Pointing at Pictures

Sophie's latest trick is pointing at pictures and sometimes identifying them.

She'll point enthusiastically to Clifford the big/little red dog (we think she thinks he's Elmo). She points to monkeys and makes the monkey sign and says "ooo, ooo!". And every time she comes across a toothbrushing pictures she puts her fingers up to her mouth in imitation.

So all that reading (and brushing of teeth) seems to have paid dividends.

She'll also point at pictures in response to our prompts. "Where's the flower?" we'll ask, and after a moment's hesitation she'll point to the squirrel and look at us hopefully. "Ooooh!" we'll say, "Not quite. But you found the squirrel--good job!"

I could wish for such a cheerful spirit of open exploration and a willingness to make mistakes in my students. As opposed to Sophie, they seem sometimes paralyzed by the thought of getting something wrong. So far "C'mon guys, my baby can do this!" has not proven itself the way to motivate them to experiment and take risks.

Sophie draws

Sophie loves to draw on paper, for about two minutes. Then, she wants to draw on the table, floor, or anywhere but the paper. Then I take away the lovely crayons and we move on to the next activity.

Sophie speaks, signs, counts and sorts.

Sophie's starting to say more and more words each week. She now says nose, shoes and banana. She can now point to pictures in the book and sign the animal--duck, monkey, elephant. She seems to understand just about anything. I ask her a lot of yes/no questions and she often nods her head yes when she answers, even when sometimes she possibly hasn't thought through the whole question. But I like this positive feedback, so I ask her questions that sometimes should just be statements. Last night I asked her if she wanted to go to bed, because for the last three nights she'd said yes. Last night she said no. I didn't expect that and no wasn't really an option. I read her a couple of more books and then took her to bed, no questions asked, which seemed to work, luckily.

She's also taken to counting and sorting. Yesterday morning she took out three cereal boxes and repeatedly counted them or at least wagged her finger at them as if she were counting. Then she emptied out our teabox and kindly separated the teabags: those with clear wrappers went in the library, those with colored wrappers, in the kitchen. One the one hand, it's very exciting to see her count and sort, on the other hand, I fear there will be more to clean up.

Sophie reaches her newest height :-(

Mike mentions how unchildproof our house is in the next blog entry you will read, he's right. We have all the basics down: locks on cupboards, electric sockets covered, etc. The problem is that Sophie's favorite places to be are those where she will find the most trouble, especially the library where all of our books and computers are. This morning, I left her there reading Goodnight Moon, walked into the living room to get my wallet, then heard a thud. I just thought it was the book hitting the ground. I was wrong. It was my newish laptop. Mike walked in and collected it off the floor. Apparently my coping mechanism is to just not think about the possibly broken computer until I need to use it again. Luckily, all is well. It didn't fall far--I've dropped previous laptops from higher up--and the landing was pretty soft on the carpet--I dropped another one on the cement once. One of my laptops--the one that was dropped on the cement--was sold to a friend who then days later dropped it down a flight of stairs at the Bibliothèque nationale. She still uses it years later. So hurray for Apple for making such nice durable computers; boo for me for leaving the computer out where Sophie can get it.

Her first lie?

Sometimes we want to play with Sophie in her room. Sometimes we're tired of running after her in our imperfectly childproofed house (she keeps reaching new heights!). Sometimes she really wants to get out of her room.

One of her signs is "feed me"--which is good for signaling hunger. When she signs "feed me" we all go out into the living room to find her some food.

Lately she's been signing "feed me" a lot when she's tired of being in her room.

Sometimes she doesn't seem too interested in eating when we get out to the living room.

Nap time!

It is a minor miracle that I can give my daughter a bottle, put her in her sleep sack, tell her it's nap time and leave the room.

And she doesn't protest. She totally bought it!

Diaper time!

So! Much! Corn!