All about my head

I'm a little ashamed that we've been here for over a year, and yet we've just now gotten our eyes checked and made dentist appointments. What can I say? Last year was overwhelming and we didn't have a lot of money to spare on glasses or dental treatments that exceeded our dental coverage.

But I was very early in getting our taxes done and e-filed, so our return has been in our bank account since late February, just waiting for extravagant medical expenses. We went and ordered our glasses tonight, which were both overdue. My glasses are on their second pair of ear stems, and my experience from the first pair is that they're good for about two years, just about exactly the age the second pair are now. The sunglasses that attach through cunning magnets at the temples broke a while back and I miss them dreadfully. Meanwhile, B put his glasses down on the bed Monday and I, um, sat on them, snapping the stems clean off. Clearly those were not frames long for this world, if they broke that comprehensively, given that they're the type that are supposed to flex to prevent just such an occurrence.

Sadly, glasses with cunning magnets in the temples for attaching sunglasses have gone out of fashion and the selection was dreadful. I'm still trying to decide how much I like the pair I chose, which were the only remotely acceptable pair. Intriguingly, putting them on convinced me for the first time that sqare lenses really suit me. I think the problem is that in the past, all of the square lenses I've seen have in fact been rectangular because they were teeny-tiny glasses lacking in the verticality department. I despise teeny-tiny glasses and they definitely don't look good on me. So the shape of the new glasses is really good. The thing that has me hesitating is the color, which is much darker than I normally go, a slatish-silver color instead of my normal brown-gold. I really can't decide if they're not the best color for me or if I'm just not used to them. They've grown on me enough that I decided to go for them instead of taking the time to go someplace else.

Speaking of teeny-tiny glasses, I'm happy to report that the trend of shrinking glasses frames has finally halted before people were forced to peer through microscopic lenses perched on the ends of their noses. The size seems to have normalized and even gone up a bit, so I didn't have much trouble finding glasses of an acceptable size. However, the new fashion seems to be plastic frames horrifying reminiscent every pair of glasses I wore in the 80s. If I had wanted, I could have walked out of there looking like I did in 8th grade, an appalling prospect at best. I suppose I'll just have to hope that eventually the style will swing back to moderately sized wire rims with sunglasses attached by cunning magnets.

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More toileting success today! And I'm just barely brave enough to say that K hasn't had a wakeup of more than fifteen minutes in the middle of the night any day this week. She's typically been falling asleep around 9:30-10, but she's been playing happily and quietly in her room until then. It's amazing how much more I like my child when she lets me sleep.

What's amazing me is how social she is these days. When she sees kids on the playground or in the library or bookstore, she greets them cheerfully and then goes and plays with them. It used to be (like, last month) that I needed to help facilitate all of her interactions and be on hand to help her as she played. Now, she runs off with other kids and I hardly know what to do with myself. I'm simulataneously amazed at this kid who's suddenly living with me and feeling melancholy at my obsolescence.

We've had a huge language leap. It's not just that she's talking more, although she is. But she's suddenly so much more comprehensible. Strangers can understand her now. She's now confident enough in her language skills to talk to strangers. She's started talking on the phone too. Up to this point, her reaction to having a grandparent talk to her over the phone is to look at the phone with a delighted grin, but not really say anything (despite the fact that some of the first imaginative play she engaged in at 10 months was with the phone and it's been a perennial favorite toy which she uses entirely correctly when she's playing with it). But this Sunday, she told my mother about her dinosaurs, admittedly from about six inches away from the receiver because she had to look at the phone with a delighted grin. She also waved good-bye to my mother. Last week, she was holding something up to show her other grandmother over the phone. Clearly we have some work to do on the concept, but it's huge progress.

She's running and jumping, talking and using the toilet. I'm working my way through a gigantic preschool application. Where did my baby go?