Mama’s Shoes

Lorelei LOVES shoes. She loves her own shoes, but recently she has started to take a liking to Lisa’s shoes. She can be really helpful and get your shoes for you, or remind you that you also have to put your shoes on. But, regarding Lisa’s shoes she has taken things one step further: She wants to wear them. Here she is walking around the house in a pair of Lisa’s shoes, and as you can see she is having great fun! She was walking around for quite a while with these things on and she fell like only once…

Open…. Tose

Lorelei is similar to Tobias in many ways, but different in many ways too. For one thing she is much more physical than Tobias. Also she is much more restless. She is constantly moving around. I am somewhat sad about that, because one of the consequences is that it is hard to cuddle with her. I have such fond memories of cuddling with my little boy, but cuddling with my little girl, if at all possible, usually lasts less than two minutes…

Anyway, maybe because she needs to be moving all the time, she seems to be somewhat more naughty than Tobias ever was. She is now tall enough to reach the door knob, and hence, tall enough to open and close (“tose” as she says is) the door. Of course it is cute the first time, and then the second time, but the cuteness kind of turns into annoying-ness by the one-thousand-and-second time… . That is also the time the naughty-ness appears, because once she sets her mind to something it is hard to get her to stop…. without some form of resistance…

Fortunately Lorelei has a big brother and wants to do everything her big brother does. So, sometimes Tobias will go: “It’s ok, I’ll distract her.” and then he gets a toy he knows she likes…. problem solved .

Lego’s

It has taken her a while, but recently Lorelei has gotten into the Lego’s. At first she didn’t really know what to do with them, but in this picture she is making a “Tower”, in other words, a stack of little blocks… It is so much fun watching her play like that. I took this picture just a few minutes ago and like pretty much like anything else, when she gets into it, she is into it quite seriously. Every once in a while I will hear: “Papa, tijt” (which is supposed to be “Papa, kijk”, which translates to “Papa, look”). I look, and she goes back to work .

(I have to mention this… As I am typing this she is emptying her bookshelf. Right now there is a pile of books on the table and she is looking for a particular one she know she has already read. The funniest thing is, she is whispering to herself what she wants and what she is doing… Sooooooo cute!).

BOOKS!!!

I may be repeating myself by posting this blog, but of all the things she is into, her most consistent and probably most favorite one is BOOKS!!! Obviously she has lots of them, because she has a lot of Tobias’ old books and then her own on top of that… She wants to read all the time! Most of the times she wants one of us to read to her, which I love doing, but she can also just sit in het chair or on the couch and read by herself. She will get books one at a time, “reads” them, put them on the table or on the floor until her entire shelf is empty… As a matter of fact, that’s what she is doing right as I am writing this blog .

In this picture she is reading her absolute favorite book of all: The Little Book of Farmyard Tales. Actually this was one of Tobias’ favorites to, for quite a while…

Play-Doh

Like I said, Lorelei is into lots of stuff… One of them is definitely the Play Doh. She loves playing with that stuff. She still requires quite a bit of attention when she does that, as you can see here. She loves to cut, but her fingers aren’t quite strong enough to use the Play Doh knife to cut through it. Also, she cannot open the containers by herself (and she just can’t seem to decide what color she wants to use…. ). But, despite all that, Play Doh is a wonderful thing.

Of course her Play Doh skills are also rapidly developing. She is starting to use the press, the roller, the knife, the cookie cutters, pretty much all the stuff we have. And it goes without saying that she gets into it with her signature abundance of energy and enthusiasm…

I know, I know, she has a snotty nose in this picture, but hey, it’s still kind of cute, right?

Writing

It is interesting how skills and interests develop, and frightening how fast they do. Lorelei is into all sorts of things these days, and one of them is writing. She has a little notebook and writing means just doodling along, with a pen that is, because otherwise it would be coloring, I think I told you about this before. The thing is that before she would need help getting all the stuff, opening the pen, opening the notebook, holding the pen, everything. Now though, she just grabs everything, sits down and starts to write, color, draw, whatever it is that she wants to do.

Also, the language that goes with it is developing unbelievably fast, and in two languages. I think I told you before that language is not really her strong suit, not like Tobias anyway, but she is catching on man! She has gotten used to addressing me in Dutch and Lisa (and Tobias, most of the time anyway) in English. She is making sentences of a couple of words with a fairly decent sense of grammar. She is referring to herself as “I”, although she will also still speak of herself in the third person. Most of her sounds are fairly decent, the most difficult one for her appears to be “K”, which sounds like “T”, which makes for funny sounding words, for example, when she is playing with “Hello Kitty” . Another funny thing is that she is experiencing with sounds. She makes up words and then cracks up about them. Needless to say she is still laughing a lot and as happy as she has always been.

It is wonderful to witness all these developments, I just wish I could slow it down, or hold on to things a bit longer, or something…. (But the again, it probably still would not be long enough…).