Pronouns: One day Annabel woke up and had mastered pronouns. You'd think it's a little thing, but my once-baby now speaks to me like this all day: 'Where are we going?', 'I'll do it myself.', 'What are you doing, Mommy?'. She seems so grown up! My favorite use of pronouns is when she wants to learn a certain word, so she'll walk backwards or make a noise and ask 'What am I doing?'.
Potty: I think Annabel has been ready to potty train for a while. We just needed to commit to it, but we were expecting the baby and didn't want to have a bunch of changes at the same time for her. But lately she is using the potty more (even outside of the house by request), and she always announces when something is happening in her diaper. Apparently she'd been asking to use the potty at daycare, too, so we think it's a good time to transition to big girl underwear. There are a bunch of kids at the daycare who are at the same stage, so (god bless them) the women who run it are going to have them go diaper-free altogether beginning next Monday. We're to bring five pair of extra pants!
Make believe: This is my favorite. Toddlers have such fluidity between what is real and what is not. Annabel has started pretending to pull things out of books and eat them. She will also offer the characters in books food or toys. We put some Vaseline (girl is obsessed with it) on her face before bedtime, and she wiped her face and then put it on the animals' faces in the book ('Do you want Baseleem, doggie? Ok, here you go.') She was watching Sesame Street one day and out of nowhere said, 'Do you need my hair clip, Elmo?' She got magnetic dress-up dolls for Christmas and will block out everything and talk to them for 15 minutes. She has named them Annabel and Ballerina (Annabel doesn't know the word 'princess', so anyone dressed like a princess is called ballerina). Her baby doll is named Baby Sister. (She actually bit said baby doll last night as a sneaky way to earn a band-aid!)
I caught this video yesterday as she was playing in the tent her Aunt Neicey gave her. We put her old bouncer in there, and she likes to read books in there to herself or have conversations with pretend people. Here she is saying 'No, ma'am' to someone. Note: she gets the 'no, ma'am' from daycare and we've started to adopt it at home. Annabel has taken to scolding our (male) dog by saying 'No, ma'am, Conan!'.
This is a random video of her eating the other night, where she broke the cheese stick into snakes:
My mom says I was a kid who sat in a corner reading books and greatly preferred truth and logic over make believe (booooo I say!). I didn't even play with dolls. But I grew up and (I think) cultivated a love of the arts and respect for play and imagination (sort of what I got my master's in), and I'm doing my best to foster this innate creativity of hers. It's so much fun to watch.
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