Our Valley View Home

It has been entirely too long since we have posted on this blog, and we owe everyone a big photo gallery update, but I thought I'd take just a sec and share a few of Sophie's recent fun sayings before they slip my mind. She calls a blanket a "bank-a-let" and tofu is "toe-food." When she wants to be picked up (87 times a day) she says either "mommyholdyou" or "daddyholdyou" or if she just wants someone, anyone, it's "mommydaddyholdyou." She loves doing sit-ups with Daddy, and calls them "head-ups." A new expression that she uses when she wants something (like a cookie or something else that she thinks we might not be eager to get for her) she'll say "I've got a idea" and then point. She's really doing a lot more complete phrases now. Instead of "more yogurt" for example, she'll say "like some more yogurt," or "Sophie like some more yogurt" which is pretty impossible to resist. We've met some new people lately, including a naturopathic doctor (Dr. Warnock) whom Sophie renamed "Dr. Warm-up," and we reconnected with our doula, Elizabeth, who is in Sophie's mind named "LittleBit." And one of our favorite things is when Sophie adds extra syllables to words as if she just can't get her tongue to stop forming the sounds. Examples are "Stephanie-nie" instead of Stephanie and "mommy-openenenen-it" when she wants something opened for her.

The other very cute thing Sophie does all the time now is interact with her new brother-to-be. She calls him "baby-in-the-belly" and is always pulling up my shirt to kiss him or pat him. She even will sometimes say "loveyou-baby." She started daycare for the first time last week and apparently all day yesterday she was talking about her baby brother. She seems to understand that he will come out of mommy, cry a lot and want lots of "milky." Hopefully her positive attitude toward him will continue when he is born sometime in the next month or so. We're looking forward to becoming a family of four while enjoying these last days and weeks as a threesome.

Sophie's first finger-painting project. This is what she made during the session pictured about 4 photos down...

Sophie loves to play this little Guinness tin whistle.The only problem is she likes to parade around with it in her mouth as she marches around the room which leads to her parents telling her to sit - never a popular request.

With last week's heat wave, Sophie spent much of her time in just a diaper. Here she is at the dinner table (outside on our deck) munching on her first ever ear of corn. It was pretty tasteless early-season stuff, but she loved it!

We took advantage of the hot, thirst-inducing weather to finally convince Sophie to drink from a sippy. For the last few months the only way she would drink was from an open cup, with one of us holding it or hovering close by to catch spills. Some yummy diluted apricot nectar with ice cubes proved too much to resist, and after a minor tantrum ("Opent! Opent!") she was sold on the sippy. And now she prances around the house with it, wielding it like she's some tipsy medieval noble with a flagon of ale.

We eat Indian food fairly often, and Sophie adores the shortcut raita we make to go with it (she loves anything yogurt). Here she is covered in the stuff. It's hard to see, but she has a chunk of cucumber in the clump of hair on the side of her head. Mealtimes are always a happening in our house.