Life with Lydia

Today I pulled out my old A-frame house for Lydia to play with. It’s fun to watch her discover my old, favorite toy.

This afternoon, while we were messing around outside, Lydia stopped, listened, looked up, pointed, and said “Airplane!”. We get something new each day.

In the last few days Lydia has started chattering a lot. In the car she sits in her seat and chatters away. While playing she talks. Pretty much all day she chatters now. Though it sounds like nonsense to us, you can tell she’s speaking in sentences because of her cadence and inflection. And she repeats the same thing over and over.

Sometimes it even comes out in German! Today she repeated “ich habe” quite a bit. One day soon I’m sure she’ll come out with an English or Spanish sentence, too.

We pulled out the no-mess markers and paper for some fun drawing time this afternoon. Well, today the box and the marker tops turned out to be more fun than art.

Today Lydia pretended for the first time! She held up a leaf in the pool and pretended to eat it, saying “nam, nam” and pretending to chew. How exciting! She didn’t actually eat it, she only pretended to! This opens a whole new world of play and creativity for her. How cute!

Yesterday we had music class again. About a month ago Lydia and I started the class. During the first class she spent most of her time exploring the room with me chasing her. By the second class she’d caught on and loved it. She clapped, danced and paid attention.

She still continues to love it. And when we play the class CD at home you can see her paying close attention to the music. You can see it in her eyes and watch her do some of the steps.

One of her toys plays one of the class tunes, among many others. When she hears that particular tune she does the class move that goes with it. What a smarty! She recognized the tune herself, with no coaching. Pretty neat, huh! It’s great to see her make these sort of connections.

“Waduh.” That’s what Lydia answered last night when we asked her what she was bathing in. The other day she said “elbow”, clear as day.

And this morning she was asking a question. Over and over and over. We knew it was a question since she had the rising inflection at the end of the sentence. The sounds were the same each time. The only word that I made out was “wa”, which means “walk”. She must have been asking to go on a walk. Since we came back from our morning walk, she’s not asked it again. It must have been that.

Grandma Becky gave Lydia a stack of post it letters before we left Jax. Lydia and I have been having fun spelling her name and sticking letters in random places around the house. When I ask her what the letters are, she either calls them “ahh” or “em”. At least she’s grasping the concept of letters, even if she doesn’t know them. And when she sees words now, she starts saying her version of the alphabet.

This morning, however, Daddy and Lydia played with the letters. I woke up to find this. Oh no! What have we started!

Here is our Lyds listening to music on Daddy’s computer. She loves it!

We just spent about 2 weeks in Florida visiting family and doing lots of fun activities. The best part for me was getting so much help with Lydia. I actually felt like I had quality time off. Thanks to all that helped us have such a wonderful trip! Here is one of my favorite shots. Paul took it one morning of Lydia and me at the beach.