Random Bits of Cuteness

I bet I have the only toddler in the whole wide world who, every morning, asks “nail, feet?” while pointing to where I keep the nail clippers and sticking her toes in front my face so I can clip her nails. Now if only she’d do that with her hands…

When Carrie said Murphy’s name correctly today I briefly contemplated officially changing his name to “Mercy” just so I could hear her call him that for a little while longer.

As adorable as it is to hear Carrie sing “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” to herself, it’s way more adorable to hear her sing it while helping a teddy bear touch his head, shoulders, knees and toes.

Carrie’s spoken vocabulary has taken off at an amazing rate. At last count she had over 70 words, but that was over a week ago and I’d guess she’s up to more than 100 now. Some of her more recent additions are “no!”, accompanied by furious head-shaking and – and I can hardly believe this myself but it’s been repeated and witnessed several times – she counts to ten. Well, mostly. She refuses to believe in the existence of the number 7. This is extra amusing because this evening at the bookstore I was looking through board books about numbers so I could encourage this new-found interest and the first one I picked up was misprinted and went 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 8, 9, 10. I was tempted to buy it anyway.

But the cutest, most adorable thing in her entire vocabulary is how Carrie says the dogs’ names. Specifically, how she says Murphy’s name. If you click on the picture below it should take you to a quicktime clip (638 KB) of Carrie saying the dogs’ names.

The other morning after Carrie woke up but before I went in to get her, Murphy barked at something. The next thing I heard over the monitor was “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy! Uh-oh! Mercy!” I hope I never forget that, that when I’m old and senile I can still remember that sweet little voice calling out for Murphy.

I was going through some images I took this past month, and I found a picture of Carrie with her sunglasses on – the same sunglasses I bought her last year! On the left, Carrie at 4 months sporting her sunglasses; on the right, Carrie at 17 months with the same sunglasses. (They’re a little worse for the wear, one of the arms is bent so they’re a little crooked.) I wonder if they’ll still fit her next year?

This is why people have children in the first place, right? To do the household chores?

Just kidding! No one needs to be calling CPS on me. Carrie loves the Swiffer – she cried when we took it away so she could eat dinner. Now if I could just get her to vacuum, dust and fold (instead of unfold) the laundry, I could knit more. :)

Carrie has also been really into the Itsy Bitsy spider song lately. She asks for it by signing “again”, putting both her arms straight up and waving them back and forth. That’s the motion she does for the whole song – it’s supposed to be the “out comes the sun” part of the song. Unfortunately, she uses the “again” sign every time I finish it, so I have to sing it over and over again. And then she pouts when I tell her we’re all done. She’s very much into repetitive things, and can watch little video snippets of herself on my computer over and over until I finally tell her enough.

Have you voted yet today? Carrie did! (The sticker you can’t read in the picture is one of those “I voted today” stickers. Silly overexposure issues!) She actually did help me vote, too: I brought her into the booth and she helped me pull the lever for the curtain back when we were done.

OK, so how bad is my hack job on her hair? I now know why it is that people go to school to cut hair: it’s really, really hard! Oh, well, at least it’s out of her eyes, and it’s only hair, so it will grow back – hopefully before Thanksgiving! I was thinking that since it had only been three weeks since her first haircut, there was no way I was going to bring her to the salon every three weeks, and how hard could it be to just trim her bangs? Yeah. Famous last words. Good thing she’s too young to be traumatized by it.

You know what’s really cute, that you would never think would be cute before becoming a mom? Being up at 5 AM trying to get your baby back to sleep, and having her point to one of her shoes on the floor and say “sh, sh, sh” over and over again. She definitely knows the word “shoe”, as well as “socks” – that one she says as almost a “ts” sound. I kind of thought that ‘s’ sounds came later, but Carrie seems to be really into them. Then again, she has a complete obsession with shoes and socks, which I’m sure is going to cost us a lot of money when she gets older.

Carrie figured out how to dance today! She bops up and down with her knees. We tried to catch it on video, but every time we started filming she stopped. Go figure. She was dancing to “All Star” (Smash Mouth) and then “Best Years of our Lives” (Baha Men). I’m putting together a playlist for her party, so I’ve been playing more/louder music in the daytime than usual – I generally try to keep it a bit quieter so she can hear what I’m saying when I talk and read books to her. But I think she’s enjoying the extra music time, so I’ll probably make more of an effort to play it on a daily basis.

Carrie’s been doing a couple other cute things lately. This morning at breakfast, she was eating grapes. The dogs, as usual, were stationed on either side of her high chair. Carrie looked at a piece of grape, looked at Molly, looked at the grape, and then dropped it for Molly to eat. Then she did the same thing on the other side for Murphy. That’s the first time I’ve seen her deliberately give the dogs each a piece of food – before now she’d just drop things and let them scramble for it.

And she’s also mastered walking backwards recently. If I’m sitting on the floor, she’ll turn around in front of me and back up until she can sit in between my legs or on my lap (depending on how I’m sitting). The funny thing is that when we play with her ball, instead of sitting across from me, she’ll back up, sit in my lap and roll it away from both of us. I guess she thinks we’re playing with an imaginary friend?

Today Carrie and I went to a baby shower. She has met Nina (the guest of honor) once before, about 6 months ago. And although Carrie’s really starting to give lots of hugs to Denis and me, she hardly ever bestows them on anyone else. So I was absolutely shocked when she walked right up to where Nina was sitting on the couch and gave her a really long hug, right around her tummy. Do you think she knows there’s a baby in there?

And tonight we finally admitted that there is definitely a tooth in Carrie’s mouth – you can even feel it if you bravely stick your finger in there – so we broke out the toothbrush I bought for her when she was only 4 months old. It came with flouride-free fruit-flavored toothpaste, which Carrie apparently thought was divine. She got this puzzled little look on her face when I stuck the brush in, but then started munching away happily. (She didn’t read the directions on the box which clearly state it’s for brushing, not chewing.)

The other night at dinner, Carrie did the cutest thing ever. (I say that a lot, don’t I?) My parents were over, and we were all sitting at the table together. Carrie looked at my dad and blew him a kiss – her kisses are preceded by a sort of lemon face, she really works hard at them – and waited until he blew one back. The she looked at the next person at the table, Denis, and blew him a kiss. And so on all around the table. It was so sweet!

She also gives really good hugs now, to people and toys. In fact, my mom bought this enormous stuffed dog for Carrie to play with at her house, and if you tell Carrie to go hug her dog she’ll run over to it and collapse on top of it to hug it. She really likes it if you stand the dog up on its hind legs – it’s about her height, actually – and make it hug her back.

(Sometimes I worry that my blog is becoming an incredibly boring “look how cute my kid is” sort of blog, but I don’t want to forget any of this. Besides, it’s my blog, nobody else has to read it if it’s that boring, right?)

See? I knew I didn’t need to cut her hair! Doesn’t she look cute with a ponytail? So far (knock wood) she hasn’t tried to pull it out like she does with barrettes – we’ll see how long that lasts. If all else fails, I may need to relent and give her some bangs.

So it may just be something my family made up, but when you blow a raspberry on someone’s skin (like a baby’s tummy, what were you thinking?) we’ve always called it a zorbit. Well, Carrie’s been really good at blowing raspberries for months now, but today she learned how to zorbit. She was sitting in my lap, leaning over my arm to look at something she’d dropped on the floor. For some reason, she put her mouth on my elbow and blew a raspberry. That made her giggle, but then I blew one on her elbow and she about fell off my lap because we were both laughing so hard!

Oh, and Carrie has started intentionally feeding the dogs from her high chair tray. She’ll pick up a Cheerio (or whatever she’s eating) bring it to her mouth like she’s going to eat it, and then look directly at me while she puts her hand over the edge of the tray and drops the food. I’ve been trying very hard to keep a straight face when she does this, because she’s obviously trying to gauge my reaction, but it’s so hard not to laugh because it’s so darn funny. Actually, the other day she snuck food under the tray to Murphy, and I’m pretty sure that was intentional too.