The Inagural Blog

I have avoided the blog peer pressure for the majority of our daughter's 17 months of life, with the exception of one Not-Me-Monday post seen below. My excuses for this are many, mostly related to the past year of excessive night/weekend call... but I have concluded that the heart of the matter lies in my inability to relinquish my obsession with Perfectionism. If I am going to do something, I am going to do it right, and the thought of maintaining the highest level of wit, cleverness, and narrative genius on a regular basis as I chronicle the events that transpire in the Golding househould is a bit daunting. Perhaps the biggest challenge I've faced as a doctor mommy, and even more so as a resident doctor mommy, is accepting that Perfectionism may not always be an attainable goal. Everything is about balance, and at some point sacrifices are necessary that preclude perfection in each of the roles I now find myself holding. A painful process indeed for someone who has spent 29 (precariously close to 30!) years meticulously pursuing Perfectionism in an often control-freakishly way. Soooo... as part of this character building process, I have decided to resurrect the Blog, accepting the fact that at times it may not be as witty, clever, or narratively genius-y as I might hope.

Now, to catch up on the past 17 months of Elledom...
Mom-bias notwithstanding, our daughter is the smartest, most inquisitive, wiggliest, funniest, sweetest, and most delightful toddler ever to grace this planet. She is constantly on the move (which makes for frustrating attempts to confine her to restaurant highchairs, shopping carts, etc)-- the last time she was still for 5 consecutive seconds I asked Jay if he thought she was having an absence seizure. Ha! She narrates life with an incessant stream of increasingly more coherent words and phrases. We are continuously amazed at her vocabularly that really seems to grow every day. When did you learn "purple"?! I asked when she jubilantly announced the shade of blueberry I had presented her with for breakfast. Some of her favorite words currently are:
Baby
Diaper
Potty
Bath
Burp (yep, burp)
Cook-in (referring to her play kitchen, I surmise a combination between kitchen and cooking)
Cheese
Nana
Apple
Dewwwww! (referring to Dad's dew, of course. When we offer the Dew to one of her Babies and ask if Baby can have Dew, she shakes her head adamantly and says Nooooooo! as if we are just being too silly)
Sausage (a personal favorite)
Milk
Water
Waffle (Va-val)
Cracker (with emphasis on the last syllable: Cra-KER
Yellow
Purple (not sure why she chooses the more difficult 2 syllable colors!)
More
Bubbles
Cup
Turtle
Giraffe (Raff)
Bear (Burr)
Dragon (Ga-gon)
Elmo
Up
Down (used much less often than Up, which generally means whichever position she is currently not in)
Out
Off (like up, typically means on or off, whichever is not currently the state of affairs)
Light
Hat
Shoes
Socks (another personal favorite, said with such convinction: Sssssssocks!)
Shirt (sometimes she will look down at her shirt and proclaim "Shirt!" as if she just discovered it)
Sit (unfortunately can sound a bit like a less socially appropriate word)
Hey (laced with southern drawl)
Hello (He-wo?, whenever she encounters a phone)
Bye/Bye-bye
Elbow
Animal (when she sees my iPhone which has an app of animal games)
Mama, Dada, Elle, Pawpaw, Nanny, Nana, Baba (attempted Grampa), Rah-rah (sarah at daycare), Nick (a friend at daycare)
Nap (universally accompanied by a passionate shaking of the head in protest)
Cheerios (Teeoos)
Brush (of the hair or tooth variety)
This (generic term for what she wants)
Ball
Book
Frog
Bottle
Mine
Bow

Do animal sounds count as words? If so, add Moo, Quack-quack (Cack-cack), Neigh, Baaaa, Oooh oooh (monkey-esque), Woof, and an un-spellable (albeit quite authentic) elephant sound

She can point to a host of body parts including: hair/head, eyes, nose, ears, mouth, teeth, hands, tummy, heart, toes

Enough extolling of milestones. And kudos to anyone who made it through this interminable post. Future posts will be much more concise, entertaining, and picture/video-containing. Promise.