We have been taking it easy on the craft side of things this month and started to garden. We planted cilantrillo and basil. Today we observed the plants and they started to grow; a tiny leaf we saw and Daniela was excited. She said. “Oh Wow” and somehow it reminded me of my sister Milta who always says, “Wow”
Grandma Sylvette left on the 11th of April so she got to spend lots of time with Daniela. When she left, Daniela was asking for her. Prior to Sylvette leaving for CT, she spent time in Ponce. When Daniela woke up the next day, she was in a routine of getting three big spoons for breakfast and her spoon. She asked, “Y Sylvette?” and we told her that she was with Abuelita Lydia. She basically asked for her the entire week until she came back. But when she left on the plane and she asked where her grandma was, we explained that she went on a plane and back home to CT. She had this weird look on her face one of understanding, sadness, and full of questions. Throughout the month she had been doing so many things with Sylvette, that she got used to her being around. It was a little sad to see her face process this information because she was not going to have her grandma around to talk with, play with her dolls, and dance with her.
Her talking in English and Spanglish is getting clearer and she is having full conversations with us. Back and forth. Sometimes its scary to see how much she is processing and how she feeds off of our energy. If both of us are having a bad day, it rubs off on her. Raul had an incident at the store with a cashier and the baby then acted mean to the cashier when she wanted to scan the soap and daniela refused to give it to her. On another occassion I asked her to eat, and was very negative about her not eating and she talked back in a mean voice to me. So we need to work on how we react in front of her and tone of voice. Okay I need to work on this more than Raul but I do spend more time with her, so she will act the way mom acts if I don’t do something about my reaction to her not doing something quickly.
We started learning about triangles and did a neat thing with tape and contact paper. She learns so quickly it is scary. Another thing we started to do was weaning of breastfeeding. She can only ask for Nene or TeTe if she is going to take a nap or go to sleep for the evening. We are giving her almond, soy mik, almond chocolate milk, and apple juice along with water. She sits with us at the big girl table and uses her little table to paint or put her snacks on. She has her routines that if we break them, she has a fit about them.
She is relating new experiences with familiar experiences. We celebrated Raul’s birthday with the neighbors and even made cupcakes for our neighbor who celebrated her birthday two days before Raul’s birthday. She loves all the musical movies we play for her and one day was doing choreography from King and I. Raul just bought Sister Act and she is hooked with watching the musical numbers.
We even put on Captain America and she liked the Rockeets scene in the movie. We also put on Star Wars Attack of the Clones and she was asking about the different types of beings she saw in the movie and the space ships. She was mesmerized by the action and light saber fighting.
She plays independently with the dog and by herself lining up her little animals. Reading her books in her tent and playing with our neighbors granddaughter Iman. She will be returning to Florida so we will wait till Ricardo who is in Italy with his Mom to come back and coordinate more play times together. We also have to start putting her in swim classes. She is starting to get more confident with jumping in the water, lying down, and getting up quickly before a wave comes on shore. She really likes listening to the birds in the morning and was even talking to some bugs that came in the house one day flying ants or something like that.
We could focus on her tantrums at times but I would rather focus on all the little beatiful things she does. We met Gene and Odilia, a couple Raul and I met through an online group. The spent some time with us and Gene took these awesome pictures of Daniela. I think we are doing Mother’s Day Gifts of those pictures to our moms.