Sophie and Ben love to dance together.
Amazingly, simultaneous bathtime works! Never thought a certain little girl would be able to share her space.
Not the most excited little Buckeyes I've ever seen.
Sophie's first real attempt at drawing.
This moment of cooperation lasted for about three seconds.
Saturday tradition.
We're hoping Sophie adds some shorts to this look by the time she gets to college.
Sophie loves this hat. Who else could make it look this hip?
The pumpkins are here! She's happier about it than she looks.
Sophie feels handicapped without her shades.
Not sure where she got this...
It's very exciting that Sophie is getting old enough to understand so many new things. One of the things that made Ben's birthday fun was explaining it to Sophie and getting her involved with all the traditions: teaching her about the changing of one's age, singing the song, cake and candles, opening presents.
Her memory is as good as ever, especially for things related to music. She's learned a new song called "Alphabet of Nations" where they say a country for every letter of the alphabet (except W and X), and she can already point out almost all of those countries on our big map (even The Gambia!). Also, she's just starting to really read in the way we normally think of reading, where you have to identify words you may not know. For example, tonight John was wearing a Red Hot Chile Peppers shirt with "One Hot Minute" written on it, and she looked at it and said "one, hot... muh." Sometimes I hide "super letters" for her around the house, like in SuperWhy!, and we make a word. If she doesn't know it already, she'll at least make an attempt at it.
She loves to sing, in general. She spends a lot of the day humming something or other. We were kind of shocked the first couple of times she started humming the theme to "Jeopardy!" out of nowhere. Her favorite song these days is "The Hokey Pokey," or any other song that has motions or dancing to go with it.
Somehow mealtimes have not been feeling quite as disheartening for me. I think that is in part because I've gotten better at making sure there is SOMETHING that she can eat on the menu -- she'll usually eat a meat and a fruit, plus her milk. She skips the grain and the veggies, but she has plenty of grains for breakfast, lunch, and snack, so I really just worry about the veggies. She takes a vitamin to make up some of that. She has also gotten a tiny bit more willing to try new things. And I guess I've stopped feeling bad about serving her PBJs and quesadillas every single day for lunch!
Our biggest challenge right now is figuring out how to discipline Sophie, on the rare occasions where she misbehaves. Hearing what other parents and experts have to say about this subject when it comes to 2-year-olds, it seems like that is the most difficult part of this age: they are old enough to misbehave pretty badly, but not old enough for many disciplining strategies to change their behavior.
There are many behaviors typical for this age that I am very thankful Sophie has never (or at least not yet) done: hitting/biting is the biggest one we've managed to avoid so far, and she's very obedient most of the time. Even if she doesn't really want to do what we say, she almost never throws a fit or is openly defiant when we force the issue. As I've posted before, our biggest problem is just that she makes terrible screaming or squealing noises when she's frustrated. I've had trouble knowing how to handle this, because most sources are very adamant that you should not "give in" to a tantrum. I think that is right in many cases, but Sophie is not usually reacting to us denying her some sort of "reward." She's just very frustrated. And I think she is really struggling with controlling herself when she feels that way. She's getting the message that she should not scream around me, so instead she goes somewhere else to let it all go. We've tried many different time out strategies, and at this point I just don't think they are helping her to control herself. If anything, the time out has become a place where she descends fully into the emotional storm. But lately the tantrums have gotten stronger and longer-lasting, so we need a coherent way to deal with them. We'll be trying a couple of new strategies soon to see if we can get a better result for everyone involved!
Beautiful, beautiful girl--inside and out!
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