Through the Eyes of a Child

Some funny stories to start: Evie loves ketchup, loves it to the point that she will eat it straight (which is something she must have gotten from Seth because I've heard a story of when he was a youngster staying late at school with his mom and he asked one of his mom's fellow teachers if he could use his ketchup in the fridge.  Later the teacher saw him eating straight ketchup and said he thought he wanted it to put on something, not just eat straight from the bottle).  So, anyway, Evie loves ketchup but she calls it sauce, which she pronounces more like sauce-uh, almost like salsa.  So the other day we were having apples and hot dogs for dinner (well, she was - we ate something more pleasant), and she started dipping her apples into the ketchup.  I asked her what she was eating and she said, "apple-sauce-uh".

Another favorite food is any kind of melon.  She likes watermelon, honeydew, and cantaloupe, and she asks for it frequently.  But when she says melon, it comes out more like money, so all Sunday morning she was asking me for money.  I'm sure it's just a snapshot of what's to come when she actually does mean money and not melon.

You can hear her get a little closer to the actual word melon in the second production in that video.  And tonight, she asked for meln (one syllable), so she's really getting there.  She's growing up so quickly!  Yesterday when she was in the bathtub she said, "Potty."  Now, we haven't done any potty training at all.  I mean, I've taken her with me to the potty and talked to her about what's happening, but I've never really asked her if she needed to go potty or wanted to.  I just haven't thought we're quite there yet.  So when she requested potty from the bathtub, I thought, well, okay, sure, I'd rather do that than have her go in the tub.  So I got her out of the bath and sat her on the potty and she did have some gas (I'm sure she'll appreciate me sharing that later) but no real need for the potty.  But I think that's a pretty big step.

A few pictures from this week.  I cannot get over how tall she is now.  She climbs the steps of the bonus room all by herself and she can open the doors with the doorknob.

 My dainty Southern girl, eating fried chicken with a fork.  (Don't worry, I pulled the meat off for her after this so she wouldn't get any bones or skin.)

 We've been spending a lot more time outside now that the weather is nice.  Evie probably plays outside for at least 3 hours a day at daycare.  They have a nice playground with tons of shade from the trees and she has been asking me to go outside with her when we get home.  This picture below was at dusk a few days ago.  We watered the roses in the front bed and then she wanted to sit on the porch swing.  Then she wandered around the porch picking up whatever random leaf bits or bark had fallen onto the porch and dropping them into the flower bed below.  I just love this sweet and curious face, studying the petal so intently.

Unfortunately not all of our outside moments are this pleasant.  Yesterday afternoon we sat on the deck and I brushed the dogs who had all just had a bath earlier that day.  Evie was enjoying running around collecting the dog fur and tossing it off the deck into the yard or attempting to make Herbie eat it (he wasn't so pleased about that).  At one point when she was leaning over to gather a fur clump, ChuuChu bumped her from behind and Evie went face first into the deck.  She got a scrape on her nose, poor baby, but she recovered gracefully and quickly.

One moment that I enjoyed so much came soon after that.  The wind started picking up and the leaves in the trees were rustling, the branches swaying everywhere, and Evie just stopped what she was doing, looked up at the trees, and smiled.  I saw that childlike wonder at something as simple as wind in the trees.  I remember how magical I thought the wind was when I was a kid, how colors were so bright, how my imagination was captured by almost everything.  And it made me really take a moment to stop and enjoy the world and thank God again for these precious gifts: Evie, nature, life itself.