The last week has been so hard. All the kids were sick, so we couldn't babysit at all. We had to wait until they were healthy again and we were sure we didn't catch the you-know-what from them. I did a couple of grocery store runs for them, but dropping off food, cough medicine, and TP didn't mean toddler cuddles. I had to keep my distance.
Today we were cleared to babysit again. Saints be praised! In the time apart, that little girl's vocabulary has tripled, at minimum. And her capacity for complex abstract thought has ballooned. She understands play in a way she couldn't a handful of weeks ago. She uses her imagination to create scenarios in the world around her in a way that shows she understands that it is separate from her. I love cognitive leaps. And we are getting the beginnings of sentence construction. For the last couple weeks she has been able to make short possessive phrases, like Daddy's keys or Grandma's car. Today she said "Doggies bark bark." Her pronunciation was a little less clear, but we understood it, and recognized there was a subject and verb. Also, not for nothing, she pointed at a photo of me and the Mr from around 2000-2001, and said, "Grandma Pa-pa-pa." This is only the second time I've heard her attempt to say my name. So excited.
I tried to sneak bananas into her diet, curled up in a Nutella crepe with whipped cream. No dice. She shook the bananas out and nibbled on the crepes. And then she got interested in the stack of gardening trays I had piled up near the spot where she was eating. She practiced making silly faces at me, and of course stopped when the camera came out. I did make her laugh at me, so fair trade. She did a whole lot of that today.
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