Imagination

It blows my mind how all of a sudden Molly has learned how to play on her own. This morning while I was folding laundry she took a curved block over to the screen door to our deck and held it up to the door frame and said "fix." Then she picked another shape block and carried it over and held it up. After a while she had a little pile of blocks in front of the door and she said "tools." (We just fixed our screen door recently and she's been following Daddy around lately watching him fix things with tools).

Just now as I was catching up on blogs she was filling a glass with water in the sink and stirring it with a fork and saying "cook." The other day she found three chopsticks and a sushi rolling mat in a drawer and it kept her busy for a ridiculous amount of time. She rolled the sticks into the mat and, I assume, did a bunch of other stuff -- I was so grateful to have some time to focus on my own stuff that I missed most of it. Here was the part when she was laughing and sticking the chopsticks into the wheels of this desk chair.

She spent a while trying to get them to stay in her pockets. She LOVES clothes with pockets.
This is almost as delightful as the new words she blurts out every day. I can't keep up. It's amazing the amount of things she's absorbing. She can pretty routinely count to three and occasionally makes it to four. She has recently added orange and yellow to her repertoire of colors and even gets colors right most of the time now. Just yesterday we noticed that she's starting to put "s" on the end of plural words, something you really only notice when she says
things like "two sheeps" or "two milks."

We've had a lot of activity in the past week, the highlight being a visit from Oma and Grandpa. One of the coolest things about her learning to talk is she can tell us at odd moments when she's thinking about somebody. All this week it's been "Grandpa. Oma." all the time. Now she's randomly saying "Freddy" because we just watched a video of him and "Lucy" because we saw her picture (she didn't even need me to tell her who Lucy was -- she just saw the picture and started saying it). We were in the sandbox yesterday and she held up a toy and said "Grandma."

A few more random shots. On a whim (because her nap was short and I felt like I would go crazy if we stayed home all day) I took Molly blueberry picking yesterday. She ate herself silly and then we went to a playground to continue eating ourselves silly. It was the first time I felt like I could just sit at a distance and let her climb around by herself on the smaller part of the playground. After we were there a while, a mom showed up with a baby and two older boys (3 and 5) and Molly walked right into in the middle of the boys' Star Wars/army/Transformers game. They pretended she was the bad guy, climbed over her and even at one point playfully kicked her. She ran around after them and couldn't get enough. She followed them up a ladder and down a big-kid slide. At one point one of the boys shouted "activate!" and Molly said "activate!" It was fantastic.

Here we are back at home with an empty blueberry container -- a whole quart consumed in less than 24 hours.



Oh, and one more shot. This is Molly licking homemade hummus. She gets right up close when I'm cooking and wants to eat everything ... bread dough, jalepeno peppers, raw green beans. It makes things pretty crazy. She's taken to taking big bites out of raw onion.

Now she wants peaches. She's been very patient. Time for lunch!