A Million Words

A few months ago I reported on Nova's early words in the post Nova is Walking! For months after I wrote that post, her vocabulary remained stagnant, and even shrunk a bit.  I don't think she used the word "baba" once between September and March, then all of a sudden, about three weeks ago, it was back.  More words followed.  Last night I attempted to compile a list of Nova's current words, including those that I'm not 100% sure of (followed by a ? in the list bellow) Baba (baby) Ball ballaballap (balloon) bubum (butter) bye-bye (also used to mean, "let's go already!" when I'm taking too long to get out of the house) book? blue? buttbutt (button, including especially bellybutton)  dada down dat (that)  dog (Nova's favorite word) dark (not very precisely pronounced) duck (a very popular word these days, second only to "dog."  It includes all birds.) eye hat/head/hair (not sure if she's distinguishing between these yet) hi/hiy...

It's now been about three months since I started practicing EC with Nova most of the time.  I didn't realize until today that I hadn't blogged about it since late March.  At that point, I was washing roughly 18 diapers every day, was bleary-eyed and confused and only half settled in to our new home.   On our trip back to America in late April, I started to discover how far we'd come.  Once I got out of the urban environment of Galway and into the woods, it became much easier to respond when Nova seemed to need to pee.  We just had to be in a place where it was all right to just stop and tinkle into the bushes.  I didn't have to work so hard at finding places to pee because the whole outdoors was at our disposal.  The warm, sunny weather helped, too. Back in Galway, where the environment around us is all people and pavement, we need to make special detours to find places to pee -- pub toilets, occasional parks, and home are nearly the only options.  I started keeping...

For the past month and a half, I have been obsessed with cloth diapers.  It started with what I thought was a simple idea:  I would make Nova some training pants, trim cloth diapers which could be pulled down or snapped closed.  I didn't even think about buying them, really, because the ones that were available ran about $15/pair, which seemed like too much.  Besides, I like researching random obscure information. And so it came to pass that I fell through the rabbit hole into the strange and puzzling world of cloth diaper makers, as found on Mothering.com and in the Diaper Sewing Divas group.  Meanwhile, a woman I know here brought it to my attention that some people collect  diapers, and will pay hundreds of dollars  for a single diaper.  The current "hot diapers" are by a group called Good Mamas.  I've seen some, and frankly I don't understand what all the excitement is about.  Sure, they're nice, but not that  nice.   Meanwhile, I was making my own.  I loo...