big blue doggy

Our little Birdie is sick. She's got a runny nose, a cough, a sneeze and all those other things that come with the common cold. We've all been getting it this week, but somehow seeing it in a little toddler is the most pathetic.

Today, before her nap, she grabbed her big, blue, soft stuffed dog, and brought it over to me so the three of us could cuddle. She mostly wanted to hug the dog and hug me and have me sing to her, but at one point she ralleyed enough to grab the dog's foot, and wave it and say "hi!", which I thought was a rather advanced form of make-believe, given her age.

Brie's doing lots of new things these days, when not cast down by a cold. She can climb her slide and slide down it by herself (we were given a toddler-sized plastic play fort by Jim and Cyndi, and finally got it set up, much to our daughter's delight). She's learning new words right and left. The favorites this week are backpack ("bakpak"), tomato ("tuthta") and balloon ("b'lllloo"). This girl is getting VERY verbal. She now sometimes stops her play to come over and tell us what she's doing in a babbling conversation scattered through with real words we can recognize and nonesense words that mean nothing to anyone be her. But she keeps trying out words, and trying out the same words in different contexts, and applying her words to more than one thing of the same kind, and stuff like that. It's so much fun to begin to hear what the world looks like from her point of view.

ANNNNNND . . . Brie has made her first joke! When she learned to say "backpack", it was the best pronunciation of any two-syllable word she's ever attempted. It actually sounded like "backpack". So we made a big deal about it. And she said it again, and we laughed and applauded again, and so on.

So now, since she's learned that it gets such a good reaction, she uses it completely out of context, on purpose. So if you're over at our house, you might see us go get a sleepy girl out of her crib after a nap, and see her smile up sleepily and say, "backpack!" and then laugh, and laugh and laugh. It's not that she doesn't know what it is. She knows what it is, can point to it when we ask and all of that. It's just that she likes how we react when she says it, so she says it anytime she wants to get a laugh. And she's right, it IS pretty funny. :)

-Jess