Sunday, March 6, 2011

The unbearable bigness of being

What a big girl our girl is! Chloë is so much fun at this age. I know, I say that at every age. But seriously.

-She's been playing with the Swiffer for days. "Keen mohr [clean more]?" she says, and grabs it, and pushes it around. Likewise, she took the wet paper towel I used on her drawing table this morning and started to clean the table herself. Then the window, part of the bookcase and the back of my chair. "Keen mohr," she wailed when I tried to take it away.

-Everything is two-word phrases now. When we came home from shopping today and I set her down in the kitchen, she asked "Tee Emmo [see Elmo]?" Then, when I started unzipping her coat, she said, "Ju down," and set her sippy on the floor so I could remove her arms from her sleeves. Then she said, "Shoe off," and lifted her feet before I could ask her. "Stay Mama," was her request at bed tonight, after we refused to let her delay bedtime by "go potty." (Potty training remains at a standstill. But she does come to us and tell us when she's got a poopy diaper.)

-After her bath tonight she started to go into the nursery, then corrected herself and headed for her new, big-girl room. She's now entirely moved in except for a couple of pictures on the wall, and has had no trouble adjusting, except that she's a little harder to get to lie down when the bed is big enough we have to chase her.

-She loves, loves, loves Elmo at the moment. I'm not sure exactly how that happened. But she has a Sesame Street "Color Carnival" book with him in it, and Elmo diapers, and now an Elmo show. It contains a segment with three girls doing a clapping game that starts "Down down baby, I can do karate." She turns to me with the biggest smile whenever I start singing it and says, "Emmo! Kap!" and claps her hands.

We went to Costco Saturday and I found a duo of Elmo/Ernie and Elmo/Grover books, and of course we had to get it. She's asked me to read them a dozen times or more since then, though that might be because she keeps interrupting me when I try to read them to say "Emmo!" or "Hakking [walking]!" or "Grober? Heah?" because there's one page in the one where Grover has a frog on his head.

-We were making dinner tonight, taking turns at the stove, and while I was sitting for a while Chloë came barreling in and hugged me. "Can I have a hug?" Eric said, sitting down in anticipation. "No," she said. Eric sighed and said, "I should have seen that coming," and got up again. In a moment Chloë turned in his direction and said plaintively, "Hu'?" He turned and crouched, and she ran against him and threw her arms around his neck.

-At Kroger today Eric and Chloë were walking the corridors while I got milk. I heard Chloë say something about "ubber ducky," and looked over. She was pointing up to a yellow thing, and I thought it was another duck like her Duck Number One one at home, which she's started calling "rubber ducky," probably because Ernie and his rubber ducky show up in the Elmo DVD. Eric looked over at me and indicated he wanted to get it for her. I thought that was odd, since we're trying to be conservative about increasing the size of her duck flotilla, but I nodded. He handed it down and he and Chloë walked over to me, whereupon I discovered the thing was a yellow bath scrubber with a duck's head and tail on it, small-size for kids, and she was really saying "scrubber ducky." "I couldn't help it when she put that together," Eric said, helplessly.

No comments: