Sophie made it to the big 1.0 and celebrated in grand style with relatives from New York and Georgia. The only problem was that she decided to contract hoof-and-mouth (coxsackie/hand-foot-mouth disease) a few days before the party. Half of our guests decided to skip the party for fear of their own children being infected. I don't blame them since Sophie was not a happy camper for a few days but thankfully she is much better now.
Here are some pictures of Sophie and G enjoying themselves in celebration of this milestone.
Sophie is old enough to go riding with her Daddy and Genevieve is getting a little big for the old bike seat so we bought a trailer for Danny's bike. We haven't put them both in it at the same time, and probably won't until Sophie's stops ripping out Genevieve's hair every chance she gets, but Genevieve gives it a big thumbs up.
Genevieve is getting pretty good at reading. Well maybe not reading but pattern recognition anyway. She can almost always pick out her name. She knows all of the letters including both upper and lower case. Some fonts still confuse her but for the most part she can spell out any word. She knows the sounds of the letters and will pronounce them with exaggerated emphasis. e.g. Buh-Att (bat) Cuh-Att (cat)
Yesterday she was playing with her CD player music box. It is a wind-up CD player that has a set of 4 plastic discs with grooves one one side with spaced notches in the grooves. The discs rotate over tuned tines just like a music box. It is the updated version of the record player I had as a kid. Perhaps there was an incarnation before that where it was a Victrola or an Edison wax cylinder.
But I digress. There are three buttons on the CD player and Genevieve was spelling out each one.
"Ess-Tee-Oh-Pee. Stuh-Op. Stop."
"Eee-Jay-Eee-Cee-Tee. Eee-Jec-Tuh. Eject"
"Pee-Ell-Ayy-Why. Guh-Oh. Go."
Oh well, I guess she just has a good memory and fakes it.
Genevieve is at that difficult age where she misses being taken care of like a baby but wants desperately to be a big girl. Lately she has been acting more like the former but today I witnessed her acting very grown up. It seems that she has taken a liking to the male counselor at her camp. Her teacher came over and talked to me at the playground and mentioned that Genevieve was chatting up said counselor at that very moment. I looked over at Genevieve talking very intently to this teenager ( or early 20s, tops) and I swear I saw her batting her eyelashes at him. Normally she runs to me screaming, "Mommy!" as soon as I am in sight but today she didn't even know I was there until her teacher dragged her away. I tried not to laugh when I asked Genevieve what the male counselor's name is. Her answer? "Nobody."
In other Genevieve news, she made a "torch" today at camp to celebrate the start of the Olympics. The teacher told the kids about the project at the beginning of class and wanted to know if everyone was going to watch the Olympics tonight. Genevieve was very confused and told the teacher that we don't have Olympics at our house. I explained to the befuddled teacher that the only TV Genevieve sees is on DVD and that until now she had never heard of the Olympics. I wonder if I am the only parent worried about socially scarring my child for life by not letting her watch enough TV.
