please keep kicking that ball!

So when you ask her "what does the happy (or baby) chimp say?" Ixa goes, "oo oo oo". She figured this out from a book we got from her Auntie Dice that has a chimp making a perfect "oo" shape with its mouth. Also if you start to talk to her about balls, she says "ball" excitedly even if one is not in sight. She seems to say "du(ck)", "b(l)o(t)" and she imitates the sounds of words she hears....
she says "ba-bye", "hi" alot, and once I heard her say "wa" for water...she says "mo" for "more"... any day now she will be talking in phrases!

Ixa turns one

It is nearly the summer solstice, and one year since Ixa was born. Some things about her have not changed: she loves to be outside, she loves to be carried, being on swings, and she sings- but she almost never sings her sleepy song anymore, the rounds of "aaaah aaah" in a creaky voice. She still wakes up frequently and needs me to be there, but now she often sleeps on her side in the shape of a dramatic arc, her face upturned as if searching for something that she apparently finds, because she falls asleep immediately once she turns this way. She only takes one nap a day now. She has also recently begun sleeping in until 8:30. This is great for all of us, and Kami has been getting to work a little later in the mornings!
Playing with water is her latest discovery, and when the sprinklers were finally turned on at the park she was ecstatic. I stood her up with her feet in the water even though it was cold, and her feet felt so soft afterward. She loves to stick her hands in water, get sprayed by water, splash water, rub her feet in spilled water. (This also has translated to her potty, unfortunately- she doesn't get to the splashing but she does stick her hand in it! Small inconvenience for a practically potty-trained one-year-old.)
People that see her say she has an apparent wisdom: her eyes seem wise. I say this is because she was native american in her past life. She may have been Mayan because she does like tortillas, black beans, and chicken...and she looks perfect in her Tzotzil clothes. I marvel that all of this presence and personality and beauty that is her took shape one day from a couple of cells. How does this miracle happen? She who is so perfectly herself, full of life and personality and belly laughs that hint at a timeless humanity, had a beginning- and she will have an end, in this form. Yet the essence of ixaness feels eternal. She is so complete, so fully her own person with her own knowledge and intuition and feelings, her own soul. How the soul finds/creates a body that matches it so well that the two are wedded as if one, that is the mystery.