Alita & the Monkey

Alita is talking a lot. She says: Mama, Dada, moon, star, kye (sky), car, cab (crab), total (turtle), monkey (& she says "ooh-ooh"), purple, black, poon (spoon), oh (asking for Cheerio), booty (asking for a snack called “veggie booty”), noo-noo (noodle), gieppe (grape), kitty, dog, duck, kid, baby, Abby, Amy, Nana, and probably several more words in Russian that Nadia taught her.

She recognizes more words than she can say, like all the important parts of the head (eye, hair, nose, mouth, tongue, ear). She touches each when it is named in English or Russian but she doesn’t say them yet.

She sleeps through the night from 8 until 6:30 or 7. Very reasonable. She doesn’t like to be left at church daycare on Sundays and practically melts down when we tried a couple of times. I think we’re going to have to push ahead with that, though. We don't want to be dealing with that on the first day of school!

When we say “Where’s the baby?” she points to herself. Also she points to herself if we say “Where’s Alita?” But she’s not so good at saying Alita yet. She’s outgrowing the kitchen sink as her bathtub and had her first professional haircut on Sunday (disaster with screaming, etc. Erik was blissfully unaware at home). She was fussing when Amy tried to dress her the other day, saying Monkey over and over, until Amy realized that she wanted to wear her Monkey shirt. When she put it on, Alita was happy as a clam and marched around the house saying “Monkey, Mon-Key” for about half an hour.

Amy is wrangling the taxes and organizing the upstairs bathroom facelift. Erik is trying to apply for funding grants in this stimulus package and working in the HMC intensive care unit.