During the time I was away from Sarah and Lexi, Lexi obviously changed. This is not surprising, given that, at this age, a child grows very rapidly. I left them in Nairobi on March 1 and did not see them for nine weeks and a few days.
At one point when I was alone, it had been several days between the times I had looked at a picture of Lexi. Toward the end of our separation, I had grown accustomed to not seeing Lexi every day. So this time when I looked at a picture of her, I saw her a bit in a new way, and I really saw a lot of myself in her face.
On May 7, when I met Sarah and Lexi at the Minneapolis airport, Lexi wasn’t afraid of me, but she wasn’t sure exactly who I was. She allowed me to pick her up, and she was neither scared nor delighted to see me. She was quite neutral. On the car ride away from the airport, she was playful with me, but not really in a familiar, father-child sort of way. It was within an hour after we arrived at Brian and Jen’s (Sarah’s brother) house that I came down the stairs into the basement where Lexi was sitting on an inflatable bed set up there. She saw me come down the stairs and yelled out "Daddy" with a big smile. I was delighted that she had remembered me, and it was okay that it took her a little while.
In the time we were separated, it seems that Lexi went from being a big baby – which is what she was when I left her – to being a little girl. She looked taller and more slender.
The biggest change in Lexi, however, is in her speech. Her vocabulary has grown so much. She is at the point where she is forming two- or three-word sentences – saying things that have a complete thought or an instruction. And she is repeating words and trying to remember them. This is taking little effort on her part, and she often thinks it's fun. She understands many more words and commands, even if some of them are in Kiswahili. She says and understands (and usually obeys) when others say “ka” (sit) or “kuja” (come).
The parts of her speech that have grown the most are her use of nouns. She must identify every thing she knows the word for, even if she sees it multiple times each day. Or she often repeats a word a few times when she spots an object she knows the word for. With one object in particular – water – she’s either very good at identifying its many forms or simply just doesn’t know the subtleties in differences and is very general. She’ll say “water” for wet ground, ice, rain, a puddle, a pond, a river, etc. A bed is still “la la” (Kiswahili for “sleep”).
I’m surprised at how many objects she knows the words for – moon, door, house, book, socks, shoes, jacket, airport, pocket, pillow, airplane, swing. She has learned and retained so many new words. Every trip outside the house – or even just staying in on an ordinary day – is a time for Lexi to exercise her mind and her vocabulary and practice the words she has learned, and she seems never to tire of pointing to and naming what an object is.
Before and after I left Nairobi, Sarah worked with Lexi on getting her to understand that I was leaving. Sarah told Lexi, “We took Daddy to the airport” a lot. This stuck with her. Certainly she calls me “Daddy” to my face, but every once in a while, Lexi will blurt out randomly, “Daddy airport,” even though she’s not at the airport, nor am I. Sarah thinks that when they took me to the airport that night in Nairobi that I left, Lexi believed I stayed there until they found me at another airport in Minneapolis nine weeks later.
Lexi’s next biggest growth in words she has learned are verbs. Even before I left Nairobi, Lexi had been saying "ka" for several weeks while sitting down on a stair or chair and asking you to come sit beside her. One of the funniest commands that Sarah told me she had started saying was, “Heat it,” but pronounced more as, “Eat it.” She said this when we handed her her sippy cup with milk. Jane had really waited on Lexi hand and foot and always heated Lexi’s milk, or perhaps it was just a holdover from the days when we prepared baby bottles of milk (it’s typical for an African person who is house help to follow instructions exactly until told otherwise – if we tell her to heat the milk, she will always do it, even when the child no longer needs it heated). So Lexi was handing back the sippy cup with milk and commanding, “(H)Eat it!” I did this a few times until I proposed to Sarah that we just stick it in the microwave for a few seconds but not turn the microwave on. This seems to have worked, and now we no longer have to heat the milk (she still asks this on occasion). Another well-worn phrase is “Cut it.” Lexi is good at identifying cutting, whether she sees me cutting something out of the newspaper with scissors or asking Sarah to cut up food that’s on her plate. Most of the time this command is used in the latter situation because Lexi is convinced that cutting up food into smaller bits will make it cooler. Lexi is good at understanding and obeying the command to "lie down" when we need to change her diaper on the floor of the bathroom (and she often says it back to us when we say it to her).
Another command that we're hearing from Lexi often is "sing." She knows that we now hold hands when we say grace before a meal, and now she is starting to request that we "sing" the grace all the time. But at other times, she asks us to sing. Upon her arrival back in the U.S., she was asking me to sing "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean" a lot (when she said, "Sing," I would ask her what, and she would say, "Bring back."). Sarah's mother must have sung this to her a lot in the two weeks that she was in Nairobi before she accompanied Sarah and Lexi back to the U.S. One song that Lexi heard a lot from Granny as well must have been "Are You Sleeping" because she can sing the opening notes to it herself now.
Lexi also regularly climbs up in a chair next to us while we're sitting at the table working on something or at the computer and asks, "Write...name." She likes to take the pen and scribble on the paper herself, and she even knows how to hold the pen properly (and holds it in her right hand).
Another favorite word is “more,” and Lexi is getting better at using this word – making it useful to her. She can ask for more milk or more crackers or more of whatever is on her plate at the moment just by saying “more.” But she also uses it as “a lot,” we guess, like when we’re at the airport and she says, “More airplane.”
She is also learning adjectives and can identify if something (like her hands or someone else's) are "clean" or "dirty."
However, Lexi is still learning about accruracy with words. One word she knows well is "poopy" and will say it sometimes, prompting us to ask if she has poopy in her diaper. Most of the time she doesn't, and we figure she's just practicing the word.
So, now that she has reached this new level with her speech, there is an additional area that an already active child is active in.
