It will be hard to keep the list to just a few, but I wanted to get some of my favorite Maya-isms down for the record.
1. Some of you may not know this, but Maya has a mild obsession with her belly button. It particularly manifests when she is sleepy or just plain needing some comfort. Every night when I lay her down she goes straight for it. I foolishly laid her down for a nap the other day with a onesie outfit on. Five minutes later I noticed she still wasn't asleep and was in there talking to herself. Over the next few minutes she grew increasingly upset, eventually crying and wailing. I went in and tried to calm her down and put her back to sleep. Then the thought occured to me, "She doesn't have belly button access!" We quickly changed her clothes and she went to sleep almost immediately.
2. Greetings. Maya is very into saying "hi" and "bye" as well as waving and blowing kisses to just about anything that moves. We often go on walks to see our neighbor's dogs and the fish in the pond down the street. She, without fail, always greets the dogs and the fish with hi's, bye's and waves. She does this with other kids, too. She seems to be puzzled when others don't recriprocate with a "hi" and often will repeatedly say hi until she gets some sort of an acknowledgement from them.
3. The intensity with which she does her animal sounds. This has been more a recent thing. Lately when doing the sheep and horse sound she seems to take a big breath and let out one continuous "baa" or "neigh" until she has no breath left. It's quite comical. But she seems to take this animal noises thing very seriously.
4. She's high-tech. She is quite the wiz on my iPhone. She has figured out how to unlock it and last week even sent a friend of mine a text message that read "moo". No joke. I had a lot of explaining to do.
5. The kid has got some serious flexibility! She can go from sitting on her bottom, legs stretched out in front, to a split, to her legs behind her (belly to the floor) all in one fail swoop. My gut is she's gonna be a dancer. We'll see.
6. She is obsessed with rice. She can now say "rice" and has been asking for it often. She also has a revived fondness for green peas. (This was one of the only foods I could get her to eat when she started eating solids. Then she backed off for a while but has rediscovered how much she loves them). I find this quite random and amusing.
7. She is quite the laugher. If you really want to get her going, all you need is a trip to Olivia Klein's house. Oh man, Olivia can get Maya laughing like no one else I've seen. I can almost always count on seeing Maya reach gut-level laughter level when they are together. (She will sometimes throw her head back in mid-laugh which is really funny, too). I'm gonna try and keep my video camera on me more when we go over there to try and capture it on film.
By no means an exhaustive list of my favorite Maya-isms but wanted to get a few down :)
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| Evidence of her obsession |
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| I wasn't even trying to capture more evidence. I realized later she was touching her belly button here, too :) |
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| Look at that smile! |
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| Goodnight Moon with Daddy |
