Uncle'lu

Blog is falling behind.

Uncle'lu (Uncle Alu) and Aunt Michelle visited Vivian back in early March. Days before their arrival, Vivian started preparing and asking about Uncle'lu. She had a great time. She opened her gifts and found her new flip-flops and sweetly said "Thank you Uncle'lu, Aun'Michelle - I looove my flip flops". And then put her hands in the pockets of the matching summer outfit and never stood still long enough for a picture that wasn't blurry.

We went to the Salt Lick on a cold and dreary afternoon. Gordon got some great pictures. These are the best I could manage. Vivian has her uncle completely wrapped around her little fingers. Figuratively and otherwise.

Chocolate Cake

Vivian ate a slice of rich chocolate cake and I snagged a few pictures.

Linguistics

Sometimes it's hard to tell if Vivian is parsing her speech at a semantic level. Or just repeating stuff. So she's at least as smart as Dubya.

Yesterday, she said "Life is so hard" when she was upset. And at the dinner table she said "Whatever, Daddy" when I tried to explain the difference between eating snow peas and eating edamame. In both cases, Jo had just used those phrases herself.

But I do see the progression of complexity in Vivian's speech. Here's how she asked for Dora as time went by:

"Dua"
"Watch Dua"
"I want Dua"
"I need to watch Dora"

And these days, she says: "How about some Dora ?" as she hands me the remote and settles down on her bean bag.

Recent Gems

Vivian's latest thing is talking like an adult. The other day I asked her to come to the table for lunch and she replied: "In a minute, Daddy". Today, she pointed at purple lettuce on her plate at lunch and asked: "Daddy - how about some purple lettuce?"

In the last week or two, Vivian has learned to sing the alphabet more or less correctly - though she glosses over "x", and "l-m-n-o-p" are more like a single multi-syllabic word. And then she surprised the heck out of us by counting to diez in Spanish the other day, and from 10 to 14 in English. And I think she was practicing her antonyms on the changing table last week: "Open. Close. Happy. Sad"

Jo or I can't claim credit for this. If it's Ana, she is one heck of a teacher - cramming all this into 2-3 hours once a week. And we thought they are running around the park or goofing off with Dora on the tube.