Keeping up with Kathleen is truly a full-time job! She has boundless energy and grows and changes constantly. She picks up new skills every day, it seems. She's still signing and isn't talking very much. Every now and then she'll repeat quite clearly a word I've said. But when I ask her to repeat it, she'll generally sign it instead of speaking it again. She does, however, babble almost constantly. Her babbling has a distinct inflection to it. It certainly sounds as though she's talking, except that (to her dismay) I can't understand a word of it.
Lately Kathleen has begun to play with her dolls and stuffed animals more, carrying them around, patting them, putting blankets on them, and even feeding them. Here she is feeding her monkey some of her chicken nuggets when we went out to lunch:
Kathleen's very sweet to her little charges, at least for a while. Then -- abruptly -- she'll elect to do something else, unceremoniously dumping the doll on its head as she charges off across the room.
Recently Kathleen has been amusing herself with a box from Costco. She is simply delighted with this toy:
(What a mom! Such expensive, elaborate toys!) She uses it for everything. She puts toys in it. She carries it around the house. She climbs in and out of it. She sits in it to watch Signing Time or to read books or for no reason at all. I've been tempted to take the box down to the trash, because it somehow seems wrong to have an empty box sitting around one's living room, but can't bring myself to get rid of it, because Kathleen enjoys it so much!
Kathleen wants to try everything that I do. For example, she likes to play with my make-up brushes while I get ready in the morning. She asks for lotion and rubs her little hands together. She loves having her hair blown dry. Although she likes to carry around her own little purse, she prefers mine. She wants to taste everything that I eat or drink. (She has thus far been persuaded from getting too near my tea in the morning, and has settled for signing "hot" the entire time I drink it.) She likes to put things in and out of the dishwasher and the laundry. When she's up in the loft, she tries to type on the computer. And a few days ago, while I was practicing a piece for Easter, Kathleen began to sing, too!
While she's quite the little mimic, Kathleen also has distinct ideas about what she will and won't do, about what she likes and what she doesn't. Her food preferences seem to vary by the hour. She will not keep a barrette in her hair, although she finds the barrettes fascinating. She'll put the barrette up next to her hair, but as soon as I snap it into place, she pulls it out. She has discovered the universal toddler trick of going limp, so that I cannot set her down when she wishes to be held. (That only works out the way she'd like sometimes.) When I turned on NPR in the car a few days ago, she quickly made it clear that she'd rather listen to the Signing Time cd. She prefers to sit in chairs by herself:
I have a feeling that this independence is just beginning... It won't be long before Kathleen wants to do everything by herself, I'm sure!
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