The food calendar on our fridge seemed as good a place as any, but Daniel made fun of me, as you can see. Anyway, here are some things I've taken note of lately:
- She says a number of words correctly, but most of what she says has to be interpreted:
- "Deez" for "please"
- "Duh-GEE" for "again"
- "WAH-ka-wah" for "video"
- "Foof" for "woof" (as in what a dog says)
- "TEE-ta-gee" for "Mr. T."
- "Seis" for "outside"
- "PAH-pa-ga" for "pacifier"
- "Ahdigah" for "octopus"
- "Foaf" for "fork"
- "Oh doh" for "Oh no"
- "Waka" for "rocking" (in the rocking chair in her room)
- "Seat" for anytime she sits down on something
- "Hop" for "help"
- She says a lot of other words, but those are the new ones/my favorites.
- When she wants one of us to read a book to her, she says "tu-tu." She got this from hearing us ask, "Do you want me to read that to you?" I guess the "to you" part translated to "tu-tu," and that's the part that stuck.
- She likes to help me unload the dishwasher. She will grab each plate out of the bottom, one at a time, and hand them to me. She also likes to put her own little silverware pieces into the drawer. Other than that, she can't actually be helpful, so then I just hand her things from the dishwasher and let her hand them back to me to put away. She loves being helpful. She's the absolute sweetest.
- Every day, her friend from the neighborhood comes over to play. She's really cute with Aubrey, and it's nice to get a chance to relax a little.
- When she goes outside, she thinks she needs to wear her hat (which is a tricorne hat, incidentally). During the summer, Daniel almost always grabbed his hat as we went outside. And she's our little mimic.
- If a car horn honks, she gets scared, whines, and looks to me. I always tell her, "It's okay; it's just the car saying 'hi!'" And then she says, "Hi!" A similar thing happens with birds. Their squawking scares her, so I encourage her to say "Caw!" back to them. Then she smiles.
- I have a bad habit of grunting when I pick her up or bend over to get something, and she has started copying me. It took me awhile to realize that's what she was doing! Her little grunt is so adorable (unlike mine).
- When I say that something is yucky, she repeats, "Yucky!"
- She likes to count, but she has a tendency to forget "one."
- When we go outside, she often picks up my shoes and tries to put them on my feet for me. She also loves tickling my feet and gets a kick out of me fake giggling when she does.
- I had awful (awful!) allergies all summer, so I ended up blowing my nose a lot. Regrettably, Aubrey thought this was a thing to mimic, so she'll randomly take a Kleenex, ball it up on her face, and blow loudly into it--with her mouth.
- When we eat breakfast, she'll say she's done and I'll get her out of her highchair. But then she'll insist on sitting on my lap and grabbing at everything on the table and asking for my food. I've taken to eating standing up.
- She loves babies and will shout "Baby!" and point when she sees one. So far she's very good at being gentle with them.
- At night, when we sing to her before bed, she'll violently sit up and lean back in order to rock the chair more if we aren't doing it sufficiently.
- She LOVES going on walks and will often ask by shouting "Walk! Walk!" in a high-pitched voice.
- She says "Shoot!" a lot. I suppose it could be worse.
- She also says "Bye bye" really cutely. We've told her to say goodbye to things/people as a way of distracting her from being sad that we're making her leave somewhere/stop doing something. And now she's taken to saying it on her own before she even gets upset. I like it.
- When I'm standing and holding her, she'll sometimes put one leg on each of my hips and say "Oh doh!" and laugh to initiate the "Oh no, you're falling!" game that we play, in which I let go of her, she clamps on to me, and then I shake her off onto the couch.
- We bought her these $1 alphabet flash cards, and she loves them. She likes naming the picture on the back of each. I'm always surprised at what she has picked up!
- She is very interested in eyes and will often poke one of us on the eye and say, "Eye!"
- Even though we installed her new car seat several weeks ago. we still have the box it came in for Aubrey to play with. She LOVES it. And hey, it was technically free!
- She loves playing in the car as it sits in the driveway. She climbs from front to back and vice versa, pushes buttons, turns knobs, takes loose change out of its little container and throws it all over, and sometimes sits at the wheel and pretends to drive.
- One of her favorite things to do is flip through books on her own. She'll be entertained for quite awhile. She especially likes reading on our bed, and she'll bring a book from her room, ask for help climbing on the bed, sit and look through the book for a minute, ask for help down, and then run back into her room to get another book and repeat the whole process. She also likes reading in the glider chair in her room. She says "Rocking!" as she does it (though she used to say it "Walka").
- She loves jumping, but she can't actually jump. Most of the time, she ends up falling on her butt when she tries.
- When she takes a bath, she dips her fingers in the water and then wipes them on her face like a raccoon washing itself.
- If I ask where something is, she'll do a little shrug with her upturned hands out in front of her. It's adorable.
- She has very strong opinions about what we read to her. Just today, when we read before her nap, I held up each book and said, "This one?" She said "All done" to each one (she doesn't say "no") until I picked the one she wanted. Then she said her cute "Yeah!"
- I finally found a TV show that she'll sit and watch. It's Mother Goose Club. The whole thing is singing and dancing and nursery rhymes. She likes sitting on the coffee table to watch it. Not sure why.
