Anniversary

I just noticed that I let the one-year anniversary of starting this blog go by without fanfare! And fanfare is so near and dear to my heart. Last September 9 I wrote my first post when we were still three months away from our referral day for Jarrah. And today is our seven-month anniversary of being home with her.

Seven months! Sometimes that seems a ridiculously short amount of time for how much our lives have been completely, utterly transformed.

Jarrah has been mostly delightful lately. She is still taking every ounce of my daily energy in order to keep her entertained, but we have seen fewer instances of foot-stamping, fist-pumping mini-tantrums, possibly because she is better able to express herself now, and, hence, we are better able to respond to her needs.

Cute thing that just happened: David discovered Jarrah had pulled my box of Special K cereal off the counter and was digging in hand over fist, so he filled her Snack Trap with a handful and figured that was a good compromise. Well, I agree, but the Snack Trap functions better in theory than in practice. The technology depends on the child reaching daintily through the slits in the flexible lid and extracting a lone chunk, rather than pulling the lid off and dumping the entire contents. Jarrah is not a dainty reacher, not really ever, and especially not when it comes to snacks.

So, within short order, our house sported a Hansel and Gretel trail of Special K, and David went to get the broom. As he cleaned, Jarrah came around the corner, having managed to put on her own pink leopard-print sneaker (wrong foot) with the express purpose of stamping on the Special K for the satisfying crunch it made when she did so. As David frantically swept, she gleefully stomped. I felt bad for laughing.

Cute thing that happened at "My Gym" this week: it was "separation time," which is the five minutes at the end of class when the kids gather in the middle of the room with toys and the adults "retreat to the lobby" while they play (this ritual amuses me, because I wonder if I'm the only one who fantasizes about "separation time" lasting more like an hour, wherein I retreat to a coffee shop across the street.) The staff brings out boxes of toys, and they are different every time. This week, there were neon-colored diaphanous scarves. These scarves made an appearance about two months ago, at which time one of the teachers tied one around her head, babushka-style, to amuse the kids. Apparently, Jarrah remembered this, because she spent her separation time attempting to tie a scarf on each of the other children. She was gentle but firm, draping a scarf over a nearby head and starting to wrap, sarong-style, before the mostly oblivious child moved on, and the head was no longer available for accessorizing. At which point, she simply moved on to the next available head.