boody!

i love the way sparrow pronounces things. she sits on the bed, for example, bounces up and down, and says, "bowncy? bowncy?" then, "mama--bowncy? bowncy?" "hahaha, sparrow i can't bounce with you! i am sooo tired!" she is undeterred. "Daddy--bowncy? bowncy?" she always does it when i am trying to get her to nap, too, so i can nap, and it doesn't help her being so cute because she makes me laugh so hard when she does that that i can't even properly discipline her to come back and fall asleep...

another one of her favorite things is to pat her bottom when she is getting her diaper changed. Thomas actually taught her to say "booty" instead of "bottom," and it kills me because she will twist and say "boody! pawo (sparrow) boody!" then follows the inevitable, "mama boody!" whence she is not satisfied until i, too, have patted my own boody.

i couldn't get what she was saying at first, but we were in the car the other day and she kept saying "toway! toway!" finally i realized she was pointing out the window at the trees. tree! toway! that is a new development! tree for her used to sound just like "wee."

i can't believe all the things she is saying! may-doe! (tomato) twacca (tractor) baby-dah! (baby doll) it is precious. what else... oh yes! she says "neiba--wady!" (neighbor-lady!) can you believe it? when she hears the neighbor lady work on her porch or walk up the stairs! now that's amazing! this morning we were on our way to samuel's house, and we stopped at a red light, when suddenly she cried out, "WED!" what? wed? ...oh, RED! red! she is astounding! she can also point out yellow for sure, but colors are still a bit mixed.

since her hair has gotten to an unfortunate mullet-like stage, i try to put her hair in pigtails every day. when we do her hair, we tell her to lie still, then take the brush and start working on it, counting. recently she has been finding the little rubber bands or her hair brush and attempting the process herself, counting faithfully along. she can definitely count to four, i don't know about any further.

we have taught her to drink out of a glass, a thick little blue flower-pot-shaped glass without a lid. i wanted her to become independent of sippy cups at an early age for several reasons: the plastic chemical contamination, also the impossibility of clearing sippy-cup crevices of mold, and also because i plain didn't want her to still be dependent on a sippy cup when she was seven. the sooner she learns to handle a glass and not to spill it, the better. she is simply addicted to (rice) milk. she cries for "maauk!" loudly several times a day, and devours it, with her cute little hands cupping the glass, one pinky sticking out. if she spills, i give her a towel and she has to wipe the spill. if she starts playing with the milk, i take it away.

the other day it came quite in handy because we were at the co-op and they had out samples of hazelnut milk. sparrow is always a challenge a the co-op because she doesn't sit happily in the cart for long, and jumps out on me, and then to let her down amongst all those bulk bins that she so desperately wants to dig her fingers into becomes quite the hawking experience for me. anyways, thank God for almond milk samples, because it kept her happy for another 15 seconds while i was trying to pay and get outta there, and she could drink it all by herself, straight out of the sample cup. i don't have to take an extra cup for her everywhere we go.

however, when her sample was gone, she loudly cried out for more milk. i wasn't going to just keep feeding her the co-ops milk samples! we were about to go to trader joe's so i told her she could have more milk there. she threw a bit of a fit, i'm afraid. still haven't quite figured out how to command immediate and unprotesting obedience in the store! she wailed and wailed and cried for milk almost all the way to trader joe's. at first i kept telling her she was going to get more. then i told her to stop whining, and subsequently ignored her. she got a lot more cheerful toward the end. once in tj's, i got a little sample cup and then opened a box of rice milk and she devoured almost 3 cups of it while we were shopping! but what a convenient thing it is to have her be able to drink it like that in a shopping cart!

sparrow does a million cute things, like say "okay!" and "alright!" and "whoa," and she keeps asking us to pray over and over again, throughout our dinner time. she stretches out both her hands to us and says, "pway? pway?" in the middle of church on sunday, jacob was teaching, and sparrow suddenly said "jay-bup!...jay-cub!" i couldn't believe she just pulled his name out of her memory like that! she has a thing for names. she knows all the lomelinos, and the other day we were playing in the reeves' yard (they weren't even there), and suddenly she said, "asha!" asher!? i thought she only paid attention to goldie! she also repeats "dowis!" if she hears anyone say my name.

she sits in a tiny blue chair at a coffee table in the kitchen. every time i give her toast or crackers to eat there, she settles in, then pulls out another little gray chair next to her and says, "mama?--mama?" wanting me to come sit with her. LOVE that!

ready for calculus

apparently my baby can count. of course she can recite a few numbers. she knows one, two, three, and possibly four after that, and she can copy us in saying them all up to twelve or something. she can also correctly place seven after six and eight after seven. we count when we set her on a swing, before we give her a big push! and we count in the morning when we put her hair in those adorable pigtails. nowadays she walks around with her hairbrush in hand, saying, "one, two, three..."

however, i was pretty sure that she was not exactly sure what the point of counting is or what it means, necessarily. about a month ago she was looking at the cover of her good night moon book and said "two--moon." sure enough, in the illustration there is one moon in the window and another in the picture on the wall. but i kind of thought it was just a fluke that she'd said that. however, tonight we were reading one of her favorite duck books, and she noticed a frog on one of the pages, and then another one on the same page. she pointed them both out and then said to me, "two frogs." she even put an S on the end of the frog! i think she's already surpassed me in intelligence. i mean, next month she'll be doing calculus!

a little sick bout

on monday sparow woke up with a stuffy, runny nose. oh no!! i couldn't send her to holly's this way, what with samuel and hope there, and sparrow's tendency to commandeer everyone's sippy cup! so i would have to take a day off work. this situation could not drag on. i would take the day off work, but i was going to make dang sure that she was better in the morning! first thing i did was give her a little of my amazing detox tea to flush her system. she gets the effects through my breast milk already, but i thought this situation called for extra.

she also had two doses of natural cold/virus medicine that day, and an extra vitamin. (she LOOOOOOOVES her vitamins because they are in gummy-bear format, and she calls it "minamin!" she asks for them all day, and whenever she gets one she gets this huge grin on her face--when you put it into her grubby, eager little hand, she laughs.)

that night, i remembered a garlic poultice for combatting sickness that kim told me about. it involved some sort of crushed garlic possibly folded into a warm, moist paper towel and placed on the child's skin or even in their sock overnight. the garlic seeps through and gets into the bloodstream through the skin and fights the virus. well i didn't think sparrow would keep a garlic sock on, as she is not used to sleeping with socks on anyways, so at the last minute i decided to put it in her diaper before bed time. however, i ditched the paper towel because i needed quick action, and i thought it might block the effects. plus i was just doing this from memory of something kim told me from something she found on the internet. anyways, sparrow ended up with raw garlic in her diaper. i told her all along what i was doing: "we are gonna put garlic in your diaper and make you feel all better..." i was slightly nervous and felt that i should go look up the kosher-ness of leaving it raw in her diaper, or if it was "caustic" and would irritate or something. but an hour later she had already woken up crying heavily and i immediately changed her diaper and took out the garlic just in case. later i read that one needs to be careful not to get raw garlic on children's skin. oops! but voila! it had already done its job! the next morning she woke up happy and far less stuffy and was well enough to go to holly's so i could go make up my lost day at work.

the next 2 times i changed her diaper after the garlic episode, she replaced her usual "sparrow--booty! mama--booty!" chant with this: "gaeec! gaeec!" i finally realized she was saying "garlic!" remembering from last night! isn't that amazing?

exercise

sparrow has become increasingly fascinated with exercise! first of all, she can say the word, which is more than most 2-year-olds can boast. she handed me the "going to bed" book the other day and said excitedly, "ecacike! ecacike!" i thought for 2 seconds... ecacike? oh exercise!!! "and when the moon is on the rise, they all go up to EXERCISE!" she loves it that there is a dancing hippo on that page, and always says, "hippo--dance."

about a week ago, i was contemplating doing a pilates session in the eve. while thomas was gone. i asked melissa if she had any pilates tapes, and then said to sparrow--"hey, do you wanna do some pilates with me?" i was totally blown away when the girl immediately started doing leg lifts and breathing pilates-breath!: "wh-wh" it was soooooo cute, and i couldn't think where she had picked that up except that nicole and i had been discussing and kidding around with pilates one evening, at least three weeks ago! crazy how she remembers things.

here's one i am really baffled as to how she picked it up: i was trying to change her diaper the other eve. and she was goofing off a bit, but as i was about to get annoyed, i tuned in to what she was doing, and she was doing SITUPS. she was putting her hands on her head, lifting up a little, and counting "one, two..." baffling! but i'll take it!hahahahaha!

she is well into doing her plies whenever prompted; she gets this verschminzt little look on her face--a slightly self-conscious smile, and bends her knees--down, up. thomas has been letting her watch dance videos on tv quite a bit. old ones of his performances, or fernando bujones in class or whatever. she LOVES it. she just stands in front of the TV and dances along and it is hilarious. i have to post a video of it asap. whenever she sees anyone dancing on the screen now, she thinks it's "daddy!" and if it's a performance video, and she hears people clapping, she starts clapping and exclaims, "Yay!"