Look game

I've been playing a new little game with Janey, where I look at her eyes and saying "Looking!" and see how long I can get her to keep eye contact going. She seems to enjoy it, and is pretty good at it. It's kind of like a staring contest. She likes a lot of little games we play like that. Another one she's always liked is the foot clapping game, where I clap her feet together like hands and sing a song. Lately I've been singing "Surrey with the Fringe on Top" and she asked for the game now by saying "chicks and ducks?" She likes to be active so much, and I'm realizing more likes to just be close to me, so I'm trying to spend a lot more time just holding her and playing with her kind of like you would with a baby, silly little games. Maybe she just now has reached the stage where she's ready for that, but it can get dangerous as she's getting pretty big, and likes to bonk heads!

This spring she developed a huge attachment to a certain coat of hers. It's very soft and plush, and she called it her "flower coat" or "nature coat" as it had flowers on it. She would get very anxious in the mornings when it got close to time for coat on, worried I would put on another coat. I had to finally hide it for a while, as it's really too heavy for this time of year. They said at school she would go get it and put it on, too. I think it was like a blanket to her. It's another area where she is now doing something like is like what about 18 month olds do. It's interesting to see the stages progress slowly like that, at least when they last and don't fade away and never come back, as they did the first time around.

She is looking so big now---she's really passed the point of looking like a preschooler and looks like a little schoolgirl. Very few people in public seem to mistake her for "normal" anymore, I've noticed. It's obvious enough seeing her behavior that she's got something going on. I guess in a tiny way I'm glad of that---maybe it would be harder if she seemed perfectly normal and then did something bizarre, but also I am sure it affects how people react to her, and she is probably getting less people talking to her in a "normal" way.

There has been a lot of crying lately---not the all day crying that's so hard to take, but off and on crying spells that get punctuated by a loud, piercing scream. That's tough. It's still often when she's hungry or tired, and just doesn't seem to know that is what she feels. Actually, she does pretty well with tired, but hungry seems to elude her, and we have to be very careful to keep the food coming and avoid that kind of meltdown.