SOPHIA CARMELLA: Two months later...

Time to give the blog another makeover using Blogger's new design function! I've been wanting to add some external images for a long time, but it was too difficult in the old format. This book background captures Sophie almost perfectly. The blog has been suffering from some serious neglect, but now that we're back from our journey up North, I hope I can remedy that and generate a little more traffic.

There is no way I can include everything that has happened in the past two months! I think Sophie changed a lot during our trip to Ohio. She's saying more and more and learning new constructions that help her communicate better. She knows many verbs; her newest one is to like. Recently she has surprised me by telling me she doesn't like something. Fortunately, it's not in the context of complaining or resisting; she's just describing part of her reality. The other day, I put some socks on her and after they were on, she said, "I don't like socks." Then she walked away.

She continues to astound even me with her reading skills. There are definitely many words she can truly read now; I'm not sure how many. I gave her a little test earlier this week by writing things out on paper so she would have to recognize them without any other context. I found out that she can read many of the titles of her books, and also the phrase "the end." She has one book called "Big Words for Little People," and she can read many of the words featured in it, like "privacy," "family," "respect," and "intelligence." Of course, she can read the names of the people in our family including herself. She also immediately recognized many food words like apple, banana, pizza, yogurt; also a ton of animals that I had no idea she could read: dog, cat, cow, horse, sheep, duck, frog, fish, bird, snake, bug, and ant. And she can also recognize many names of cities, countries, and planets. Pretty impressive.

I think she just has a really good memory for language-related things. The number of songs and stories that she knows by heart but are meaningless to her blows my mind. One of the funnier things that happened during our trip was that one morning, after she kept repeating "I am the Lorax! I speak for the trees!", John said "Sophie, you're going crazy." To which she responded, "sir, you must be crazy with greed. There is no one on earth who would buy that fool thneed!" She repeated that about 100 times over the course of that day. She couldn't be stopped. But we think it came from John using the word crazy, and her linking it to that line even though she doesn't know what the word means.

She LOVES to play with her dad. She does not love to play with her brother. He's getting old enough to start being interested in whatever she's doing, and he's very grabby. Lately, she has started telling him, "NO, baby Ben!" or "stop that, baby Ben!" But she is amazingly good about being careful with him. I've never seen her do anything aggressive toward him; she doesn't even take things back after he has grabbed them away from her.

Her dietary habits are only getting worse. She won't even try new things now. Her meals consist only of cereal, crackers, bread, yogurt, and fruit. Tonight she didn't have any dinner at all. I think we have some tests of wills ahead.

In general, though, she has a good temperament. Now she can understand a lot of what I tell her to do, and she almost always does it. We haven't seen any purposeful disobedience yet. Our only disciplinary problem with her is her reaction when she gets frustrated or doesn't get what she wants fast enough -- then she squeals or cries, and that can be embarrassing when we're not at home. We're trying to break her of that habit, but it's hard because she isn't old enough to control her emotions yet.

She's still a little bit antisocial, but she's getting better. Grammy Sue has little animal bobblehead dolls with all her grandchildrens' photos as faces. Sophie was sort of obsessed with them while we were visiting, and she used them to learn all her cousins' names. We all thought that maybe that would make her more interested in her real-life cousins, but no such luck. However, I would say she was significantly more interested in playing with them by the time we left, after she had seen them a few times.

Here are some pictures from the last couple of months: