I have been reflecting on these last six months that we last saw our family and am amazed at how much our dear little girl has learned and grown. She has learned to go up and down stairs, walk turning into runs, holding hands when walking, a plethora of words to express herself, climbing on to anything and everything mommy and daddy will let her, and so on. She is also now taller than the dining room table. Penelope has also started having one LONG nap during the day (anywhere between 3 and 4 hour nap or else she'll take two smaller naps that equal about 4 hours). We have a friend of ours who is a school nurse about our age who is always interested in seeing what Penelope is doing now. She came over the other night and asked if we'd started colors with her. Well, we just finished up some animals and their noises but we hadn't started colors. So, these last couple days we were curious to see if she could point some colors out to us. She won't really say the color names very much but Chris decided to conduct an experiment tonight with her. We know from past experience that she understands and can do things before we realize (she started crawling and cruising the furniture the same day- so we realize now that she knew how to walk before we got it on camera).
Here's the experiment: We have a star stacker (instead of a round cone stacker) with 4 colored stars of different sizes. The colors are orange, blue, pink, and green. As Penelope was playing with them this evening, Chris asked her to hand him the blue star. She did. Then he asked for the green star. She handed it over. He then waited for a time to pass before trying it again. Instead of him asking tho, he had me ask for the blue star. Penelope handed it over, a little hesitant because she was playing with them still. We will try the experiment tomorrow to see if it's still the same and then use different objects that are different colors and see what she does. But we're pretty sure she knows what each color is, just doesn't say them to us yet.
Penelope has so many words now, including animals and some of their noises (what noise do you make for a giraffe?). Her favorite phrase during the day is "'atch elmo" (watch elmo), although I don't give into it more now. She loves identifying letters and what they say ("j" says "jump", and she proceeds to jump). She can correctly identity a handful or so of letters. Chris took her to the park one Saturday and she walked up to a woman (with a magazine) with her daughter and as Penny approached her, the woman asked what Penny was in to and Chris said that she loves learning her letters. The woman then said "Isn't she a little young for that?". I feel so much every day that Penelope is just a sponge, absorbing everything said and seen. I am trying to take advantage of that as much as I can when she's focused (which is not all her waking hours, trust me). Penelope has learned the word "happy" from nursery (we have music time and we sing "if you're happy and you know it"). She claps as I sing "If you're happy and you know it" and it is so precious.
I am loving being a mom right now with such a sweet spirit of a daughter. I am also very lucky to be able to stay home with her and watch her learn and grow. My other luck is that I have a wonderful husband who helps when he is home. My sweet, darling husband plays with his little girl (and she is such a daddy's girl at this point) and gets up with her in the morning so that I can rest a little longer. Being a parent is exhausting sometimes but I know it's what I'm meant to do right now in my life.
Well, speaking of exhausting, I'm headed for bed. I hope you all enjoy reading about my little girl's growth and progress.
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