Eden Update

Our little girl is getting so big!

Lucy - Eden loves her little sister.  She calls her "Lu-Lu" (and is the only person allowed to do so!;) and when she's feeling super affectionate will upgrade it to "Lulu-Baba" or "Lulu-beebee," which I think is her version of "baby Lucy."  Sometimes its even just "Lu-Ba."  Eden is always excited to find Lucy lying in some accessible place - the floor, the couch, the jumper - and snuggles right up to her, laying her head on Lucy's chest much as she does with Nate and me.  Of course that pretty much squashes Lucy, but she's a good sport about it! She's also discovered that its hilarious to stick her finger as far as she can in Lucy's throat and watch/hear/feel her reaction.  I can pretty much guess exactly what she's doing when I here a certain delighted and uncontrollable giggling coming from around the corner.
Eden is very much a girl when it comes to colors, pink and purple being her definite favorites.  If there's a choice, those are the winners, whether in food, clothes, flowers, or toys.  She also knows green, blue, black and white sometimes, orange, and yellow.
Hats are required for any outfit to be complete.
Back in December, I brought home a DVD of The Nutcracker from the library.  I didn't know how she would react, but it turned out that she loved it and would watch it for as long as I would let her.  She would dance and twirl and fall down, only to get up and watch and dance again.  When we visited California, she learned a lot more about dancing from her aunts and her three year old cousin, and her passion for the Nutcracker continued.  These days she asks for the music three or four (or ten!) times a day, always with the same urgency and enthusiasm, and her dancing now includes jumping, twirls without falling down, spinning (which does result in falling down), and all sorts of creative and dramatic flourishes and kicks.  She'll dance with her dollies, with some little paper bears I cut out for her, with Mama or Daddy, or by herself.  She wishes Lucy would get up and dance with her - she'll grab her hand and pull up on it, exclaiming, "Up! Up!" - but that won't be happening for a while.
Speaking of the Nutcracker, one of the things she learned from her cousin was that the Nutcracker died at one point in the ballet.  So for nearly a month, everything "died."  Daddy, Mama, dollies, Lucy, Eden herself...she's very drawn to the dramatic and emotionally intense side of life. We tried to derail that obsession by telling her he didn't die, he just got broken.  So now everything is "broke."
Eden loves to read!  She wakes up and the first word out of her mouth is, "Eat!"  If we don't respond appropriately, she'll make sure we got the message by signing eat, first on herself, and then on us!  When we get downstairs, however, she switches from "Eat!" to "Read!"  She loves Curious George, a series of old Disney books my mom gave us, and Beatrice Potter's Jeremy Fisher, but she's pretty much an omnivore.  Last night I found her sitting on her blanket, poring over a massage manual.  It amazes me how much she comprehends of the spoken word.  She's only just beginning to be very verbal, but her understanding of conversations and oral storytelling is astounding.
We started Eden with elimination communication from the time she was about two weeks old and went through all the ups and downs of that.  By ten months she would tell us when she had to poop, and she did all her poops in the potty (except the occasional miss) and I must say, that has been SO nice.  We pretty much gave up on catching the pee though.  I thought I'd have her potty trained before Lucy, and then before we came back to Alaska, but that didn't happen.  So we got down to business a few weeks ago, and really focused.  For three days I changed many wet panties, pants, skirts, and tights, and mopped/soaked up numerous puddles.  I gave up.  I decided she must not be ready, and resigned myself to putting her back in diapers.  But that night she woke up at 4:30 am, bolted out of bed and ran to to potty and peed.  And every twenty minutes, for the rest of the night, wanted to get up and go potty.  I was so over it!  But we've progressed in our potty training journey from that day, and now she's in panties, except for naptime and bedtimes. (That's been its own struggle. She would ask to go potty at least 5 times every time we put her to sleep, and it was seriously delaying the process.  We finally came down to declaring, "If you're wearing panties, you pee in the potty.  If you're wearing a diaper, you pee in your diaper."  Maybe it will backfire when we want to get her out of diapers for good, but for now its the only way to get her to relax and go to sleep.)
Some other concepts and words she's been experimenting with  include "NO!" "Happy!" and "Cranky." When she's being cranky, we ask her if she wants to go to the cranky corner, a little alcove at the end of our entry hall. This is not framed as a punishment or a time out, just as a place to go to get yourself under control. She usually says yes, takes herself over there, stands there for a few seconds, and then comes out saying, "Happy!" It melts my heart, though, when she comes up to me, out of the blue, and tells me she's happy.  That is what I want for her!

Oh yes! She calls herself "Eenie," and she says oopsies, "eepoo!"

One more thing.  This update is about three months old! Eepoo! :) She has grown and changed so much that I need to do a whole new edition already.  I didn't want to lose this, though.