WOW

OK.  Sophie has been kind of freaking us out lately.  It all started at breakfast a few days ago when I put a box of Cheerios down in front of her, and she read this on it: "That's why we make Cheerios with..."  That floored me because when I've worked on spelling and reading with her, we've pretty much just stuck to nouns.  The fact that she knew any word in that phrase other than "Cheerios" was completely unexpected.  The next day, we were taking a walk and we passed a For Sale sign by a house in our neighborhood.  Sophie saw the flyer box and read "take one" on the outside.  I started to wonder: what else does she know?

So today I tried to find that out.  I wrote down some sentences to see which ones she could read.  I had to be careful not to give her anything too hard because she gets very frustrated when she doesn't know something.  But here are some sentences that she read with absolutely no trouble or help from me whatsoever:

I love you!
Do you want some Kix?
Where is the orange dinosaur?
Baby Ben likes SuperWhy!
Can I have a cookie?
The sun and the moon and the stars and the planets are in the sky.
Sophie is a big girl.
Elmo loves to draw.
Give me your shoes!
I want to go outside and play.
Are you hungry?
Dada has a big nose!
Grammy Sue has ten fingers and ten toes.
Sophie has two eyes and Dada has two eyes and Baby Ben has two eyes but Mama has three eyes!
Let's eat apples and yogurt.

She almost got "I don't like green beans" except she thought beans was bananas.

Ummmmm.... did I mention that I have not taught her any of those verbs, prepositions, articles, etc?  We've known she was good with letters and words for a long time, but it kind of seems like a whole new ballgame now?

She really seems to be blossoming in other ways, too.  She did so well trick-or-treating on Halloween!  I didn't know if she would want to dress up or if she would get the whole knocking on doors and getting candy thing.  But as soon as I told her about how Halloween means we pretend to be something else, she was happy to wear her butterfly wings and antennae.  The whole time we were going door-to-door, she kept saying "Sophie's a butterfly!"  She loved saying "trick-or-treat!" and she got the idea of getting the candy and putting it in her pumpkin bucket right away.  :)  Here are some pics:

More on Ben's blog.  Also, she's much more willing to interact with strangers.  She'll eagerly say "hi" and "bye" to people.  She also talks more to Ben.  I think they both think his name is "Mr. Ben" because of how often we call him that!

On the other hand, she's still very independent and kind of a loner.  Just because she's willing to interact with other people still doesn't mean it's her thing.  She will if there's something interesting going on, but if not, she'd rather just be on her own.  The other day, we went to a birthday party at a playground.  She was very excited about singing "Happy Birthday" and eating cupcakes, but as soon as that was over, she basically went as far away from everyone as she could and spent about 20 minutes just playing with sand.  And by playing with sand, I mean picking it up and letting it sift through her fingers.  For 20 minutes.

One of the funnier things she's doing now is that when she hears one of her favorite songs, she'll yell "here we go!" and start running madly in circles.  I don't know where she learned that!