Daniel Learning to Sign

With a quick, repetitive hand gestures, Daniel indicates he is hungry and ready to eat dinner.

During dinner, Daniel signs that he'd like more of a helping of pasta or fruit.

After only two months in day care, Daniel is learning sign language as a way to communicate when he needs basic needs met. It's something we tried teaching in Colombia, but were not very successful. I guess it's because we were overwhelmed with so many other things Daniel was trying to teach us at the same time!

Daniel is a quick learner and especially when food is involved. 

Shortly after I drop Daniel off at day care, the children enjoy a morning snack. Most mornings with backpack and jacket still on, Daniel begins gesturing for food as soon as he walks into the room.

His teachers look at him and say, "Yes Daniel, we know you want to eat."

I take his jacket off and watch him head toward the sink to wash his hands with the teacher. He waves good-bye, and off I go to work.

Claudia and I are so happy Daniel is learning to communicate with us more. He can tell us when he wants to drink or eat and a few other things.

I wish we could say that we taught him to sign and therefore were some sort of parental geniuses; but we can't. We pass all of those kudos to his day care teachers.

Restaurants, Races and Rendezvous

Let's go have dinner at Pei Wei, Applebee's or our favorite Mexican Restaurant dive.

It sounds like such a great idea at the time. All the ingredients to a good time are there. We're hungry. There's a restaurant offering to satisfy a particular craving we have. And so, we go inside.

But after a few visits to the restaurants, we have realized there is a pattern.

The waiter comes. We order. We wait. Daniel is entertained by something or another. Food comes. Daniel becomes bored. The race is on!

It's stressful eating when a child is screaming and forcing you to split your attention between meal, conversation and child. We end up shoveling food into our mouths, gulp the drink and bolt out the door as quickly as possible.

How can you enjoy the atmosphere when your child is decorating it with the entree? Makes you wonder, right?

We resigned ourselves to the fact that restaurants won't be a part of our lives for the next couple of years... at least not with Daniel.

While at work the other day, Claudia sent me a text.

"Are you available for lunch," she asked.

"Sure," I said.

"It's a date and without Daniel," she responded.

What a great idea! We could have our weekday rendezvous sneaking off to enjoy a lunch together at one of our favorite restaurants each week. My wife, in case you didn't know already, is brilliant!

This is a great solution to a seemingly silly problem, but in reality it is extremely important for us to maintain our relationship with each other. We rarely have time to enjoy an uninterrupted hour together now. So these lunches give us a chance to go on our "date" and continue the romance that made our relationship and friendship so great before parenthood.

So Claudia and I can continue enjoying our conversations at meal times, albeit during lunch; and Daniel can decorate our kitchen with his meal while we eat dinner together instead of destroying the decor in a restaurant.

Balance has been restored in the universe and life is good.

Independence Is a Messy Transition

Daniel appeared like a little man sitting in his miniature chair at the table and taking fist-fulls of fruit and shoving it into his mouth while surrounded by his new friends at day care.

One of the things Daniel's day care begins teaching all of the children upon arrival is how to become more independent. He has only been attending for about a week and already he wants to be more like the 18 month old children in his class.

"I'm losing my baby," Claudia exclaimed at one moment. 

Yeah, Daniel is starting to do a few more new things and we're realizing progress can be messy. It's cute to watch him be a little man eating at his miniature chair and table in day care. Frankly, we don't have to clean up the mess on the floor afterwards. At home, it's a different story.

Daniel is starting to use a spoon. By that, I mean he holds it in one hand while shoveling food into his mouth with the other. He pauses and looks at you. A grin creeps across his face. He knows how to use the spoon but prefers the feeling of soft banana squishing in his fist while eating.

Before day care, we would spoon feed Daniel the majority of his food. He would eat pieces of fruit by hand, but that was about all. Now he is eating by hand pasta, vegetables, fruit and whatever else we give him. Some days are cleaner than others.

In other developments, Daniel is starting to finally gain enough confidence to walk by himself - even if he is making it into a game.

He crawls out of his bedroom and into the nearby bathroom out of view. Then, he'll burst into the doorway and waddle his way toward you with a huge grin, laughing and arms pointed toward the ceiling. 

He totally knows what he is doing.

We receive daily reports from day care and they say he is starting to cruise around a lot more. That's definitely a welcome change for the staff, if not for Claudia and I who love to tote him around like an accessory. 

One day I observed him in his class room and everyone was standing in a line to go outside. Daniel was the last child in line. It was hard to see him because he was sitting down. The teachers opened the door and children walked outside. 

"Wait a minute. Let's see if he'll crawl outside, " one teacher said to another.

Daniel began crawling out the door, but about the time he got to the doorway he noticed something fascinating on the ground. 

I could see him pick it up in his hand and pull it close to his face to inspect the object of curiosity. The teacher, still holding the door patiently, just tilted her head to one side. The other teacher finally picked him up and took him outside.

Maybe Daniel's transition from baby to toddler won't be messy on all fronts. Some changes will be welcome, like sleeping the entire night; and others will make us remember with fondness when he was just a little bit more dependent on us, like when we're cleaning our kitchen floor after every meal.