Oh No...

I'm exhausted! There's really no other way to say it. My exhaustion has nothing to do with getting up early and going to the gym...or going and tutoring late. It has everything to do with Lilly's talking. Now that she has started saying words, she doesn't stop. From the second she wakes up, we hear her singing parts of songs in her crib, or saying all the words she can think of in whatever order they come to mind, followed by extremely loud, "hi, hi, hi, hi, hi.....daddy, daddy, daddy, daddy..." (since Jim always goes and gets her in the morning, she calls for him first!) Lilly used to say, "uh oh" all day long, but now she says, "oh no" literally hundreds of times a day. One day, I'm going to try and keep track of the number of times she says it. When she first started saying it, I thought something was wrong. I quickly learned otherwise. A few circumstances that deem an "oh no" necessary in Lilly's eyes include when, she drops anything on the ground, she finishes a piece of cheese or apple, she spills water, she can't get a toy that she wants, the water has drained from the bath, we say goodbye to someone on skype, she can't hear Jim on the phone...and if she hears or sees anybody else drop anything. None of these are dire situations, although if you were in our house, you would think that a disaster was taking place every couple of minutes. Her chatter is constant. And now that she is trying to say words, I'm exhausted from trying to listen to everything. If I walk into the bathroom, Lilly follows me in and says every word she knows that she associates with the bathroom, so she says "teeth, towel, bath..." over and over again. In the kitchen, we hear, "cheese, cup, apple, baby (because she sees the baby on the yobaby yogurt)..." Dad told me I might need to try drinking wine with breakfast, and for the record, I contemplated that this morning.

Lilly's pediatrician said that whenever babies learn a new skill, like crawling, walking or talking, they tend to take shorter naps because they wake up eager to practice this skill. I remember Lilly doing this when she learned to crawl and walk. We'd go in and find her crawling around her crib, or running laps back and forth as soon as she woke up. The same is true this time around. Yesterday, her nap lasted only an hour and a half, instead of the three hours it had been the week before. The second she woke up, she started talking. She says the little bird rhyme, so I hear, "hop hop, how do you do, bye bye," along with another family favorite, "hubba hubba." I'm trying to get a recording, so when I do, I'll add it to this blog. With the crawling and walking, these shorter naps lasted a week or so, until she was used to her new skill, so I'm hoping the same is true this time. If you'd like to witness Lilly's newly found vocabulary, feel free to catch us on Skype and Lilly will be more than willing to demonstrate.

As I finish writing this, Lilly is on the phone with Jim, chattering away. After all the, "Daddy's, how do you do's, and oh no's," Lilly said "bye bye" and kissed the phone. She's exhausting but we love her.