almost two and a half!

It's been a good couple of months since I've written anything about lil Umie's development into humanhood. It's all J.K. Rowlings fault, as I devoured her entire series in this span of time. Now that I've finished, I can finally be a productive human being.

Uma will be two and a half in a few days. She looks four and acts like she's going on 13. Our neighbor called Uma "large and in charge" when she was only a few weeks old, and she was spot on. I've had to hold back from starting to say the mantra my Mom said to me my entire childhood, "Because I'm the Mom!". She is already bossing me around and telling me what to do. Sometimes this is funny and cute, sometimes not. Half of the time she acts like a darling toddler, the other half she is a bossy African- American grandmother.

She has so many little sayings these days. Six weeks ago she started trying to make her sentence structure a bit more complex by putting the word "because" in the middle and then basically repeating herself. days were filled with phrases such as "I really need that lemonade because I need that lemonade" or "I need to go to the park because I need to go the park". Then she looks at you with her eyebrows fixed and lips all a pucker. As the weeks have passed, she is now becoming a bit more logical with her use of 'because" but the take home message is usually consistent with "I want that because I want it". Who can blame her?

Other charming phrases she uses constantly:
1. "I was just doing something" (useful in many situations)
2. "Alright, now" (employed both sweetly and demandingly)
3. "Be calm." (whenever she wants someone to be quiet, used with large sweeping gestures)
4. "Do you hear me??" (used menacingly)
5. "Mama, you are not going to noga(yoga)!" (going to yoga means that I'm going to go someplace w/o her. Used anytime she sees me put more than two minutes into my appearance, wear earrings, etc.)

There's more, but those are the ones that are in the most vogue at the time of writing. She is fully conversational now. She always asks "Remember..." and pulls something funny out of her memory. She still sings all day long, the whole day like a campy musical aria.

Uma delights now in wearing her "party dress" which is any dress that is lacy or flowing. She now has a vague concept of princess, but truth is she is much more of a diva. The good news is that we just passed out of the incredibly irritating phase where she refused to wear almost any of her clothes. She insisted on wearing one of two outfits for over a month(including sleeping), but now she's open to wearing new things again-thank goddess.

We've had an awesome summer so far. We've had a tons of visitors-my dad and then friends from exotic locations such as Maui, Philadelphia, Amsterdam, and Brooklyn. We've been on countless picnics, gone to the beach three times, went to the Oregon Country Faire, and we just returned from 3 days at delightful Breitenbush- a hot springs retreat center nestled n the forest. It was at Breitenbush that I was finally able to DROP HER OFF with some fantastic mamas and call it 'kid camp". This may not sound like a big deal, but Uma has not historically been a "drop-off" kind of child. It was so amazing and adorable how she took to it. She loved it and felt really good about herself for going as well.
Another first this month was her first haircut- at a salon! No pics to prove it but she was lovely.

Last but not least, Uma is pretty much potty-trained! It's been a very interesting month of huge successes and plenty of smelly laundry, but she's doing a great job. She looks so damn cute in her underwear.