These days Maya is a bit of a Moody McMoodypants. When I go to retrieve her from her crib every morning, I never know what’s in store for us that day. Sometimes, as was the case today, she starts out happy and goofy and high-spirited and more or less independent, then we’ll hit a crying spell late morning (the cause of which might be utterly unknown to me), then she’ll recover and do fine for another several hours, then she’ll get mad during her evening bath and wail away plaintively until bottle time with Daddy. Other days, Maya is happy-go-lucky from sunup to sundown, tra-la-la, fiddle-dee-dee.

And then there are the Chock Full O’ Tantrum days, where Maya seems to go from one meltdown to the next, becoming angry and frustrated at the slightest (to my mind, anyway) provocation. Those days are rough on everybody, including poor Maya.

Moodiness aside, Maya continues to astound us with her delightful sense of humor. For instance, a few weeks back she and I started this game where she’d point to me and say, “Toonces?” and I’d say, “No, silly! I’m Mommy!” She’ll point to Seth and call him Ndugu; she’ll point to Toonces and call her Mommy—you get the idea. And she loves it when we do the whole faux-outrage routine, as in, “What?! No no no! I am NOT a kitty-cat! I am MOMMY!”

More evidence of Maya’s sense of humor: Ask her if she likes pizza. Or kitty-cats. Or cookies. Or Elmo. Then, when she says “Yeah!” say an incredulous “Nuh-uh!” Oh, man. She’ll laugh for days.

This morning Maya was requesting cheek zerberts from her daddy, who unfortunately could not oblige, being that he was at work and all. Sometimes when I give her tummy zerberts, she’ll laugh for a bit, then she’ll tire of it all and pronounce, “No zerberts.” I’ll try to sneak one more in, and she’ll cry, and then I’ll feel like the Meanest Mom Ever.

Other recent accomplishments of note:

• She can count items with a real sense of quantity. She’ll point to four items and count them: “One, two, three, four.”
• She continues to string short sentences together: “What doing, Mommy?” “Where crayon go?” “Ndugu sleeping!”
• She’s really into the mothering thing right now. We seem to always be putting diapers on Elmo and her two baby dolls, and Maya usually has one of her babies sitting in her old highchair with a little toy cup or plate on the tray. Maya is also a fan of putting her dolls and stuffed Elmos to bed.
• She’s getting very good at remembering people’s names and knowing who everyone is. In our apartment complex, for instance, she can identify and name Eileen, Marion, and their daughter Leilani; the new baby next door (“Baby Alysen”); and the woman across the way (also an Allison, but spelled more traditionally). She knows who my friend Jenna is and can name just about everybody in our photographs on the fridge, including long-distance friend Lucy Rehmert.