An Eliana first: She hid her face.

A benefit of expanding Eliana into new foods is they are often less messy. I shared with her some spoonfuls of the oats and yogurt in my breakfast concoction. She seems to really like the French vanilla. I like that the consistency is thick enough that it all stays in her mouth.

Eliana also enjoys one of my favorite types of buttered bread, a mixture of whole grains with nuts. Whether plain or toasted, she likes it either way, and either way it is a bib-optional experience.

With the bib not around her neck, Eliana quickly repurposed it as a toy. When she hid her face behind it, Ethan and I said, “Where’s Eliana?” She was already familiar with unhiding, so the “There she is!” part came easily. Again and again, Eliana led us in a game of peek-a-boo.

An Eliana first: She drank from a sippy cup.

Being so used to a bottle, Eliana had no interest in drinking her baby formula through a sippy cup. Still, she seemed to be ready to handle one. After some dodge and parry of her opposing hands and turning head, I got her started. After a few seconds, she realized it wasn’t so bad after all, held the cup, and enjoyed her early morning beverage.

An Eliana first: She climbed stairs.

Eliana didn’t start with the soft, carpeted stairs at home. Instead, she chose the hard, smooth (but fortunately, not too slippery) stairs of the children’s museum. Was it the bold, yellow stripes cuing her next steps? Or maybe boredom waiting for her brother to finish playing fireman?

Short-lived exuberance

The most exciting moment for Ethan during our visit to the Children’s Museum on Navy Pier was the instant he saw the wheel loader. He could see that he’d be able to climb right in. Thanks to a NATO convention in the city that kept most people home, there wasn’t any waiting. But that only kept his exuberance all the more brief, for as soon as Ethan discovered that none of the controls did anything and that neither the wheel loader nor its scoop were going anywhere, the exhibit immediately shifted from fascinating to entirely disappointing.

An Eliana first: She played the water whistle.

We expected that Eliana would put the whistle in her mouth, but we didn’t know that she would discover that if she blows, it makes a pretty sound.

“Want to see a Philistine?”

It wasn’t Goliath, or Ethan surely would have said so, but wherever it came from, to Ethan this pink little guy serves quite nicely as a run-of-the-mill Philistine.

An Eliana first: She tossed all her bunnies out of her crib.

One of the bunnies is a music box—a bit heavy, but not so much as to take away the fun of getting thrown overboard.

An Eliana first: She signed “all done”.

We tried to teach Eliana the sign for “all done” during the same period that we worked with her on “more”. When she latched onto “more”, we drifted away from working with her on “all done”. Yet she remembered: five days later, out of the blue, she told me in no uncertain terms that she was all done with organic peach oatmeal banana puree.

Clear roads on a rainy day

On a rainy day warm enough to have some windows open, Ethan heard the sound of a car going by the house on a wet road, but didn’t recognize it. When I told him he heard a car going over rain on the road, it prompted a logistical question from the boy who can’t experience enough of heavy machinery: “What truck plows the rain?”

An Eliana first: She signed for more.

Having experienced the benefits of teaching a bit of sign language to Ethan, we knew the same would be good with Eliana. In particular, signing for food is more palatable to the ear than crying. Since the sign for more is a bit too advanced for her and since we wanted her to learn clap hands anyway, we made that the sign for “more”, and now she is doing baby claps for baby food.