Share

Margaret's vocabulary is growing by the day, as I notice when we play a stream of consciousness, free association game when we walk down the street and I say whatever pops into my head. "Brick," I say. "Brick," she replies. "Fence." "Fence." "Tree." "Tree." "Truck." "Truck," she says in a way that sounds disturbingly like a certain curse word. She gets almost all of the one syllable words, although certain sounds that I have yet to isolate can cause problems. When I feel like challenging her, I toss is a two syllable word. "Stoplight." "Sewer." And so on. She gets most of those. Then we really ratchet it up and try some words with three syllables. In almost every case, she drops one of the syllables. So she has a clear wall in her verbal skills that she hasn't crossed yet. That's also evident in the "sentences" that she structures since "sit down" is a possibility while "I'll be back" becomes "I back."

But one of her favorite words at this point is "share." She appears to have learned it at school and will say it in a very serious, earnest way. "Share," she'll say as she grabs a toy. The problem, however, is that she doesn't really seem to understand what it means. To her, "share" seems to mean that you have something that I want and you should give it to me. So when we saw her younger friend Laura over the weekend and they were both tugging on a doll stroller, we would say "Share." And Maggie would response, "Share!" with solemn look on her face as she tugged at the handles. This, I think, is a difficult concept, so it's not surprising that she's a bit confused.

On other matters, today was the first daddy-Teddy day at home during my time off before he starts daycare fulltime. With Margaret, I took off a lot of time, but work issues and the fact that we're already paying for his daycare spot make that less feasible with Teddy. But over the next three to four weeks, I'll be spending around three days a week with him at home.

Today was our first day together. And it went pretty well. He did ok with the bottle, although he liked to snack and nap a bit as seems to be his style (he's also a sloppy eater as he'd dribble a lot of his bottle down his chin.) When he was awake, he didn't fuss too much since he'd either grin at me when I engaged him or would spend time looking at whatever I waved in his face when I was trying to read my book. He wasn't a good napper since he only slept for 45 minutes at a time, but in general, he seems to be a pretty happy baby, grinning a lot without the fussiness that accompanied his sister. I'm sure that will happen at some point, but he seems pretty pleasant. And not to toot my own horn, I'm probably better at dealing with the inevitable baby crises than I was with Margaret.

But tomorrow, I have to go to work. So Teddy will be spending his first day at daycare. They're very excited to have him, and I'm sure he'll do well, although he'll probably come home with a cold. In any case, stay tuned for a Teddy at daycare post.