Yesterday I looked after Maia all day (she’s my 21-month old daughter). This is the start of a new life pattern where I work four days each week and have a three-day weekend. Mondays I take care of Maia. Shrijnana’s taking Fridays off, so we both have three day weekends and Maia has four days at home and three at daycare. Big changes all around.

Spending yesterday with her was delightful. Having a child is like being in love, but without the complications. We had a lot of fun just hanging out, and we did some work together, selecting photos for a Shutterfly book documenting her second year. this’ll make a great pressie for the family.

This was taken a month ago, during some unseasonably warm weather. Maia loved her first experience of the beach.

My adoption agency sent a link the other day to this huge photoset of images of Ethiopian children, adoption agency staff, and adoptive families.

At the risk of seeming to be obsessed with Obama, while looking for transcripts online I came across one where he mentioned that his given name, Barack, means “blessing” in Arabic.

I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to notice this, but that’s my daughter’s name as well. Maia’s birth name is “Bereket,” which also means “blessing” (in Amharic) as well as “abundance” or “gift.”

In December I used some money I got from my family as a gift to participate in the National Geographic “Genographic” project. I sent off a swab of my cheek cells to have my Y chromosome tested. I just got the results back the other day. No big surprises — I’m a mamber of Haplogroup R1b, which is the most common haplogroup in Scotland (where I’m from).

But what is more interesting is that my family’s journey begins, as does that of all human beings alive on the planet today, in or around Ethiopia, where last spring my wife and I adopted Maia. So over the last 60,000 years or so my family has migrated in a large loop from Ethiopia, up to Scotland, and in my case over to the US. And then we’ve headed back to Ethiopia to adopt. I guess that means Maia took a shortcut!

If there is such a person as a “baby whisperer,” it is the pediatrician Dr. Harvey Karp, whose uncanny ability to quiet crying babies became the best-selling book “The Happiest Baby on the Block.”

That seemed like the start of a very promising article in the New York Times today, but I was both reassured and a little disappointed by not really learning much new.

Dr. Karp’s method for dealing with an upset toddler is to hold them tight, do lots of rocking, and to use short, repetitive sentences while reflecting the child’s emotions in your voice and expressions. All of that has seemed intuitively obvious to me ever since we adopted Maia.

The other thing I’d add is to keep calm and not see crying as a sign of failure. Often when Maia needs to sleep she starts thrashing in my arms and crying, and it’s tempting at that point to think I’m doing something wrong and give up. But most often she’ll calm right down after a few seconds and start cooing and laughing, and then fall asleep.

The one thing that I did pick up on from the article that was particularly reassuring was the advice to reflect back what the toddler is saying:

For instance, a toddler throwing a tantrum over a cookie might wail, “I want it. I want it. I want cookie now.”

Often, a parent will adopt a soothing tone saying, “No, honey, you have to wait until after dinner for a cookie.”

Such a response will, almost certainly, make matters worse. “It’s loving, logical and reasonable,” notes Dr. Karp. “And it’s infuriating to a toddler. Now they have to say it over harder and louder to get you to understand.”

Dr. Karp adopts a soothing, childlike voice to demonstrate how to respond to the toddler’s cookie demands.

“You want. You want. You want cookie. You say, ‘Cookie, now. Cookie now.’ “

Maia doesn’t actually talk yet, but I’ve intuitively felt that the best thing to do when she’s upset is to voice what’s going on with her. So if she’s in pain I might say, “I know honey. It’s sore, isn’t it?”

The basic principle I adopt (and that Dr. Karp seems to be using) is to empathize. That doesn’t necessarily mean gushing, because Maia will often look to us for cues as to how to act. So if she falls and I’m sure it’s a mild spill I won’t treat it like a disaster. I know she’s trying to figure out by watching me whether she should be worried or not, and I’m quite comfortable either reassuring her — “You’re fine, honey” — or even turning the fall into a game by applauding her — “Good one, Maia!”

I love the challenge of parenting! I love letting my intuition tell me what’s best to do in any given situation, like suddenly finding that I’m patting her back when she’s woken in the middle of the night a bit upset, with my hand making a lub-dub rhythm, like a beating heart, or finding just the right way to rock her that encourages her to blink (if she starts blinking her eyes will soon start to stay closed), or finding a way to distract her attention is she’s decided to walk into the kitchen while Shrijnana’s putting something in the oven. There can be a kind of Zen involved, where you just open up, connect with the child, and let the appropriate behavior emerge.

So if you read my post of a few days ago regarding my precocious wee one, you may have thought it was a fluke that she found her favorite CD on the shelf and that she tried to hook up my USB headset so that I could Skype my parents, but she did it again this morning. Both things.

She picked out her favorite Aimee Mann CD and handed it to my wife.

And she started patting my laptop excitedly this morning after breakfast, and when I went over to her she started starting at the place where I keep the USB headset. When I went over and got the headset she bounced up and down with excitement. So we talked to her Nana and Grandad once again this week.

She’s quite fascinated by technology. She loves picking up my iPod and one of her favorite things to play with is a Firewire cable. She even knows what a Firewire cable is by name! And she’ll drape it over her head and pretend it’s headphones.

She’s also recognizing a lot of what Shrijnana and I say, so we’re in the faintly ridiculous situation of having to saying things like. “I think I’ll S-K-Y-P-E my P-A-R-E-N-T-S later” in order to stop her from getting too excited. I tell you, kids nowadays!

Maia did two very smart and cute things this morning.

First, she often asks (in sign language) to hear music in the morning. This morning I asked her if she wanted to hear anything but she was a bit noncommittal. Nevertheless I put on the Cocteau Twins’ Heaven or Las Vegas, which she loves. But she put up a protest and then toddled over to the CD shelves and pulled out Aimee Mann’s Bachelor Number 2 CD. That’s one of the other CDs she really likes and she was able to identify it by the spine and haul it off the shelf. My CDs are shelved alphabetically. She’s not quite 15 months old.

Second, she saw me pick up my laptop this morning and got very excited. She got hold of my USB headset and tried to plug it in — she was wanting me to Skype my parents, who she gets to see twice a week or so when we have a video call. Did I mention she’s still only 14 months old?

I suspect it won’t be long until she’s guessed my password and figured out how to call my parents without my help!

When my parents were visiting in October they sang a nice wee song to Maia. It went:

Oh, Maia Sering, I love you.
Tell me Maia Sering do you love me too?
I’ll marry you my darling,
I’ll die if you say no,
And I will come and kiss you, Maia Sering, oh.

There’s a nice tune that goes with it — rather old-fashioned but very sweet. I sing Maia to sleep with it all the time. Apparently my mum and dad sang it to me when I was small, but I don’t remember that at all.

Anyway, I’d heard them singing this years ago to my niece, with the name changed, naturally (”Oh, Jessie Barrie…”), and I was curious about the origins of the song. I’d assumed it was some old song from the 1940’s or earlier but I’d tried finding it on Google without success. So I asked my parents and my mother was pretty sure that this was a family song, and she thought that possibly my grandmother had made it up. So that was a surprise, because I’d never thought of my family as having a creative streak. Good for you, Marjory Tragham!

Also, I swear that I woke up well before dawn this morning and heard Maia “singing” the song! She’s only 14 months so the lyrics were composed entirely of “da-da-da,” and she wasn’t too tuneful, but she did the first two lines in perfect rhythm. Of course I’m not the sharpest crayon in the art-supplies box at 2 AM, so I may have been hallucinating, but I’m sticking to my story for now.

If anyone else is familiar with that song, or even one similar to it, could you please let me know?

I was talking the other day about how Maia is signing and how she’d been repeatedly using a sign that neither Shrijnana nor I could figure out. She’s made up signs for “cheerios” (which she’s addicted to — that’s a modification of the sign for “more”) and “music” (that’s kind of sad — she waggles one arm in what is evidently an imitation of her father dancing).

Anyway, so we thought she’d made up yet another sign, but my clever wife figured out that she had been trying to tell us that she wanted a bath! (She was doing the sign, but in a modified way). Poor Maia must have been so frustrated wanting to play in the bath but not being able to get her dense parents to understand her.

Incidentally, neither of us is a signer. We’ve learned what little we know from The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Baby Sign Language. I don’t know how anyone can bring up a baby without sign language. How else could a one-year-old tell you she wanted something as specific as music, or cheerios, or a bath?

Maia (who just turned 14 months) is understanding a remarkable amount of what we say. She can pick up any of her books when we name them, she can point to her ears, nose, tongue, teeth, belly, toes, foot, etc.

But the most surprising things are the words we didn’t teach her. One of her favorite toys is a firewire cable. It’s not too surprising that it turned out she could pick out the firewire cable when asked. But the other day when I mentioned “headphones” she draped the firewire cable over her head, imitating a pair or headphones! And today I discovered that she knows what a dishwasher is.

She’s been making up signs for things as well, so she also does a lot of talking. She made up a sign for “cheerios” (which she loves) and a sing that means both “music” and “dance.” Today she made up another sign but I couldn’t figure out what it meant.

Speaking of dishwashers, we ran a load the other night, only to discover this morning that Maia had put one of my books in there! A book on meditation, of course.

It’s only when you have a curious toddler that you start to realize the fatal significance of all the really important keys on a computer keyboard being closest to the edge — when she grabs the computer with her inquisitive little fingers all kinds of interesting things happen, from windows suddenly vanishing, text changing size, and (sometimes) the whole computer shutting down.

A laptop designed for parents would have all those functional keys right in the middle of the keyboard! Or maybe they should be hidden safely away under some kind of locked cover. Not very practical of course! I guess toddlers and laptops just don’t really mix.

The New York Times has been running an fascinating series of first-person accounts of adoption from the point of view of adoptive parents and adopted children (so far nothing from people who have put their children up for adoption). The series is called “Relative Choices.” This is of great interest to me because my one-year-old daughter, Maia, is adopted from Ethiopia.

Adam Wolfington writes about being a black child in a white family. He writes with a sense of vulnerability and describes the confused questions (”How come that white lady’s your mother?”) and taunting he has received from other children, and describes also his doubts about his own self-worth. He was given up for adoption by his (I assume) American mother before he has even born, and yet he still wonders if she rejected him because there was something wrong with him. His mother sounds wonderfully supportive and reassuring, however. I admit to nervousness about the possibility of my child encountering teasing and racism.

Hollee McGinnis was adopted from Korea and writes about how she came to accept that she was both Korean and American after many years of struggling to decide which was her “true” identity. How real a sense of being Ethiopian can we instill in Maia? She’s been adopted into a Scottish-Italian-American family but is Ethiopian by birth. That’s a lot of identities to play with! “Hi, I’m Scottish-Italian-African-American”?

Tama Janowitz writes about being questioned in the street (it’s really amazing how free people feel to ask personal questions when you’re with a child of a different race), but mainly about the resentment her daughter has for her. Tama, however, considers resentment to be a normal part of a parent-child relationship and not the product necessarily of the adoption. The adoption, in her view, is just the thing that the resentment fixes on to. I find myself wondering if Maia will resent having been taken from Ethiopia?

Sumeia (beautiful name!) Williams was lied to by her American father, who first claimed that he’d found her in an orphanage and decided to bring her home, then said he was her biological father (by way of a bigamous marriage in Vietnam), and then reverted once more to the orphanage story. He sounds like a real piece of work, and Sumeia still has no idea of what the truth is. At least we’re going to be completely honest with Maia about her story. We have as many photographs and as much information about her background as possible and hope to find out more. No one should have to face that kind of uncertainty.

Dr. Jane Aronson wrote a story that disturbed me. She was given a video of Ethiopian children who were offering themselves up for adoption. I found it rather disgusting that children should be put in that position and that a westerner would in effect do some “tele-shopping” for a child. The Ethiopian government doesn’t allow children in orphanages to have their photographs or video used in this way, and my own adoption agency was very clear about the need to keep images of children waiting to be adopted private. After reading that part of Aronson’s story I confess I couldn’t bring myself to read the rest. I hope it had a happy ending.

Huong Sutliff wrote at the age of 13 or being adopted at age 6, and conveys the anxiety, hope, and relief of a child of that age as she meets her adoptive parents for the first time.

Katy Robinson was adopted from Korea and grew up in a Salt Lake City family where there was a sense it was disloyal for her to have an interest in her Korean roots. She describes this attitude as being her own, but it’s obvious that the was but an internalized version of her adoptive family’s repression (Salt Lake City? Repression? Who knew?). After 20 years she decided she had to find out more about her roots and began to quiz her adopted mother. Then armed only with her Korean name and the date of her adoption she headed to Korea where she found her father, with whom she’s still in touch. She also seems very appreciative of her adoptive mother, despite the family’s attempts to efface her personal history. I admire that Katy hasn’t ended up resentful of her mother.

I came close to tears reading Jeff Gammage’s story of trying to trace the scant details of his Chinese daughter’s origins. While we know Maia’s birth-parents’ names and have met members of her family (even sat in the grass hut where she was born) Chinese baby girls are generally simply abandoned in public places. There’s therefore no family information, often not even a name. But Jeff discovered the name of the man who had found Zhao Gu in the street and made sure she was looked after, and managed, with the aid of a Chinese journalism student, to phone him. That’s not much in the way of background on your child — a conversation with the man who found her abandoned on the street — but if that’s all you have to go on then it’s incredibly important. That’s why I found my eyes welling with tears.

Three days ago Maia’s first tooth began to appear on the bottom right. I’d love to show you a picture but I don’t have one! She really doesn’t like it when I try to push her lip away so that I can get a look, and her tongue pushes forwards, her arms flail, and she turns her head away. I keep trying, she keeps squirming, and fortunately she keeps forgiving me.

I did manage to get a look the other day when she was asleep and at the moment there’s not much to see — just a thin line of enamel — but it’s very distinct to the touch.

She’s not showing any signs of discomfort with it. That all happened a few months back when she was chewing anything she could get hold of and producing copious quantities of drool. For some reason that more or less stopped several weeks back, and then the tooth appeared!

She’s also pulling herself up to a standing position.

She’s almost exactly 10 1/2 months old.

Gary Cross, a professor of history at Pennsylvania State University, and the author of “Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood” looks at Mattel’s recall of China-made toys in today’s New York Times and argues that it may be time to “rethink the decision to allow the unrestricted advertising and cartoon promotion of toy lines that has produced year-round marketing and piles of plastic toys, bought and soon discarded.”

“After all,” he says, “we ought to be just as concerned about the impact of character licensing and toy advertising on our children’s psyche as we are on protecting them from ingesting leaded paint and magnets.”

He gives an interesting overview of the evolution of the toy industry, showing how the number of toys based on licensed characters (easily promoted in film and in TV programs that are essentially extended ads) shot from 10% in 1980 to 60% in 1987. That’s an astonishing rise in a short space of time, and as a result we now have toddlers being fully immersed in consumerism. This is an unprecedented level of indoctrination — and one that goes largely ignored.

The commercial pressure of course mainl comes from TV, which makes me doubly glad that we only watch DVDs in our household.

I just got a laugh from my wife by using the above line. No, we don’t have some kind of non-traditional family framework, it’s just that Maia so far only knows one word, and it’s “dada,” which she uses indiscriminately for all adults. As her real dada I still get a thrill whenever she calls me that, and it doesn’t seem to dampen my adoration of her when Shrijnana walks into the room to be greeted with an enthusiastic set of dadas. Actually, Maia often calls me “hada,” which really gets the oxytocin flowing..

Dada is in fact her all-purpose word. She says what sound like whole sentences, which go like this: “dadada dada dadadada dadadada da dada da dadadada.”

Maia has also just learned how to push herself up to sitting, just a few days after she passed the 10 month stage. Both her dadas are very proud!

On Aug 3 Maia said the word “dada.” She’d been babbling for months and her experiments in phonics had often included “dada” (which she said for the first time on Fathers’ Day, bless her) but this time she was really excited. She knew, this time, that it was a word. She also seemed to know that the word applied to me. When I tapped my chest and said “who’s this?” she’d say “dada.” When Shrijnana asked the same question she just got a stare. That, plus her obvious excitement, convinced me that she was finally making a word, and not just a noise.

Sometimes she even says “Hi, Dada” (or “hada”).

I’ve heard her say “mama” three times. In each case she’d seemed a bit distressed and the word just came out. I don’t think she can say “mama” deliberately, but that she knows the word and that under stress the word bypasses her conscious control and just erupts. In the past she’s even said words as complex as “hello” before (quite distinctly) but again those seem just to slip out, and she hasn’t seemed to be able to do it at will, although I think that might be changing.

Plus, just a couple of days before all this Maia started rolling with new deliberation. She’d been flipping herself from tummy to back for months and from back to tummy for weeks, but then she discovered that she could turn this into a method of locomotion, and she started steering herself across the length of (and all around) the livingroom. She’s unstoppable! Since she’s also at the chewing stage we’re having to babyproof by moving things out of reach.

All in all it’s been an exciting week. More baby news (and recipes) can be found over at my wife’s blog, Conscious Mom.

As well as the sign for “milk,” Maia now knows the one for “change.” So when she starts to get a bit squirmy and whiny she can now let me know whether she wants to be changed or whether she wants milk (that one works for when she wants to sleep as well, because she generally nods off to an ounce or two of formula).

She can’t actually make any of the signs yet, but she does respond to them with big smiles and excited, waving arms, so it’s easy to work out what she wants. The only time this doesn’t work is if she’s very hungry and gets herself into a state. When she’s crying she just doesn’t respond to the signs. It’s like she’s saying “Stop the stupid hand-gestures and get me some milk, dammit!” (She picked up the bad language from me).

I can’t tell you how much easier this makes taking care of her. There’s much less guesswork involved, and once she can actually make the signs herself it’s going to get easier still.

She’s showing signs of understanding “mommy” and “daddy” and since she’s teething we now have an opportunity to work on “pain.”

And in terms of vocal communication, Shrijnana and Maia came back from a walk today and I heard a loud “Hi!” I thought for a split second that it was Shrijnana speaking to me, but it was Maia. She managed a few sounds afterwards that sounded like she might be trying to say “hi” again, but I’m still left wondering if it was just a fluke.

The quality of her vocalizations is definitely changing, however. They’re sounding more word-like, somehow. I can’t put my finger on it.

For more on Buddhist parenthood, you might want to check out my wife’s new blog, Conscious Mom.

Maia’s been surprising us with her communication skills. No, she’s not quite talking yet, although she babbles like crazy and from time to time we could swear that she’s said words like “hello,” “yeah” (in response to questions), and even the other day a “dada.” No, it’s her comprehension skills that have impressed us.

Since we adopted her just over two months ago we’ve been demonstrating a few basic words in sign language — mommy, daddy, milk, change — and in the last couple of days she’s firmly grasped the meaning of “milk.”

When she’s getting a bit whiny and we make the sign for “milk” she now instantly breaks into smiles and wriggles with pleasure. I’m not sure whether she’s happier because she knows food’s on the way or because finally her mom and dad have shown signs of understanding her and no longer have to resort to trial and error in order to divine her needs!

At the same time as this she’s become much more relaxed about food and is happy to wait while we prepare her bottle. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.