a good routine with daycare. Blaise has been absolutely loving being around other kids during the day. Mom and Dad are boring. She's especially excited about water play and buggy rides, even faking a lost shoe to prolong a buggy ride. (Okay, so maybe I'm giving her too much credit, but her lost shoe did prolong a buggy ride and she wasn't too upset about that.) We also went swimming with her friend Leo last week, which was lots of fun. Otherwise, pretty quiet. Maybe even boring. But I've said it before: As far as we're concerned, boring is good.

Today, however, we had a double-header of appointments. First up was Blaise's 18 month well-baby check-up. 18 months! How did that happen? We love our pediatrician because he has no reservations about declaring Blaise's progress to be amazing. Who doesn't want to hear things like "She's just amazing! I've never even heard of any kid doing so well after all she's been through!" Her growth continues to be good (possibly because she keeps eating entire avocado halves) and she's very healthy. She got a couple of shots with hardly any fussing and then we hit the Au Bon Pain for a croissant.

Then we went home for her 1-year Early Intervention re-evaluation. They didn't tell us anything we didn't already know. Her gross motor is almost completely caught up. Her fine motor is, and always has been, pretty solid. Her social development and receptive language are ridiculously good. Her expressive language is age-appropriate, as is her cognition. The only thing she's still behind on is feeding. We knew that and it makes some sense. She didn't start eating normally (as much as she wants by mouth) until she was 6 months old, solids were start-and-stop while we resolved the colitis issues last fall and we've been rather conservative with what we let her eat (we're getting more relaxed). So she has the feeding skills of a 14 month old, which isn't disastrous and will probably improve rapidly, especially since daycare has been a real boon to her eating. We've seen big improvement with her drinking from a cup even in just the 3 weeks of daycare so far. Hooray for peer models!