Gia on August 26, 2008

I'm writing this particular entry about three days late, but this is where I wanted to start.

Today was a fun day for us. All the time you hear parents talk about their kids having learned something which is a total surprise to their parents. "Where did you learn that?!" The parents always say. With the frequency of these types of stories being passed around among parents, you'd think that they wouldn't be surprised when it happened to their own child.

I always imagined that one day (in a few years) I'd be driving around in traffic, cursing at other drivers when from the back seat my innocent little angel would chime in with "YEAH, YOU UKKING DICK!" or some other cute variation of some totally inappropriate thing I'd screamed at someone else earlier. In actuality, it happens a lot sooner than that. For example, back when our family had roommates, at one point everyone in the house had a head cold at the same time. Gia was only about 6 or 7 months old and she would sit on her little blanket on the floor and cough. At first we got worried, but then soon realized that she would always smile while she was coughing. That little faker never even got sick from us, she just sat around fake coughing. Apparently she couldn't resist joining in on all the fun of a head cold.

Anyway, today I noticed a few things that she has learned without me ever noticing before. One makes me immensly proud of her, and the other makes me think that her mother is teaching her ways to make my being a stay at home dad more difficult. I was holding Gia on my lap while I was eating lunch. Since she just turned one, and has four teeth, it is often easier to just feed her whatever I am eating, rather than make her a plate of her own. She just dumps all the food on her lap, turns the plate upside down, then smears the juices around the highchair anyway. So she is sitting on my lap and I am feeding her about every third or fifth bite. At some point she picked up the fork and started dragging it around on the plate. At first I thought that she was just banging it on the plate to make noise, but quickly realized that she was trying to get the food onto the fork. With my help, I stuck some food onto the end of the fork for her and let go of the utensil. Immediately she turned the fork around and stuck it in her mouth, pulled the food off, and went back for more food. We repeated this excercise until she couldn't fit any more food into her mouth, as she was too busy practicing her new skill to chew. I told her she could "give some to daddy?" and she obiediently put the fork over her left shoulder, right into my mouth. I was floored.
After we were done eating and everything was cleaned up, I noticed her second new skill. Somewhere, probably from me, she learned to blow her nose. Anyone who has ever fought with an infant to get the boogies out of their nose would initially think this is a wonderful turn of events. Not in this case. She still fights if I try to wipe her nose; and if I just hold the tissue to her face, she just sticks her tongue out and gets the whole thing stuck in her mouth. However, when she is alone, she will blow her own nose. The problem is that she blows her nose onto her wrist.
I was walking past her room when I thought I heard what sounded like her blowing her nose. I peaked in the door and to my surprise found her standing in the middle of the room with her wrist pressed to one side of her nose, blowing snot all over the place. She blows it onto her wrist, then wipes it up her face and into her hair with her other hand, then walks around the house touching all those things I've already told her 40 times today not to touch. While being elated that she made one small step toward learning to do one small, but gross, thing on my own, I also realized that now I was going to have to watch her even more closely all day long, lest I have snail trails of snot all over the house.