New Happenings with Ellie

Ellie's got a few new favorite pasttimes.

The first is counting. She's definitely my kid. She LOVES to count. She counts everything... whether it's the flowers on the page of a book or her tub letters or the number of apple pieces she has for dessert. Right now, she can count up to eight, and then she repeats seven and eight over and over again thereafter unless you say "nine" and then she'll say "ten". That pesky nine!

We've been working on ABCs, too, and we're making progress. We sing the song in the bath, we do the ABC books before dinner, pretty much whenever and wherever. So far, she's good on A, B, C, G, H, J, P, T, W, X, Y, and Z. She sings them at the right parts of the song, now she just has to get all the letters in between. She can also recognize some letters, namely A, Q, T, W, and Y. I know, random.

She's also gotten really good at body parts. I can ask her where anything is, and she'll repeat it and point to that part. This past week, she's even initiated the game, so now she says and points to the body part, and I repeat. She loves it. Elbow has been her favorite 2 weeks strong.

Lastly, she's started to memorize her books. Again, she's so my kid. That was actually how I started "reading". I'd memorize the books, and then recite them as if I were reading them. My mom thought she had a 2-year-old genius on her hands until she realized I could tell her the story without the book in front of me. It did help me learn to read though because I started recognizing the words that way. I'm hoping Ellie will pick it up like that, too.

Her favorite is her Winnie the Pooh and friends Super Sleuth's counting book. She's enthralled with it. She's started yelling out parts of the story as she turns the page, so excited that she knows what's going to happen. She memorized how many bugs or flowers or whatever are on each page, and she counts them out sometimes without even looking at them. We even got it on video, which is so cool because we've been bad with video lately.

Of course now everytime someone comes by to visit, Harry pulls the book out and hopes Ellie will "perform" for our guests. LOL. He's just so proud of her, but I keep telling him she's not a circus act. She eventually goes and gets the book anyway, so there's no need to push it. He just gets really excited.

Oh, and she's learned a new phrase. "Let go". Yeah. If I try and take something away, she cries, "let go!" Sigh. I'm sure "gimme!" is not too far behind.