Reflections on Zadie @ 18 Months

Above: Zadie wearing Grandma Linda's crazy birthday hat.

Zadie had her 18-month checkup yesterday and she's had a big growth spurt. She measured 34.5 inches (100th percentile!), weighed 25 lbs, 2 oz (70th percentile), and had a head circumference of 19 inches (a precipitous drop to the 90th percentile). Sadly, she also has outer ear infections in both ears and we're now putting drops in her ears -- the doctor said she was quite the trooper to not have complained!

I've been thinking a lot lately about Zadie and how developed her personality already is. Maybe it's partly because I've been hanging out with Skip and I often wonder what his personality is going to be like when he gets older. So I want to jot down some observations about Zadie at 18 months so that she can look back on this later and see if she thinks some of these core elements about her personality hold true.

• This kid is sassy. One thing you have to say about Zadie is that she has personality, for better or for worse! Given ideal conditions (outdoors and lots of fruit on hand), Zadie can be the most charming and adorable kid you've ever seen. Grandma Linda always talks about Zadie's special twinkle in her eye. But just as surely as she has a twinkle, she's also got some little horns that can come out! This typically happens when she is not allowed to have some piece of fruit that she sees or is prevented from doing something she is really fixated on. Then she can deliver a ruckus. It surprises me a little that my child is so capable of loud ruckuses (given my calm and even-keeled nature!), but I think she has what I'm diagnosing as "Early Onset Terrible Twos." So I definitely think she will grow out of this stage, but in the meantime I will continue to marvel about how sweet her sweet is and how sour her sour is.

• She may have my genes, but she's got Tori's personality. In the ongoing debate over nature versus nurture, chalk this one up to nurture. I think Zadie looks a lot like me, but she acts just like Tori. Here's how:

1. Obsessed with the outdoors. Even when she was an infant, we could always calm Zadie down by taking her outside and letting her feel the breeze on her face and look around. Now, as a toddler, her favorite thing is to be outside at a park or, even better...
2. Swimming! Like Tori, Zadie is a die-hard beach-goer. We decided early on to let her embrace the full beach experience and she would eat handfuls of sand and go charging into the waves even when the water was freezing. Some of my favorite pictures of her are ones my sister took of her covered in sand in Hawaii. She also loves to swim at my parents pool in San Diego, which has been great fun.
3. Mechanical? As everyone knows, I am the last person you would ever want to ask to fix something. I struggle to put together Pack 'N Plays, pack the trunk of a car, and even arrange chairs in a room. But somehow Zadie is amazingly mechanical and one of her favorite activities is finding random keys and picking the lock to the cupboard in our kitchen. She's picked it open so many times that it's actually hard to open with the correct key and Grandma Linda gets frustrated trying to open it and has to call Zadie over to help! Zadie could also buckle and unbuckle straps for hours and hours.
4. Rough around the edges. Tori is not a quiet person. She talks loudly, laughs loudly, bangs dishes loudly, and generally lives life loudly (I love you, Tori!). Zadie seems to be cut from the same cloth. She greatly enjoys slamming doors and generally barrels her way through life. I'm relieved and surprised that there haven't been any stitches yet.

• Zadie loves her mama. Although originally we were going to be called Mama T and Mama K, that has now evolved into Mama (Tori) and Mommy (Kate). Zadie's very favorite word is Mama! She can't quite say Mommy and she sometimes uses Mama to refer to me, but most of her "mamas" are directed at the one and only Tori. Since Zadie loves being busy (very unlike me), she loves to follow Tori around and watch everything she does. She particularly loves to watch Tori cook, sew, water the plants, and fix things. It's really quite adorable.

• It's all about the fruit. Yes, I realize most kids like fruit. But this is something completely different. This is a total fixation on fruit, to the exclusion of all other foods. Zadie is madly in love with fruit. Her preference is for berries, and blueberries are her very favorite. When she visits my parents' house, my mom gives her buckets of the stuff and her diapers are purple. Although we are appreciative that her favorite food isn't, say, hot dogs, this fruit obsession results in daily battles over foods. It's miraculous to me that Zadie has grown so much on such a poor diet. She pretty much boycotts all other foods. My mother sees this as divine retribution, given what a terribly picky eater I was.

• MORE! Tori did not want me to neglect mentioning Zadie's other favorite word. "More" was the first and primary sign that we taught Zadie and it has kind of become her mantra, her guiding vision, and her reason for being. Her cousins Nick and Austin loved watching her frantically signing for more fruit in Hawaii (I'll post a video of her signing later). Now that she can actually verbalize it, her "more" comes across as quite demanding and bossy. We're trying to teach her to throw a "please" on the end of it, but so far that hasn't stuck.