While stacking her blocks in the living room, the Wilco song A Shot In the Arm playing in the background (its refrain: Baby all I need is a shot in the arm), Clara pointed to her father saying "Dada, Dada, Dada."
What?, we asked her. Do you want to play a different game? Read a book? Watch an Elmo video?
No. And she said again, "Dada, Dada" with a different inflection this time (as in, "no, you dummy").
She couldn't be commenting about Dada's flu shot, could she? That was last week. Paul brought Clara to Target (part of a weekly pilgrimage to visit Elmo followed by saying hello to the big cow at Chic-fil-A and sharing a small lemonade) where Clara sat on his lap, entranced as the pharmacist plunged a needle deep into his shoulder.
Clara had received her flu shot just the day before, an event for which Kate had her fully prepped on what to expect. It was the first time Clara was placed on the doctor's examination table and not gone into hysterics. This time, in fact, she didn't even cry when the needle pierced her chubby left thigh. Kate says she clenched her face, and her lip quivered ever so slightly, but no tears.
Clara had been showing off her Dora band-aid ever since, and continued to do so while sitting in Paul's lap at Target. The pharmacist asked Clara whether her Dada might cry when she delivered the shot. "Oh yeah," she said confidently. She never glanced away, so curious that Dada was going through the same process she had the day before.
So a week passes, we expect the memory was quickly fading, and we certainly never expect that Clara pays attention to the lyrics in our music...but "baby all I need is a shot in the arm" reminds her of Dada's travails at Target.
(Notes to selves: Pay attention to the lyrics in our music! The sponge is absorbing it all!)
We have closed the book on 18, and Clara has officially entered her final teenage month. Here's a retrospective:
-- Her parents are convinced we received a preview of the terrible twos. We're hoping some of the behavior this month might have plunged it from her system. Just as the karma of Kate being a terrible sleeper as a child has spawned an anti-sleeper daughter, the karma of Paul urging his toddling nieces and nephews to say "No, no, no!" often and loud has wrought its own payback.
Clara has picked up on it with a fury, and the word is frequently delivered as "Noooooooooo!", oft repeated, and recited within a fit. Paul officially apologizes to his siblings for encouraging that word, and they can trust that he's receiving fair payback. (Kate, in her misfortune, is karma's innocent bystander.)
-- Clara's love for children's music in the car is unabated, as is her request to hear the same song over and over and over again during a single trip. We can testify from experience that the distance between our house and the North Hills mall (Target) is eight John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidts. From our house to the Autobell Car Wash is five This Old Mans.
-- Clara is very much into matching games. It started with a book where her mother taught her to find the picture of a child and match it to its duplicate. Her Ga bought her a toddler memory game where she matches pictures to each other. She gets very studious with it, pointing to the original, looking around for its match while drawing out "ummmmm", and identifying the winner with a victorious "that'n and that'n."
The other day at the car wash (we bring up the car wash twice because it happens so rarely that we want to make sure you know we actually did it), she pointed to a red Jeep Wrangler and then a red Jeep Cherokee saying "that'n and that'n." Close enough.
-- Speaking of colors, they are her newest favorite words. The next door neighbor's cat is "black cat", the piece of fruit is the "yellow nana", Abby Cadabby is as clearly pink as Elmo is red, green stoplights mean "go!", and oranges are orange. Blue has been in the repertoire for nearly a year now (blueberries).
-- Paul is responsible for putting Clara down for nap twice a week. He is also in charge of putting her to sleep most nights. The latter remains a somewhat orderly affair. The former not so much.
After a couple weeks of epic fights with much wailing and tears on both sides, Paul has given up the old routine of reading a story, singing a song, and putting Clara in her crib. Now, he makes sure she somehow ends up in the carseat or stroller as we near nap time. Even though she seems to know what's coming, Clara can't seem to resist being lulled to sleep. Paul chuckles with satisfaction at how easy it is to transplant her from carseat/stroller to the crib.
-- Finally, some of you may know that Clara's great-grandmother, through the paternal lines, was named Apollonia Campisi in a nod to the old country, Sicily. While she changed her name to Lilian, the Italian genes remain dominant.
They have recently expressed themselves in Clara's speech patterns. Just this month she has quit the traditional pronunciation of "moon", replacing it with "moon-eh"; and she no longer asks for "more", it's "more-eh." It probably comes from feeding her too much pasta (which, of course, she now pronounces "past-eh"). Mama mia!
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