bodhi tree swaying

Another picture of Maia at Aryaloka. She loves Buddha statues and likes to do the anjali mudra in front of them.

“War ” is putting it a bit strongly, but I’ve been aware that Maia has been vacillating between saying words with a Scottish or a north-eastern US accent, emulating either myself or, well, just about everyone else she knows, including her mother. The main thing I notice is the long A in words like “hand” and in the name “Pam” (the name of a woman who works in a local store). To me those are straightforward A sounds (I don’t have the phonetic vocabulary to discuss this properly), although to some Americans when I say the name “Dan” it sounds like “Don.”

But in a northeastern accent those A’s are diphthongs, which sound to me like “HAY-und” (hand), “PAY-um” (Pam), and “DAY-yun” (Dan). At the moment Maia’s more often using the NE accent, although sometimes she’ll alternate between that and a Scottish way of saying things as if she’s playing …

Shrijnana and I were wondering how Maia’s linguistic development compared with the average. I looked at a few websites and they all said things like, “A typical 22-month-old’s vocabulary consists of about 20 words, and most toddlers can also combine a couple of words to ask questions or make statements.”

We haven’t counted Maia’s active vocabulary, but it includes words like head, teeth, foot, toe, socks, shoes, piano, motorbike, airplane, car, cat, dog, door, outside, diaper, milk, bottle, tea, coffee, eat, toy, water, river, tree, sky, moon, blue, light, apple sauce, home, cup, wall, cheerios, peach, upstairs, stairs, down, up, picture, iPod, phone, keys, paper, come on, coming, slide, sand, bath, poop, pee, change, pretty, book, banana, dammit (a rather unfortunate one, that), spoon, fan, walk, jump, turn, yes, no, hi, hello, belly, knee, etc, etc , etc. I’d guess she knows well over a hundred …

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.

Another shot of Maia’s great great great grandfather, Leslie Lickley. Born 1840. Died 1910.

This is my great great grandmother, Mary Lickley (née Robertson). She was married to Leslie Lickley.

I believe she was born 1841 and died 1907. Married 1859.

My Great Great Grandfather Peter Wallace (my father’s mother’s father’s father). Born 1827. This is a very primitive photograph, and much faded. This scan brings out pretty much all the retrievable information.

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

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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?
Marry me, 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 …

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% …