The Jabber Box

We've been quite busy the last month. We have finally got some nice weather and getting to go outside and play. For her birthday Selena got a stroller to push her baby doll around in and she loves it. We spend quite a bit of time doing laps around the block with baby doll, Dyna, Douglas and Howlidays (her two stuffed puppies). She amazed me one day when we were sitting in the front yard playing with baby doll and she decided to take off her shoes and socks and start running. She ended up doing two laps around the block, in bare feet, and only stopping for a second when a big dog approached us who didn't like Dyna. A lap is roughly a quarter mile! She did end up taking a 3 hour nap that day.


She is really a jabber box and comes up with the cutest things. Some of my favorites have been:

• Dada is tall like a giraffe.
• Dada has a big nose like an oh elephant. (Oh Elephant comes from a song.)
• Me need more jokes. Which she follows with. Mama has poopy knees.
• Dada's name is Floyd. Mama's name is Laura. And so on, for everyone in the extended family.
• Me love Mama SO much. (Of course she says this while she is getting into everything possible in sight and making me very tired, but how can I get annoyed when she is so stinking cute?)
• Me have the best Dada.
• I love to go potty. I go potty every day. (In my dreams she does.)
• Oh Man. Dyna don't poop in the back yard. Go in the potty.
• I need too many books.
• Dada's name is him. Mama's name is her.
  

She is really into doing everything on her own and unfortunately is even starting to have small tantrums if she doesn't get to do something. So she helps me cook by helping stir, pour and push buttons. She has to put her own clothes on, but still needs a bit of help, so I have to be careful that I help just enough so that she doesn't get frustrated. She needs to buckle her own car seat. But she also has started to be able to do some real chores too. She can sort the silverware when I'm unloading the dishwasher, and sometimes I can get her to move all the laundry from the washing machine to the dryer, or from the dryer to the laundry basket.

I've also noticed that she is dreaming more often. She'll wake up in the morning or nap and start talking about something. One day she woke up and said, "I need sunglasses, and go out in Dyna's backyard and pick berries." One night she woke up crying and saying, "Me do it. Selena do it." Floyd was funny and said that she was having a nightmare, but then said it isn't a nightmare if all it is about is her not being able to do something. It's a pout-mare.

And the mystery has been solved about the meaning of Abadaba. She kept saying abadaba, ahmina, over and over so I asked her what they meant and she said, "They're just my words. Just Selena's words." So there you go.

Some favorite books for this month are The Blue Balloon and any other Kipper books, and Sunshine.

On a kind of interesting developmental note she doesn't draw much anymore and when she does it is not the stick people she was drawing a few months ago. She drew this picture a few months ago, but now when she picks up a pen or pencil she tends to not hold it "correctly" and only scribbles. I don't know if she forgot or if she just isn't into it any more. It'll be interesting to see if stick people will reappear in her art soon, or if it will be at a more normal age.