Development (Children, Not Property)

Oh, my. The baby just came up to me and clear as a bell, said, "I want my Daddy."

OK, so it was actually more like, "Ah wan' mah Da-deeeee," with the ultimate syllable on Daddy trailing off into a sort of buzz. But! It was a clear and recognizable sentence, no question about it at all!

I've suspected for the last couple of weeks that she was popping out with the occasional sentence, but I wasn't sure if I was really seeing (hearing) something, or if I was just being a loving mommy reading too much into random sounds. It sure sounded, though, like she was coming up with "I want" an awful lot.

And now there's no doubt about it! Woohoo!

In honor of this moment, I'm really going to have to stop calling her The Baby on here and move her up a notch to The Toddler. She's been walking for months now, talking almost as long, and now she's using complete sentences. It's time to let her move on.

Excuse me while I go whimper in the corner for a few moments.

Moving on to the preschooler, she is currently wandering about the living room, singing to an imaginary friend. She's been doing that a lot lately. Both the singing and the imaginary friend, that is. The identity of the imaginary friend keeps changing. One moment it's Uniqua from the Backyardigans, the next it's Anna from preschool, who we are having a playdate with on Monday. Only the preschooler wants to play with her now, so the part of Anna will be played by the imaginary friend.

It's fascinating to hear her narrate her life in song like this. She gets embarrassed and stops for awhile if I let her know I'm paying attention to her singing, so I try not to. Sometimes I can't help it, because she's so sweet and funny I'll smile at her in spite of myself, but if I do that she'll lower her head and give me an embarrassed little smile as she looks up at me from under her bangs.

I can remember doing that when I was little. It was a very private thing, I remember. I stopped doing it because ... well, I'm not really sure why, except that it had to do with being very sad. And Dad. Naturally.

The preschooler is singing, "Be a dinosaur, and my costume, and my dinosaur. Oh, I love my oh-own costume. The pumpkin is my slipper." (She's wrapped up in an old scarf of mine, and has a plastic pumpkin bucket from Halloween on her foot. I'm not quite sure how that translates into being a dinosaur, but hey, it works for her!)