More December 2010 Short Stories

Not sure if I mentioned this one already, Ian sometimes says “xbox close tray.” The new Kinect accepts voice input, and so I’m talking to it at times. He’s been listening.

Dec 5th Ian saw Mommy get a cut — he disappeared and came back with bandaids AND what we call goop, anti-infection cream. I can’t be sure, but perhaps one of these days better child-proofing at the new house?

Nina uses mama constantly now, literally every day. It is hard to confirm most of what she says because they tend to be one-offs. So she may or may not have also said:

hai
hello
thank you
bob the builder
uh huh
and when looking at a doll on Dec 7th, said “Baybee!” WITHOUT anybody saying something beforehand. (Like “Look at the baby!”)

Nina’s done the sign-language for milk but it looks similar to a wave. (The sign is a hand motion like milking a cow… which she interpreted as a sort of opening and closing of her hand.) However I noticed that if you correctly guess what she’s trying to say she squeals in happiness. So that goes something like this:
Nina signs.
Daddy – “Hi!”
Nina looks a little bewildered.
Daddy – “Oh… milk?”
Nina – “SQWEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!”

Nina was able to figure out that I had placed a toy she was after inside a different toy by sound alone. This seemed smart to me, as she wasn’t looking in my direction… it means she could reason the direction it happened, and what noise it has typically made in the past.

Another smart thing I saw Nina do recently was that she popped her zooey in her mouth just as I was about to feed her. Wait for it, that’s not the smart part — I looked at her like she was nuts and said “Hey now how do you expect me to feed you around that?” And she looked up at me and reached up popped her zooey out… and then popped it back into her mouth again. She did this as if to say “I can just pop it in and out as we go, Daddy.” I said “if you say so.” Held out a spoon of food, out came the zooey. Fed it to her, and back in it went. (And this went on for the entire meal, about 20 spoonfuls.)

Ian heard me accelerate my Honda civic onto a freeway and he said daddy, you have a race car!

Ian pointed out that a slice of bread (like from wonder bread) looks like a telephone, and then he pulled the crust off the top, held it up to his ear and said “Hello? It’s me Ian! Bye bye!””