birds open?

Every place she likes to go nowadays, she'll ask repeatedly if it's open. Apparently she enjoyed looking at the birds at the park enough yesterday that today she asked, "Birds open?"

getting ready for the zoo

Next week, I think, Sophie's going to the Detroit Zoo and later this summer the Indianapolis Zoo. I wasn't sure how interested she would be this year, since last year she was interested for only about 30 minutes. In my attempt to improve this year's experience (and to not waste 3o some dollars), we stopped by the library to pick up a bunch of books about animals and we are checking out local petting zoos. Today we went to check out some different birds and reptiles. The birds were in pretty big zoo-like cages and she loved looking at them. I think she figured out that there is more that one kind of bird after looking at owls, eagles and a turkey vulture. When they did a little show and brought out some turtles and snakes to pet, she didn't flinch. She loved touching the corn snake.

Sophie's first movie

Today we took Sophie to see her first movie. We went to see a documentary called Babies. If you haven’t heard about this movie, it is about 4 babies growing up in different parts of the world. Sophie is quite a fan of looking at pictures of mommy, daddy, JJ and Tegel, so a documentary seemed ideal. Once when we tried to watch a little bit of a movie at home, she found it quite scary (Elmo in Grouchland). That only lasted for about two minutes before she shut the screen on the computer to make it turn off. Oddly, the PG rating for Babies was much less violent than Elmo in Grouchland that was rated G.

Since the movie was right at Sophie’s naptime, we figured she might just fall asleep. She did nothing of the sort. She loved every minute of it—except for a really scary movie that they showed previews for before Babies—grrrr, what where they thinking? Throughout the movie, she was the quietest and calmest she’s been since I can remember. The showing we went to was prepared for parents with children so there were also a lot of babies in the theater—sort of an extra bonus.

My favorite part of the movie: when the San Francisco baby tries to walk out on the Mother Earth mommy and baby class. Constructed "enrichment" just isn't the same as the real thing. But don't tell Sophie that, we're going to our toddler class on tuesday ;-)

What's in your medicine cabinet?

The other night, I went to open the medicine cabinet to get my tooth brush and toothpaste and there were the raisins. They might still be there. I'm resigned to parenthood.

2 more minutes?

A local store has an area for kids where you can leave them while you shop. I hadn't been in the store in the last six months or maybe longer, so it never dawned on me that Sophie would like to go in the play area until she saw it and pointed and yelled, "This, this!" So I put her in and did my shopping. After paying for my purchase, I went to pick Sophie up. She resisted and told me, "Two more minutes?" What? Where did she pick that up? We really don't use that expression and if so, loosely at best and rarely with two minutes as our marker. I was so impressed that I told her she could play for two more minutes, but that I was setting my timer. After about 4 minutes, I told her time was up, to which she responded, "Two more minutes?"

Octagon Kayak Surprise

She's impressed people by knowing the word octagon and by identifying stop signs as such.

Well, she identifies hexagons and pentagons as octagons too, so...

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We walked down to the river last week and she was really impressed when she saw a canoe. (I was less impressed, it was an inflatable thing that looked decidedly unseaworthy).

She identified this canoe as a "kayak". Um, excuse me? Where did she learn the word kayak? When did she develop such an enthusiasm for kayaks? She seriously wants a kayak of her own...

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Before her mom got back last week, I was planning to take her to the park as a surprise.

"I've got a surprise for you" I said.

"My surprise mommy pick up now!" she said.

Awww!

back home

JJ and I went on a bit of a vacation together sans bebe. Sophie stayed home with her dad. This was the longest I had been away from Sophie and I was ready to see her again once we got off the plane and past security. When I first saw Sophie, she seemed so happy and excited. She was sitting in her dad´s arms, so he put her down and she ran over and gave JJ a big hug. Shot down. I had to make do with leftovers. At least I got to sit next to her on the ride back home.