a day with JJ, aka JNanners, aka The Nanners, aka The hip-hop grandma

Sophie's spending the last few days of fall with JNanners. She's at the park playing in the sandbox. These last couple weeks, she's started looking more and more like her dad. Her blue eyes are slowing turning hazel. It seems odd to think of her as having dark-haired, but then again she was born that way. I have a hard time of thinking of her as younger or of being older, she always seems just right at the age she is now.

update

-Sophie stayed home with JNanners for the weekend while the parents escaped for a weekend in Toronto. When we returned, she didn't even seem to notice that we had left. Guess she had a good time.
-She's starting to add two words together. It's clear that she's on the verge of stringing longer sentences together. It's also clear that she has a lot to say.
-She's getting the idea of kicking a ball. She likes to kick, run, throw.
-Lastly, she's turned into a wonderful sleeper. At 8.00 she goes into the crib without a peep. At around 7.00am-8:00 she wakes up excited to start the day. If she wakes up in the middle of the night or early in the morning, we pop her pacifier back in and she'll turn over and go back to sleep. How lovely!

fall has arrived

The weather is getting crummy and only allows for a few hours of outdoor play each day. Got to make the most of them.

baby in the stroller

Babies are really important now.

Mah Bay-bee!

A sentence! Or not? A fragment, perhaps. But certainly evocative, communicative even. Two words. Two. Not one.

So language learning proceeds apace. And we are all given to understand that this is Sophie's baby--not Mommy's, not Daddy's. She looked askance when I suggested that Sophie was Daddy's baby. A bit too meta, no doubt.

(She'll also give us an occasional unsolicited "tank u". Which technically is a sentence, no doubt. But that's a result of phrasal chunking, whereas the "Mah Bay-bee" was generative and thus more impressive).

In other news, she came up to us unbidden while she was playing, and *smack* *smack* gave us each a big sloppy kiss.

So that's it, I'm tapped--all out of ponies.

gratitude and compassion

Today (or was it last night?) we got another unsolicited “thank you” from Sophie when her dad brought her some food. Yesterday, she gave up her doll to a girl who was sad and tearful because she didn’t have one. This isn’t the first time she’s displayed such grace. At school, one of the boys was really upset that his mom was leaving. Sophie walked over to his cubby, got his favorite stuffed animal and brought it to him. I find these moments quite uncanny because this comes from a little girl whose working vocabulary is probably around 100 words and she can’t really even say her own name, but she can demonstrate gratitude and show compassion.

NO! No! No! No! No! No-oh-oh-oh-h!!!!

no.