prodigy!

the most amazing thing happened, well really i shouldn't be so surprised, since God is good and cares about these things: i have been praying that we would be able to get sparrow potty-trained in the next 2 weeks, and... then yesterday this happened: she wakes up in the morning and starts playing a little. she looks at us and pats her diaper with her little "huh?" noise which i love so well. i say, "does that mean she wants to go pee? what if it means she wants to go pee? oh well, let's try it!" so i walk her to the toilet, take diaper off, set her on it, and she pees a pee! and her diaper was even completely DRY through the night! so i think she's a veritable genius. nevermind that that's the only time that's happened successfully. she tried to indicate when she was pooping too, but we didn't get to the toilet in time. most of the time, actually, i can tell when she is wanting to poop, and it sort of happens around the same-ish times every day, too. but she has this funny habit of running away when she poops! the other day i came home from work and was so excited to see her, i told her "come to mama and get kisses!" and she was coming toward me, but then she did a 180 and ran into the corner! thomas and i were like, what was that about? but he said, "maybe she's pooping." how did he know? cause sure enough, when she emerged she was very fragrant! but it's apparent that she doesn't like wearing diapers anymore. whenever she is in nothing but a diaper she always pulls on it and tries (sometimes successfully!) to take it off. i have been talking to her a lot about poo and pee and toilets and showing her flushing and telling her every time i am going. confession: i have not been using the decided-upon "turtle" word for her poos. i've just been saying "poopee." it works and it is intuitive and won't make her confused about turtles, which are really a sweet animal.

other things she has been amusing me with lately: she is really dang good at saying "uh-oh!" and "bye bye" now. she started saying bye bye about a week or 2 ago; so cute and so clear. she says uh-oh every time she falls down; or she makes a dramatic crying scene but i usu. don't give her much sympathy. thomas has always reacted to her head-bumping and falling in a dramatic way, a LOT more than me. i keep telling him he should temper his reactions, but he can't help himself! but she learned somehow to react dramatically when she falls! cause i know she really doesn't care a whit, because it usu. doesn't even hurt. when she bumps her head, thomas always shows her what she bumped it on. then he knocks on the item (edge of counter, or whatever it was) and says, "look baby, it's very hard, watch your head! very hard!" as he pats on it firmly to illustrate. she picked that up pretty fast! now whenever she bumps herself on ANYTHING, including his arm or my leg or anything, she will knock on it and make the "huh?" noise to indicate that "this is very hard!" sadly enough, my legs are definitely NOT hard... quite soft, i told her, but maybe someday when we start doing ballet together...

speaking of ballet, we took her to thomas' wed. night ballet that he teaches in goleta, and she was FULLY trying to to tendus and plies, and even working her arms! when she was watching lily's dance recital on video the other week, she was also moving quite accurately to mimic. so perhaps she will want to get into it, even though thomas is super adamant about not pushing her. whenever someone asks him if she's gonna be a dancer, he says, "or maybe she'll want to play soccer!" but for the record, valerie huston (great ballet teacher at ucsb) did herself confirm the beauty of her dance-able feet when she was a mere six weeks old.