Ren Plays With Crayons
Hi,
There are some new videos coming. We've taken some nice ones in the last few days that make me laugh out loud.
Prior to a video, I thought I'd mention that Ren is developing in really satisfactory ways. I can say without equivocation that she is the happiest person I know. She's constantly in a great mood, and seems to really be able to self-manage staying there. She's really a delight to spend an evening with because it's her driving the action, and coming up with new fun stuff to do. The first floor of the house is like a big playground for keeping both herself and us amused. Some stuff from the last few days:
- She's learning some food words and using them to make requests. Prior to this if a food item came into her field of view (say, someone opened the fridge), she'd point, and sometimes she'd pull us to the kitchen. But now she'll just tell me she wants "apple" or "water".
- Hiroko was lying on the floor, and Ren found a blanket, dragged it on top of her, and tucked her in.
- Ren laid out a napkin on the floor, put one of her puppet-dolls on top of it, went and found a diaper, and "changed" the doll. Wish we'd got her on camera doing this, but we couldn't get her to repeat it.
- When she wakes in the morning, she'll sing portions of various songs she knows. She's starting to sequence groups of them together, in particular making progress on "The Alphabet Song".
- A couple of nights ago, she spontaneously hit me in the head with a block. I sternly told her no, and she reacted by beating herself a couple times with the block to demonstrate that it didn't hurt. When I told her no to that, she quickly tucked the block away and started playing some music. I could see an adult reacting to being told not to do in just about the same fashion.
- It's probably true of other babies (again, I have no frame of reference) but I'm always startled by how perceptive she is. She knows the moods of everyone in the house and her behavior changes with our moods (even we aren't that perceptive about our moods). She knows when I'm trying to distract her. She has no problem with me roving the house (often when it's just the two of us, we leave each other alone) but if I go into the basement, she becomes instantly upset, even if she didn't see or hear me go...I don't know how she knows.
These two vids are from when I took her to this year's Printers Row Book Fair. They had this kids' area, and I sat Ren down and showed her these crayons. She had absolutely zero interest in coloring (no matter how much I demonstrated it), but was only interested in gathering and arranging the crayons. These videos don't really show the intensity of the behavior we've seen other times, but here they are.
By the way, the band in the background was an alt-rock band specializing in kids' songs (think They Might Be Giants) and they were awesome.
