On this visit to my parents’ house, Margaret has learned how to stand up without the aid of any convenient furniture (or, as it’s my parents’ house, and some of their chairs were crafted long ago to stimulate good posture, preferably standing up, inconvenient furniture). She can even stand up while holding something.
She can apparently also read while she walks, so that’s good.
Margaret has been disgusted by the lack of content on her blog recently, so this morning, she decided to do something about it.
I think her title has a certain flair, don’t you?
I think Margaret has been hearing way too much talk about hybrid technology, because she decided to cross two of her toys today.
I think she’s figured out how to hack her shape-sorter. Humph.
In Margaret’s world, all things are phones until proven otherwise.
And we’re not sure what would prove it otherwise, as she is capable of talking on anything.
Two days ago, she answered a cheese sandwich, talked to it for a while, and then passed it to me.
This morning, she talked for a while on a puzzle piece.
In short, this scene, where she holds some non-phone object up to me for me to talk to, is common in my life right now.
In this instance, it was a piece of a stacking toy that needed to speak with me. Life is very busy.
One of the things that Margaret enjoys is music, and so spending some time with her cousin Josh is nice, as he is an extraordinary pianist.*
A few nights ago, however, Margaret was moved to correct Josh’s playing, pointing out that he needed a little more from the left hand.
This is a pernicious habit, and I think she learned it from her paternal grandparents.
*By this I mean extraordinarily good, incidentally.
This is for you, Patrick.
For months, ever since she was born, certain uncles of Margaret’s have been agitating to get her on a horse. I take this to be an attempt to kill my precious baby, but I usually bow to pressure in these sorts of situations, so here you are.
(This is an old post, that I’ve been needing to write for a while. What can I say? She does cute things with astonishing rapidity).
I’ve been trying to teach Margaret to feed herself with a spoon. She likes grabbing the spoon from me and smearing food everywhere but her mouth helping me feed her, so I figured we should lay down a tarp and let her have a shot.
Really. They make floor tarps for baby. We went for Cars instead of Disney Princesses, because as we’ve discussed before, I’m allergic to Disney Princesses.*
Anyway, I’m not saying that this was an unmitigated success – or even a mitigated success – but I think that we made some strides.
She held the spoon, which is good.
And she got that the spoon went into the bowl.
And she got that you used the spoon to get food from the bowl to the mouth.
She also got (eventually) that the food was supposed to go in the bowl of the spoon, though she was a little fuzzy on how it was meant to get there.
I also learned that it was far easier than I imagined for applesauce to be a finger food.
Margaret also learned that spoons are very useful when you’re trying to get your suction-bottomed bowl up off the tray and put it on your head.**
Eventually, she decided that this whole spoon business was too much, and considered her options.
She then took what seemed to her the most sensible course of action.
*There was a book that came out recently that discusses the inevitability of the princess phase, and I’m fine with that, but when she goes in it, we’re going to start negotiating a marriage for her that is politically and economically advantageous to us. She can be a princess, but she’s going to be an historically accurate one.
**Because I have lightning-quick reflexes when it comes to preventing my daughter from pouring applesauce on her head, it didn’t actually end up there.
