--and a silver spoon--

There was a baby in the restaurant at lunch today, sleeping in an infant car seat that was the exact model that Sophie had when she was young.

Sophie immediately and correctly identified this as a baby, and spent a good part of the meal looking over the seat back to see what it would do.

It's at this point that I, primed by an impending move, several requests a day from Sophie to see pictures of her as a baby (she's working this out, see), and my very own innate proclivity for the maudlin and mawkish, that I was tempted to start singing Cat Stevens.

"Look at that," I say later that day, "you were so tiny! How did you fit in those little booties??"

----

Besides her increasing bulk, her language tells me most clearly that she's not a baby anymore.

She understand just about everything I tell her. Though there is a lag. If you present her with a choice, she's got to think it over for about 15 seconds before she's ready to answer you.

Also, some time in the past week, she's acquired um as a new lexical item. Like uh oh!, I wouldn't have considered um to be much of a word before she started using it. It's remarkable the depth of meaning it seems to add to her utterances. For one thing, it's a marker of thought. If someone or something says "um" to you, you know that that person or thing is doing some thinking, marshaling her forces preparatory to telling you "dis one" or "my ball outside na-ow".

It's very humanizing. Or perhaps anthropomorphizing. In any case, it's swept away in less than a week any lingering tendency I might have had of treating her like a very well loved cat–and, it seems, the last cobweb vestiges of her babyhood.