Inching forward

I talked to the finance coordinator at my clinic, and apparently my $10K in insurance will definitely cover at least one full cycle of IVF, and depending on what procedures etc. we have for that first cycle (PGD, for example) there might even be some left over for a second cycle. Not including $750 for the anesthesiologist, who doesn't take insurance, and cryopreservation, for which I need to give them a credit card number. But I'm relieved to know that I'll at least get one cycle covered. We've got an appointment with Dr. SF next week to talk details.

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We spent a long weekend at the beach with friends who have a 4-year-old and a 10-week-old. Bat Girl was pretty cute with the baby (when she wasn't ignoring him, that is), though I just realized a lot of her "Hi! Hi baby!" is pretty similar to what she does with the cat. Hmm. Anyway, seeing our friends manage with a preschooler and a newborn made me feel more comfortable with the concept--like, hey, maybe we could actually do that too!

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This post is all over the place. I'm just trying to get some thoughts down before I go to bed, since I won't have a chance to blog this week...

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Bat Girl seems to have grown up in leaps and bounds in the last few weeks. Her vocabulary, sentence structure, and expressive ideas are suddenly more sophisticated, which happened in the space of a week--my brother even commented on it when we saw him for our weekly Sunday brunch. My husband told me that the day before we left for the beach, she was talking about how she would play with one of her favorite toys at the beach, then paused, thought for a moment, and said, "No, I would probably lose it. I better not take it." She's interested in everything, and is constantly asking, "What's that?" and then "How it helps you?" (meaning, what does it do or what is it for?).

In the last week or two, she's suddenly into a new level of pretend play, too, where she will say things like, "I'm a monkey, and you're the mommy monkey!" or "I'm fishing! I'm going to catch a whale!" The whole let's-pretend phenomenon is fascinating, and it really came out of nowhere--one day she wasn't doing it, the next day she was. She's into drawing a lot more, and will fill a page with crayon scribbles (until recently, she would scrawl a tiny doodle then lose interest). She pretends to write too, making a line of scratch marks while "spelling" out loud: "G, H, J, B, E spells Bat Girl!"

At nearly 2 1/2, she finally has enough hair for pigtails, which make her look like a big girl instead of a baby, and she's grown what seems like half a foot (but what the growth chart in her room says is only an inch or two) since her birthday. Yesterday, driving back from the beach, I looked back at her, all pigtailed with her long legs dangling over the end of the carseat, munching on grapes and swigging from her water bottle, and I said to my husband, "Would you look at this big kid we have here?"