She's all ears

One last video for tonight...

Sonia recently has been both talking a bit more, and showing how much she understands us a lot more. It has become a pretty regular occurrence that we will say something to her, which before would have fallen on deaf ears, and now she will actually react to it in a way that makes sense. When we're at the park and we say, "Sonia do you want to go on the swings?" she turns and walks over to them. Two days ago she gave Sameer a kiss good-bye when she was leaving for the park, and after she walked away Chuki said, "Give Daddy one more," and Sonia turned around, walked back to Sameer, and gave him another kiss. Earlier today I said, "If you want to go outside you need to put on your shoes," and Sonia walked into her room, opened the dresser drawer, took out her shoes, and brought them to me. It definitely makes us wonder just how much else she understands...we're certainly going to have to be more careful with what we say around her. :-)

She is doing a bit more talking, which is lots of fun. She always waves good-bye, but today for the first time when she did it she said "bye-bye" (or, really, "buh buh"). She always says "flower", "uh oh" (constantly), and "down" ("duh"). She also says "bo bo" all the time, but we still haven't figured out what that one means.

Below is a video of Sonia showing off how many words she knows (even if she can't say them). Clearly we need to buy some video editing software, because, a) this video clip is way too long, and b) then we could have cut off the part at the end where she shows that she's not exactly 100% accurate just yet. :-)

Future Mia Hamm...or maybe not

Despite my last post, we have managed to sneak in a few videos of Sonia in recent weeks. In this one you can see that Sameer has already begun his focused, but I suspect ultimately futile, quest to make Sonia athletic. He has put up a toddler basketball hoop at home, and Sonia (a glutton for praise if ever there was one) happily makes baskets and then turns and looks at us and waits for us to clap and cheer. So, having met with success there, today Sameer decided it was time to take on soccer. We purchased a small soccer ball from the local toy store and hit the park. As you can see from the video, I must admit that Sonia did seem to show some natural skill for the first 15 seconds or so, but then it was like she had an epiphany and said, "This is stupid...why don't I just pick up the ball and carry it?" So, she did, and that was it for soccer (at least for today).

I'm ready for my closeup

There has been a request (really, more of a demand) from my mom for more videos. :-) Unfortunately, this may prove to be difficult as Sonia has become rather fixated with the camera which makes taking a video of her pretty tricky.

It started off cute enough...whenever we began to take a video of Sonia doing something, she would stop in her tracks and instead pose for the camera (as in the video below where she loses all interest in the balloon she was playing with once she realizes the camera is on).



Unfortunately, like idiots, we started showing Sonia the videos of herself on the camera after we took them (a seemingly harmless way to distract her when necessary). To say she has become obsessed with the camera would be an understatement. If she ever even catches a brief glimpse of the camera, she lunges for it, grabs it, hands it to you, and starts making the sign for "more" so forcefully that I think she might injure herself. (And, yes, she basically thinks more means "I want" and doesn't get the concept that you have to already have something to then have "more" of it.) This makes taking a video of her very difficult, as you can see in the next clip where she is trying to grab the camera out of my hands so she can see the pictures of herself on the display screen.



So, needless to say, we've been taking fewer photos lately. :-) It's scary to think how comfortable this child will be with technology if at 16 months some of her favorite "toys" are the camera, our cell phones, and any laptop keyboard she can get her little fingers on.

Odds and Ends

Way behind on posting, as usual, so I thought I would write a quick one detailing the miscellaneous things going on with us...

• We finally bought a new car! The "good old Honda" was starting to really just be the "old Honda", and the last straw was a scraping noise everytime you hit the brakes. Since we didn't want to put any more money into the car (I literally hesitated to even fill the gas tank at times), we decided to finally just call it and buy the new car we have been talking about for ages. We decided to get a Prius, not just because we are cheap, but also because we thought it would feel right at home with the 5 other Priuses (if that's a word) in our building's garage. So far, it's been great...not exactly a luxurious feel, but I've driven it 70 miles and the fuel indicator hasn't even moved. Stay tuned for a farewell tribute posting for the Honda once we finally figure out how to get rid of it (and yes, I will shamelessly copy Molly's ode to the Maxima).
• Sonia continues to show more independence (which is a euphemism for "bossiness" or "stubbornness"), which is pretty impressive given that she has yet to really latch onto this whole talking thing. Essentially it involves a lot of pointing, a fair amount of whining, and the occasional teensy-tiny tantrum. Ah, a sign of things to come, no doubt. Most of the bossiness centers around going outside, which she wants to do all of the time. She starts by bringing you her shoes and pointing at her feet. If you don't get the picture then she walks into her room, points at her jacket in the closet, and starts to whine. We really encouraged Chuki to take her out as much as possible so she gets lots of activity, but we've definitely created a monster in the process. On the weekends when we are in the living room she just looks at us like, "What's wrong with you people?! Why aren't we at the park yet?" Of course, we typically cave in to her requests to go outside, which explains why last Wednesday Sonia was the only child already in her pajamas at the park around 6:45pm.
• Sameer recently showed me a video online of a baby on the Today show who at 17-months can read (no joke, check it out). Of course this kid is some sort of freak of nature, but in the whole "nature vs. nurture" debate it's hard to ignore the fact that both of her parents are speech pathologists, so maybe they were a bit more focused on this whole language thing than we've been. In other news, Sonia has added "uh-oh" to her vocabulary (whenever she drops something). I'm sure the Today show will be calling any minute. :-)
• The house hunt continues, but with no luck. We saw one last weekend that we actually sort of liked -- it had a huge lot and the house itself was nice (albeit small). It was more money than we would have liked, but that is always going to be the case, so we were considering it. I'm using the past tense because it sold over the weekend, before our realtor even got a chance to see it, so apparently others were "considering it" a bit more seriously than we were. Oh well...the hunt continues this weekend.

Other than that, life continues as usual. Work has calmed down considerably for me, which has all sorts of good benefits in terms of getting enough sleep, actually getting some items on our personal to-do list done (next stop: taxes), and hopefully more regular blog posting.

Look who's talking (or maybe not)

Despite the fact that Sonia is very "talkative", for the most part she doesn't really talk...or at least not words that we recognize. She says "mama" and "dada" pretty regularly (and of course occasionally "go go" for dog), but that's about it. Sameer and I do a very good impersonation of parents who are laid back on this topic, except occasionally one of us will say to the other "why isn't she talking yet?!" in an exacerbated tone. Since's Sameer's nickname when he was a baby is a word that translates to "mute", I don't think we should hold our breath waiting for more words from Sonia.

So, when Sonia does say something that sounds like a new word, we get very excited. Recently we've convinced ourselves she is saying "diaper" (more like "die-puh", but close enough), "purple" (only Sameer has witnessed this one), and smaller words like "yeah" and "up." This weekend we added "baby" to our list, although you can see from this video that if she is indeed saying that word, she certainly isn't very reliable as she seems to use it to refer to the pictures of flowers and rubber duckies as well. Oh well...close enough in our book!

Fun-filled Weekend

We had a great weekend relaxing together as a family, despite a bit of a rocky start. We had to cancel our planned date night on Friday when worked reared its ugly head (Friday night...is nothing sacred!). After that inauspicious beginning, the weekend took a turn for the better when on Saturday we motivated to take Sonia to the Children's Discovery Museum in San Jose. At first she was a bit intimidated by all of the noise and other kids, but she quickly settled in, climbing around like a little monkey and grinning the whole time. Or should I say grinning most of the time, except for when it was time to leave when she threw a fit like the little kid she is rapidly becoming. A vision of the future, for sure.

We thought we would beat the crowd by heading over to The Old Spaghetti Factory that is nearby at around 5pm (admittedly, Saturday night in our world has changed a bit in the last year), but when we got there it was completely packed with young girls running around in princess costumes. I thought it was one very large, very surreal birthday party before I finally realized that this restaurant was the closest to the HP Arena where "Disney On Ice" was playing that night. Talk about a vision of the future -- there is nothing like seeing 100 6-year-olds running around in full-blown gowns and tiaras to make you ponder how you should raise your young daughter. Or at least make you wonder why you did not buy stock in Disney when they introduced this whole "princess" theme a few years ago. Unfortunately all of those princesses led to a very long wait time, which means Sonia had a mini-meltdown from hunger in the waiting area and basically ended up eating Pirate's Booty for dinner while we waited. And then of course the kitchen was "a little backed up" getting our food when we finally did get a table, so needless to say by the end of the night our "no binky except for sleeping" rule was broken and Sameer and I set world records for how quickly one can scarf down spaghetti and meat sauce.

On Sunday we drove up to San Mateo to split the distance with the Glotzbachs (who live in SF) whom we had not seen in ages. Despite the fact that the park I picked out online turned out to not be exactly as advertised (the park's "train" turned out to be only slightly larger than a toy train), it was still tons of fun to see them and watch the kids play together. After a brief lunch where Sonia refused all food besides Cheerios, we then drove back to Palo Alto and went to a handful of disappointing open houses. Then we closed the day with another visit to the park (and another tantrum upon leaving), before Sonia finally collapsed at the end of the day exhausted. Mission accomplished.

I guess we missed the memo about resting up for another crazy week at work, but it was well worth it.

Below are our pictures from February...and yes, Mom, I will post another video very soon. :-)