How Beautiful Yesterday Is

It’s been too long since my last entry, and too much has happened. As I sit down to type this out, I’m reflecting on the past few months, trying my best to remember all the strange, wonderful and humbling achievements made by Amelie. But before I attempt to list a few, I think it’s worth while mentioning the past few weeks. A little after the Easter holidays I was struck down with a chest infection. It was a secondary infection from a head cold I had just before Easter. For those of you unaware of the affects of a chest infection, rest assure it’s not pleasant. The most debilitating part of it all is the lack of energy you have. All you want to do is sleep, but sadly, sleep was in short supply. Around the same time Carla was rushed into hospital to have an operation on a bulging disc in her spine. It was all very quick, and terrifying, but fortunately the operation went well with the only lasting damage being a five inch scar at the base of her back. For obvious reasons, she was instructed not to lift anything, which meant my duty of care to Amelie was ramped up. To top things off, Amelie is only in nursery term time only, which means when Carla is off, we pull Amelie out of nursery and she takes care of her. And yes, it was the Easter holidays, which meant Amelie was at home with a father coughing and spluttering every ten seconds, and a mum who could do little but lie down and rest (and who was also getting over a cold). The poor girl must have been bored to death. And although we tried to interact with her the best we could, her thirst for stimulation, combined with her incalculable inquisitiveness, left us both knackered. For this, I apologise Amelie, and hope one day you’ll understand that while our bodies and enthusiasm had waned under the affects of our recovery, our hearts were all yours.

So, what’s new with Amelie? Below is the most comprehensive list of achievements both I and Carla could recall. And while I’m sure there have been more developments, and changes, the below strike us as the most significant, and as always, the most endearing:

Vocabulary – Amie’s inventory has increased two fold. She’s got the “Bs” master now, exclaiming, “ball” and “bye” whenever the moment suits. She also has a wonderful way of saying, “hello”; she’ll pick up her V-Tec telephone, place it to her ear (the opposite way around of course), and say, “Harrow”. Well, we assume she’d saying hello, but she could just want to visit the town near Middlesex. She can also say yes and no, but favours the latter over the former. Carla is trying her best to teach her say, “quack”, but it sounds more like a sneeze, which is ironic because I was teaching Amelie to sneeze and it came out sounding like a quack.

Cognitive Recollection – sounds impressive, but really it’s just matching shapes with words. That said, Amelie has mastered quite a few now. I think I’ve already mentioned the house with the shapes cut out. Well, we now place the corresponding shapes on the floor, and ask Amelie to pick out each one. We started out quite basic: circle, square, triangle. We then moved onto to more complex shapes, star, heart and pentagon. My parents came over one day and we showed them how well Amelie was doing with this, and when I asked Amelie, “where’s the pentagon?” and she pointed to it, my father interjected with, “Even I don’t know what a pentagon is?!” There are also letters and numbers that make up the shapes. If knowing which shapes wasn’t impressive enough, Amelie can actually phonetically read out both A and B.

Reading/Testing: Story time has become a moment of wonder, and a test of patience. Amelie loves books. She especially loves looking at books with animals in them. She can stare at farmyard animals till the, erm... cows come home. My understanding of my role in her develop with books is to read them aloud, and point at the different animals, which I have done. But it’s now got to the point where Amelie doesn’t want me to read the story, but instead, test her on which page each animal lives. Ask her where the cow is, and she’ll open the book, thumb through the pages, and stop at the relevant page. I’ll clap, and she replies with, “Gen..Gen...Gen...” (her way of saying, “again”). Over the past month or so this has developed into asking her where other things are on the pages, like the sun, and the sea, and the grass. After a few uncertainties, she was pointing away at the relevant drawing and beckoning us on to test her more. Carla and I, believing she was getting a little too cocky, threw out the challenge of pointing out objects in our living room. Much to our amazement, she got almost all the things we asked her to find. And while we were reeling in admiration, Amelie was looking at us both saying, “gen... gen... gen...”

Confidence – It’s grown. She now allows immediate members of the family a kiss and a hug, something both Carla and I were only permitted to do a couple of months ago.

Motor Skills – Amelie can now climb all the stairs unaided, and mount and dismount various steps around the house. She also has a rocking horse, which is shaped like a cow. It was bought for her by my parents at Christmas, but until recently, Amelie was unable to climb on its back without help. That’s no problem now. She can kick a ball too, run at a fair speed (well, I say run, but really it’s more a trot), and dances like a drunk Oliver Reed on Aspel.

Preferences – In the Night Garden is the big thing for Amelie at the moment. She can’t get enough of Igglepiggle, Makka Pakka and Upsy Daisy. Carla’s mum bought her a book based on the show, which Amelie has us read over and over. She still has a soft spot for Deal or No Deal, but prefers Countdown over the two (her favourite adverts seems to be the Go Compare with the Tenor, and Direct Line with the animated phone and computer mouse voiced by Paul Merton and Stephen Fry). A few other favourite shows are Teletubbies, Tweenies and Chuggington (the latter is one of Carla’s too).

Sleep – it’s getting better. Providing she isn’t suffering with the snuffles, Amelie is more than happy to go down at night and not awake until 6-7am. She’s also accepted the cot during the day too, which has saved us a small fortune in petrol.

All in all, she’d doing well. We’ve had a few issues with her skin. Her eczema flared up quite bad on her back, which meant numerous trips to the doctors and a cocktail of different creams, but fortunately, things seem to be dying down now. But it seems no matter how much you prepare yourself for what the next day will bring, when you have a child, you are never without a deepening sense of loss. Their unnatural gift of rendering tomorrow a place of expected wonderment and hope, sadly casts yesterday in a shadow of wistful reflection. Even now, just 16 months in, Carla and I are looking back on the times when Amelie was a baby, remembering her little peculiarities with bloated hearts and wide grins. She is changing so damn quick that I want to pull back the lever of time and grind the world around us to a halt. For selfish reasons, I never want to forget how beautiful yesterday is.