Sophie the Big Sister

As I think everyone knows by now, Sophie became a big sister on September 29th, although she was asleep at the neighbors' house at the time. She met her new little brother the next morning, and has slowly been getting used to our new family member. Here is a picture of their first meeting:

For the time being, Sophie is pretty much indifferent to Ben, although she seems concerned when he cries -- she runs over to where he is and starts saying "Baby! Baby!" We've actually been trying to keep some distance between the two of them because Sophie really doesn't understand the consequences of her physical actions right now -- in particular, that she can hurt people by jumping on them, throwing things at them, etc. Same with objects -- she's maimed or destroyed some of her books lately, without seeming to realize the damage. Our biggest problem is that she has a habit of "giving" things to people by throwing them. Often she'll come up to me with various things -- a book, a block, a sippy cup, some tupperware -- and just wing them at me as hard as she can. She was doing that before Ben arrived, and I tried to teach her to be gentle, but that concept still seems to be very far from sinking in. Unfortunately it's a much more immediate concern now, since often she will do it while I'm nursing Ben; she has hit him in the head with things a couple of times this way. We're not sure how to teach her quickly not to do this, and about the word "no" in general. She clearly doesn't understand it: she answers "no" to any yes or no question, and when we tell her "no" about something she's doing, she does the behavior again but starts saying "no" to us while she's doing it. Anyway, I've discovered that I feel terrible about having to "discipline" one child on behalf of the other (even if it just means speaking sharply), but I suppose that's normal and something I just need to get used to. Although I don't think Sophie is specifically acting out in direct response to the big changes in our household recently, I doubt it's coincidental that she's beginning to exhibit "terrible two" behavior just now. She's learning about her own power as a human being, but she also runs up against her limitations quite often, and gets very frustrated when she does.

Dealing with two kids in the evenings has been challenging sometimes. The other night was particularly tiring, and John and I were both nearing the end of our rope by bedtime: he had just finished giving Sophie her bath, and I was walking Ben around in our bedroom trying to calm him down with some music. "Midnight Train to Georgia" had just come on, and I was dancing and singing along with Ben. All of a sudden, I heard John yell "oh no!" and within seconds, Sophie dashed into our bedroom completely naked and thrilled about it. As soon as she heard the song (which I don't think she recognized), she started shaking her naked butt with all her energy. It was hilarious, and it provided some much needed comic relief!

Anyway, enough about the frustrating parts! Sophie does something to impress us just about every day. Yesterday, John was thrilled at how quickly she learned that letters are associated with the notes on the piano. He played A-B-C while singing those letters, and she immediately picked up the pattern, playing and saying D, E, etc. The funny part was that she naturally didn't know that after G, you go back to A, so she just kept going with the alphabet, up to P or something. :) She can also sort of count to 20, but many of the numbers after 10 aren't distinguishable from one another. One of her favorite things to do lately is puzzles. She has kind of a love/hate relationship with them, though: she's not very good at getting the pieces in their holes yet, and if she can't do it within about 3 seconds, she throws a terrible fit. But when she succeeds, she's really happy and claps and shouts "yaaaaaaay!"

This past weekend, we decided to take the kids to a pumpkin patch close to our house. Here are some pics of that outing:

Sophie likes the pumpkins.

Sophie's distracted by the cars on the road.

Sophie spent a lot of the time crying because she couldn't pick up the big pumpkins, which she really wanted to do for some reason.

But there were some non-crying times.

We tried to interest her in the little pumpkins instead.

She likes to give things to people. Fortunately, there was only limited throwing of pumpkins.

We got one pumpkin for each member of our family. Maybe next weekend we'll do some carving and take a cute picture of the four of us!