Freshly bathed and cozy, Kate ponders herself in the guest room mirror. I wonder what she is thinking? Maybe, "Hmmm...it's true: I am pretty cute!"
Kate and I were dancing to the soundtrack from The Triplets of Belleville. 
Kate is learning the official McGaugh Family Pasttime. :-) Yes, there are actually three Rubik's cubes in her playroom. Any day now...So my lesson plan for today was dependent entirely upon the weather being sunny and conducive to spending quite a session outside, yet if there is one thing I learned from my time as a teacher it is this: have a back-up plan...and maybe a back-up plan to back up the back-up. So instead we played with blocks indoors, made it a point to watch the trash trucks from the window (it is fascinating to a youngster, and I admit, even still to me), read several books, had a discussion about the relationship of thunder and lightning while watching the sky, did our usual meal prep together, and started learning the names and moves of the chess pieces. (Kate can now identify the rook and pawn by name, and she was enamored of the knight and how it moves in an "L." After I showed her the knight, which she called a horse and then said "moo" {hrm}, she wanted to take the knight for "hop, hop, hop" all around the house).
Our favorite impromptu moment came in early afternoon when the sky sent hail our way. Hail always fills me with joy, probably because it is so rare here. As soon as it started hailing, I grabbed Kate and we ran downstairs laughing and barefoot and ran right out into the driveway. I showed her the hail and we held some and looked around for as many pieces as we could see... She now calls hail "ice balls." Yes, ice balls from the sky. Such a magic moment, so teachable and real.
Her language has been making leaps the past couple of weeks, but even still, she woke up with more language ready to spill out of her than I have yet witnessed. She was talking about all kinds of things: "Miss Daddy," (or when he came home, "Daddy home"). She has so many words she has been saying, but now she is putting them into phrases. It's just so awesome. I am loving watching her acquire new turns of phrase. I really feel like she and I have communicated all along, like we've been "talking" to each other since she was born: she had different cries for different needs and different nuances in her sighs and verbalizations. And then, of course, she invented a couple of her own signs (we purposely did not do sign language with her in order for her to invent her own means of communication and to prompt faster verbal language acquisition). So to add this more recognizably English piece to our big list of communicative devices is really cool. The only time our communication ever breaks down is when one or both of us is really tired and not decoding/using our tools well....but lately that has been so seldom.
Speaking of which, I should get to bed! Goodnight, all! Enjoy your pajamas!
Speaking of which, I should get to bed! Goodnight, all! Enjoy your pajamas!
