Patterns

Evie did a couple of things this week that just absolutely astounded us and while we were pondering over how she picks up on all these things, Seth and I determined that it's really all about pattern recognition.  Evie has picked up on a variety of different kinds of patterns and associated them with language and that, frankly, just blows my mind.  Not that it's unique to Evie or anything but it's just amazing how the mind works...

For example, over the weekend while Evie wasn't feeling very good we let her watch some TV which is definitely not the norm here.  Evie reads lots of books and plays with toys, but to my knowledge she's never seen any of the Charlie Brown characters.  We threw on Charlie Brown's Thanksgiving special or whatever it was, and Evie sees snoopy and says, "woof woof".  I know I've marveled at her identification of dogs before, but I'm just so surprised that she can see Snoopy who, frankly, doesn't look all THAT much like a real dog, and identify him as a woof woof.  However, later a real live husky was on TV and she said "meow", so, you know, grain of salt.

Another pattern that she was picking up on which I didn't realize is the bedtime routine.  We don't make a big deal out of going to bed - there's no wind up and pitch with words of, It's bed time, time to go to sleep or anything like that.  I'll walk her over to Seth and he kisses her and says night night, but it's not a big ordeal or anything.  So Saturday, after a day of full-blown and unusual grumpiness from her because I'm sure her ear was still hurting badly from the infection, it was about 7:30 and she came up to me and put her head on my shoulder.  So I said, probably for the first time ever to give her this instruction, "Go kiss Dada night night."  And she did!  She walked over to him and put her arms up and gave him and hug and a kiss and then marched over to the stairs, ready to go brush teeth.  Our jaws dropped.

This week, Evie also added a ton of new sounds to her repertoire!  Hopefully you can hear her responses to knowing what sounds all these animals make.  Just last night she added that the duck and chicken say cluck, but she makes the cluck with her tongue.  I don't know if that's just an Evie-ism since she can't say quack or cluck, or maybe they are doing animal sounds at school, but either way it's pretty cute.

And I have to share this video of her from last night, cracking herself up by playing peek-a-boo.  Warning, if you had your volume cranked up for the last video, you might want to turn it down for this one.