Baby with a cellphone

Fern has figured out how to take a picture with Graham's phone, turn it around, and squeal at the results. Her latest photoessay follows.

Dear Fern (Part XXII)

Dear Fern,

New adjectives flooded into your vocabulary this month. You asked for the first time to wear a "pretty dress," and you describe things with words we're sure we never taught you on purpose: "fuzzy," "heavy," "cozy," "chilly," and countless others. Whenever you hit on an invented phrase that makes sense, you get really excited. "Cheese sandwich bacon" came to you one day: you know about cheese, you know about sandwiches, you love bacon, so putting them together gives you the ideal food!

Sentences are also interesting you. "I-want" is an easy construction, but you're also trying out some more complicated turns of phrase, like "I-no-like-it" and "Push-you-on-belly-swing." The record long sentence so far is "Let-me-I-want-touch-water-please." You tell jokes, too, usually about farting.

 
You picked the outfit yourself!

We're not sure when, exactly, but you have started to "pretend." It began with flying like a bird by flapping your arms -- that may be from your music class -- and has progressed to full-blown tea parties with tiny Play-Doh cups, saucers, and petit fours.

As always, you're really active, quite the dancer. The guitar player who sits and entertains outside our playground didn't used to excite you all that much, but now as long as he's playing something with a beat you're happy. And your acrobatics are progressing apace -- you can hardly see a horizontal bar without wanting to hang from it.

Group activities are starting to interest you more and more. The other day, you led a gaggle of toddlers in a mad game of Ring-Around-The-Rosey that left your dad with torn jeans and bruises. And you like leading: you love to encourage other kids to follow you places, although you usually move on once they're there. (You're a little disappointed, we think, if they don't show up!) The pursuit, it seems, is more important than the destination.

You still love bugs and worms, but lately you've insisted on showing all your discoveries to other people. Your preference is "kids" -- you must think that adults don't need to see another caterpillar -- and especially older boys. Maybe we're projecting, but we think you're proud that you can gently hold (and pet and caress and kiss) a worm that even the big, weapon-wielding boys are a little leery of.

We're moving this month -- today, in fact -- to a neighborhood closer to hiking trails and into a house with a backyard, but a bit farther away from the friends you've made down here. The loss of that community is sad, in a way, but we'll hold on to many of the friends we've made here, and we see a lot of good coming out of the challenge to take on a new playground and make new friends. Given how engaged, how verbal, how active you've been this month, we can only assume that you'll be hit the new neighborhood like a freight train!

We love you very, very much,

 

Mommy & Daddy

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Here's this month's slideshow. If you can't see the pictures down there, click this link.