We don’t have any updated pictures today. But thinking back on the day, there have been so many interesting occurrences that I had to get them down. Both Steve and I stayed home today and telecommuted as best as possible. We received about 3″ of snow starting at 8AM thru noon. And then because freezing rain starting at 4PM, we told Patty and Paulette to head home before the roads became unmanageable. I spent at least 3 hours playing with Katherine during the day and then another couple hours with her tonight before bedtime.
Active Playtime
Katherine now plays actively with her Little People Farm. She flips the chicken coop to hear the clucking and opens/closes the gate for neighing. She takes the rooster off and tries to put it back on the roof. Interestingly, she remembered that the little bed can flip up (farmer goes flying out of the barn). When I showed her the lever to flip the bed, she grasped it and tried to turn it. It required more dexterity than she had, but she went back to it again later to see if she could turn the lever. She must have spent several minutes playing with the barn before she flipped it over and walked away.
We’re really proud that Katherine is getting braver with some of her toys. We had bought in Santa Barbara a German inflatable red rocking horse called Rody. For the longest time, she would object to being put on the horse and try to get off or even cry. This past week, she’s started to enjoy rocking on Rody. She grasps on his red ears and uses her legs to try and rock the horse. Getting on the horse is a bit beyond her because she’s not tall enough to get her leg over the horse. But, she tries the nevertheless and slides off the horse with assistance.
I also bought her a pretty cool shape sorter book for Christmas. It has little puzzle pieces that she can insert in pages in a book. Once the pieces are inserted, they can then slide down into a box at the bottom of the book. While this sounds rather complex, Katherine understood the concept fairly quickly once we demonstrated it to her. She carries the book around if we leave it around. Once we dump the puzzle pieces on the carpet, she’ll pick a couple up and walk around with them. Katherine does the best with the page that has the simplest shapes – circle, square and triangle. She’ll try really hard to insert the shape in the page – unfortunately, she’s not quite coordinated enough to get it in on the first or second or third try. So, she’ll then jam the piece in any way she can – or she’ll even put the triangle in the square! What’s really neat is that she figured out that the pieces eventually go into a box with clear windows. So, she’s tried to skip the pages altogether and just get the puzzle pieces directly in the box!
Now that she does her Jumbo Puzzle and her shape sorter book, I put the plastic top with cut out shapes on her little Lego bucket. At first, she watched me insert the flower Lego in the corresponding shape and so on with the oval and triangle shapes. She then grabbed an oval Lego and inserted it (with help) where she had seen me put the oval. Given her relative success with the oval, she tried to jam the triangle into the oval hole – less success but still fun.
I guess what we’re seeing more and more of is an ability to do some basic problem solving – which is very cool. I just wish that she would spend more time with toys before cruising on to the next toy. I’ve put away some toys in the upstairs closet. Hopefully, if we have fewer toys out, she’ll spend more time with the toys available (which is still considerable!).
Imitating Mom
We have a new game now when we eat. Katherine has determined that she likes to eat apple, not just the slices we give her but the apple itself. The game goes like this. I take a bite of an apple. I then hand it to her. She takes teeny bite out of the skin and apple using her 7 teeth. She hands it back to me (occasionally taking more than her fair share of bites). What’s really cute is that she’ll say “ummppphhh!” as she takes the bite.
Steve has a lot of boxes in our den. Tonight, Katherine discovered that one box had packing peanuts. She grabbed them and started breaking them apart. I told and showed her how to take her peanuts and put them in another big box. Once I did it, she would then do the same. That said, the floor has its fair share of peanuts left. ๐