Present Day: Kvelling Again :-)

While y'all wait for me to put up my next post about the trip (see note at the end of this post), I just thought I'd do a little online kvelling over my niece.  Mommy had an all-day certification course to deal with, so Grandma & Grandpa had the little dynamo at home... so Uncle Brian stopped by mid-afternoon to try & spell them a bit.  The Pipsqueak and I had a very nice time; we watched the birds in the yard, took a nice walk outside, did a little sketching, shared a bit of dinner, and I even got an unsolicited hug & cuddle later on as I got her into her jammies! (Mommy was exhausted & had given up trying; Grandma & Grandpa knew better than to even try at that point, leaving me the only adult awake enough[?] to attempt the feat.)

What got me kvelling again was some of what the Pipsqueak said & did...

- Looking out the window at the hole in a nearby tree that's just had a little woodpecker move in, she kept pointing & saying, "Doggie!" (her general-purpose "that's an animal" statement). I pointed to a Robin moving around in the yard and told her it's not a doggie, it's a bird; I said that maybe 2-3 times when she looked at me, very clearly said, "bird!" and used that word properly the rest of the afternoon. (Okay, it was more like "buud" but she got the idea. <g>)

- During our walk in the yard she was interested in my SUV (which she's never been in before) so I opened the door & plopped her into the passenger seat. After a couple of minutes looking around, she whacked the seat next to her and commanded, "sit DOWN!", then pointed at the steering wheel and asked, "Beep?" When I honked the horn, she laughed and for the next several minutes would periodically interrupt her exploration to point at the wheel and ask for another beep. Pretty cool, since she's still riding backwards in her car seat and can't see where honking horns come from -- she got the idea of the wheel going "beep" from "The Wheels on the Bus" (one of her three favoritest songs).

- The one event that caught us all by surprise came after we went back inside. The Pipsqueak pushed a pen & paper across the table to me and said, "Doggie!" so I drew a few. (It helps that she's no art critic, 'cause I'm no artist!) I started running out of room on the page, so I drew a little star and showed it to her. She contemplated it for about 30 seconds, then drew herself up to her full miniscule height, held her hands up over her head, and with a big smile said, "Up in the sky!" This was the longest sentence any of us have heard her say, and (based on "Twinkle Twinkle" being one of her current favorite songs) just blew us all away with how she put the picture, the word, the idea, and the song together in just seconds & then let us know about it. Not bad for someone a bit shy of 22 months! :-)

Oh, and now she's made a game of calling me "Mommy" -- I'll say, "No, I'm not your mommy, who am I?" and she'll laugh and say "Uncle!" a couple of times.

:-)

Okay, maybe this post doesn't have a lot of deeply meaningful philosophical statements, but I'm proud of the Pipsqueak and wanted to share it with everybody!

Meanwhile, I'm still trying to figure out what to do with/to/about all the photos I was thinking of including in my upcoming post about our nighttime cruise through Guangzhou on the Pearl River... Should have it straightened out (and posted!) soon...