While being with Elisa is a joy (who doesn’t love a little girl who loves hats and smiles all the time!), it can also be very fun to hear what others’ experience with Elisa! This week I’ve heard a few different stories about Elisa that give a good snapshot of her weekly experiences away from her parents. [Unfortunately, since we weren't there, we don't have pictures of that and you have to put up with these pictures of Elisa in a hat she got from her cousins and her green monkey pajamas!]
Elisa is cared for by Emily, wife of one of the physics professors, every school day. Emily is a former elementary school teacher who is a sweet, gentle and steady caregiver. One or two afternoons a week she gets to leave after lunch and starts her nap on the way home. While she is there, she spends her time with a few other kids – a little girl, Adelaide, about 8-9 months old a few mornings a week; a little girl, Sophia about 3 who she sees every day; and the little girl’s older brother, Eli, who comes after preschool. Beyond this, they go to the local church playgroup two mornings a week and to the church nursery during Emily’s weekly bible study.
One of the other faculty members has a daughter named Elise Joy who is a month older than Elisa (we didn’t know about the other’s names until months after they were born!) She goes by Ellie and sees Elisa at playgroup and bible study. Apparently, every time she sees Elisa she says her name and runs to her. She has gone to the nursery during church services and asked to see Elisa only to find Elisa wasn’t there. The faculty member told me today that he hears about Elisa all the time! It is nice to know Elisa is well-liked by some of her peers!
Sophia and Eli are definitely teaching Elisa about a variety of things. Sophia models for Elisa all the ins and outs of being a girl. Occasionally Elisa’s diapers get used to diaper dolls. Sophia mothers Elisa, bringing her sippy cup and other things she needs. Elisa has learned from this by bringing little Adelaide her sippy cup and trying to feed her. This week Kristin looked out the window and saw Emily walking all the kids (she lives just off campus, probably a couple hundred yards from the science building) and quickly realized that Elisa was wearing a pink coat rather than her maroon coat. After a first thought that maybe her coat was inside out since the lining is pink, Kristin realized that Sophia was wearing Elisa’s coat and hat and Elisa was wearing Sophia’s. So Elisa is being trained to trade clothes at an early age!
Last week, I came to find Elisa with a towel knotted around her shoulders as a cape. Having seen Eli with this same setup earlier, it was clear where the influence came from. Eli likes pretending that he is an “evil pharoah that fights for righteousness” - I love the consistency of children! This week Eli read a book about colors to Elisa. He first asked for Elisa to sit on his lap, but quickly switched his request to have her sit beside him when she was placed on his lap. Then he read to her “R-E-D, red…” Apparently Elisa is absorbing early ideas of alphabet because she points to the letters on Emily’s sweatpants and pretends to read them!
Between playgroups at church and daily walks onto the Houghton campus to play on the quad or visit students in the campus center (which keeps Elisa very amused!) many people know Elisa. Besides the faculty member at lunch, Kristin had someone else stop her this noon to tell her how adorable and sweet Elisa was and how much she enjoyed seeing her around campus. Since Elisa is known by more people at Houghton than she is after 4 years, Kristin is accepting that she is identified first as “Elisa’s mom!”
Elisa recently discovered stickers. We had a sheet of happy face stickers from who-knows-what that had been on the fridge and over the last week she had wanted to take them down and grab a few stickers. Once she ended up with a few on her face – without too much help from Daddy. Tuesday she seemed more intent on the stickers than before and started putting them all over her pants. Mommy came and sat down on the kitchen floor, too and Elisa began transferring all the stickers from her pants to Mommy’s. She got every sticker off the sheet (with a little help from Mommy on one) and then Mommy showed her the joy of peeling off the backing and she had fun tearing it to pieces. It certainly seemed to be an activity she enjoyed! (See the last picture!)
On Wednesday, Elisa was very helpful in cleaning up the table. She carried all the dishes to the dishwasher where Daddy put them in. The only problem is that she wanted to be too thorough and picked up Daddy’s still-full glass of milk from the table and spilled some! Paper towels came to the rescue and after most of the milk was wiped up, Elisa took over and kept wiping the chair. She tends to be a little more thorough in cleaning than her parents, so not only the seat of the chair, but the spokes got wiped. (We’ve seen this before – once she took the dish towel from her playhouse and started cleaning around the window ledges and the door. This is clearly not an inherited trait!) After the chair was deemed done, she dived under the table with a cry to clean kitty. Ink very wisely left the area quickly.
Elisa has picked up a number of animal sounds in the last week or so. It was rather surprising last Friday to realize how many she knew since she had never done any of them for us! She knows that a cow says moo, a kitty says miaow (usually VERY high pitched), a dog says woof, an owl says hoo, and a lion says roar. She has also learned this week that a monkey says he-he-he. Of course, these sounds aren’t always consistent – sometimes the high pitched sound takes over for all the different animals and doesn’t even sound like miaow any more!
It’s obvious that the semester is back in session since we haven’t written for a month and haven’t taken many pictures either! Elisa continues to develop new abilities and preferences and lately has enjoyed many around the house chores!
Elisa is gaining new words (not very clear yet!), but her major mode of communication at this point is to come to us, sign please while making an insistent whimpering sound until we take her hand and follow her to whatever she wants. Raisins are a current favorite and she will take us to that cupboard (she knows which cupboard most things are in!) and ask for “Rayuns” – it isn’t really two syllables, but an extended vowel sound. She spontaneously signs please when she wants something and when asked to say thank you, she often blows a kiss since she confuses the sign for thank you with this. When asked to say goodbye, she sometimes responds with a wave, other times with blowing a kiss and often plays dumb.
Elisa adores the dustbuster and frequently goes to pick it up and pretend to vaccuum. She asks us to turn it on and then pushes it around – although she hasn’t figured out lifting it to get an angle. She regularly watches what Daddy is making in the kitchen from her highchair and asks to get up and look into things while dinner is cooking. Yesterday, she wanted to stir the noodles and had to be distracted by her own bowl and spoon elsewhere. She has tried to help with snow shoveling as well. Recently, she got hold of the reusable shopping bags and carried ALL of them around her playhouse.
Elisa is also learning to mother. Over Christmas, she force fed her cousin Ellie with a sippy cup. Apparently, she is also helping the younger baby (~8 months) who is babysat with her – putting away the sippy cup where she thinks it goes and fetching it when asked.
While she hasn’t learned to put back toys without prompting, other things have a definite place. She will let us know when we haven’t hung up our coats yet, bringing us to coat and insisting we do something about it. This morning, she took books and DVDs that she found out of place (she actually put the Veggietales DVDs out of place) and put them onto the appropriate shelf, sliding them right into place. She also has started carrying dirty dishes to the sink and putting dishes (and not just silverware) into the dishwasher.
Elisa is developing her own sense of style. She is mostly particular about shoes and socks. For a while, she would choose which pair of shoes. Recently, it is a question of socks – and white socks have become boring enough to throw fits about (argh). Sometimes we end up with layered socks and although the bright colored socks we’ve invested in help ($6.50 for 10 pair), we may still need to find more creative socks! Only once has she complained -in fact, threw her biggest tantrum yet - about shirt or pants. After calming her, we modeled the correct way to ask for a change.
She also plays dress up. Largely, this has to do with hats since this is what is actually laying around for her to play with. She likes putting on her various hats in various ways. Occasionally she just wants to wander the house in her snow pants. I think she accessorizes with stuffed animals and dolls – this week she has brought a different doll or stuffed animal 4 of 5 days in the car. A week ago, she rediscovered the pacifier she never really used and seems to treat that as a way to change her look, too. And whatever the look (either clothing or expression), she monitors it in the mirror regularly! One thing closely related to dressing up is her deep joy all month at getting her parents under a blanket with her and seeing them in this “secret hideout.” We get a lot of giggles that way.
At the beginning of the semester, Elisa moved to one long nap after lunch. Mommy tries to get away from school at least one day a week right after lunch to pick Elisa up. Elisa falls asleep on the way home, surfaces slightly as she is carried through the cold and has her shoes and coat removed, and then goes back to sleep – usually for a total of 2.5-3 hours. Her bedtime is back to 7:30 and she usually wakes up between 6:30 and7:30 (it usually gets later as the school week goes on – her naps at daycare aren’t as long because she can’t bear to miss what the other couple kids are doing!) At this point, Elisa is usually pretty happy about being put into her bed for nap or bedtime. She will often carry her blanket to the crib of her own accord, and once in will lift her arms so we can tuck her blanket around her. She may yell for a few seconds, but then will either fall straight asleep or talk to herself happily for a while.
While Elisa has always enjoyed water (especially in her face and on her head), she recently has found new ways to enjoy water. Always fascinated by water bottles, she has recently learned to drink from them and even from cups if given very small amounts (and yes, there is plenty spilled – she is still learning about the inevitability of gravity if she turns the cup upside down.) She has also started to enjoy pouring water in the shower/bath so Mommy decided to pour a little water over her head. Of course, she has experienced rain and loves the shower that is a part of every bath, but this was a true thrill as the water came over her in concentrated force – she kind of shivered in excitement and laughed all at the same time. (We always knew she was a bit of a thrill seeker). She kept asking for more water over her head and tried pouring water over her own head. She is not yet able to lift the large container we are using over her head with water in it, so she kept pouring the water down her front rather than over her head. She knew she wasn’t getting the container high enough, so she leaned sideways in the bath and tried again.
We have one other not-so-happy milestone: 2 weeks ago, Elisa was the first of us to get the stomach flu. She was a real trooper, not showing any real fussiness before food came back up and when we picked her up to control where the returns landed she made her only complaint. Otherwise, she was just cuddly, trusting and even happy between bouts. We gave her a bath to clean up and she got another round and we gave her a bin to use in the bathtub – and she knew exactly what to do with it, even returning to it when she lost more. She went to bed and other than one more mouthful that necessitated a change, she slept the rest of the night and was sluggish the next day, but otherwise recovered.
We are very blessed by the positive attitude our little girl has as she encounters new situations in life. She is a blessing to us – full of deep joy at the little things in life and a constant surprise.
Over the last month, we have checked out two of the area’s children’s museums, one in Buffalo and one in Rochester. It is clear that while Elisa is not big enough for many of the activities, she is big enough to enjoy herself hugely!
At the beginning of the month, Elisa and Daddy had a special day all to themselves while Mommy was away in Michigan giving a talk. So they went to the Explore ‘n’ More center in Buffalo. Elisa enjoyed sitting in the train and even came back to it (Grandpa Rood would be proud!). She played different musical instruments, hid under the dress-up clothes, and had fun playing in the rice table! Someone volunteered to take this picture of Elisa and Daddy in hard hats.
This last Tuesday, Andrew took a day off and we went to the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester. It was amazing! Elisa had fun playing for 2 hours and that was just in the first 2 of 9-10 sections of the museum! Mommy and Daddy even had to pull her away from activities so that they could get a better sense of the museum.
We started by watching beautiful tropical fish in a few large tanks – and Elisa kept running back and forth between the two tanks, which meant she was running across the main pathway into the museum! Then we moved on to the section devoted to what is learned from play, both science and life lessons. Overhead, balls rolled, giant mobiles modelled balance and there was a large kaleidoscope. There was a mirrored and lighted section that allowed Elisa to be in a kaleidescope, musical instruments to play, a giant drum to drop plastic beads into to make different pitches of music against the different sized nails, race cars to drive or mini-ones to put on a track, fun houses that set off your sense of balance or perspective and many other things. Elisa particularly liked driving, diving under the tongue pillow in the fish chair, and putting beads down the drum.
We went on to Sesame Street, where Elisa knocked on the door, looked at books, was on TV with Mommy and Rosita (counting in Spanish!), hid under dress-up smocks, climbed in the Muppet Taxi (to drive, of course), and played the musical pipes with a paddle. (Mommy can’t wait until we can look up in the tree and count all the different things hidden in it!) Elisa also got to ride the train around the track and climb in the cockpit of the plane in the next section before we grabbed a stroller and just took a tour of the rest.
We did visit the butterfly garden and were the only ones there. Besides having butterflies land on us and fly past, we also got to watch the butterflies emerging in the crysalis case and Elisa just stared! There were also turtles, coy, and a tortoise that wanted to get close to Elisa. At that point, we were done for the day, but Elisa had really enjoyed herself and had another good nap on the way home – and slept well that night!
We had the rare chance today to celebrate Christmas by ourselves at home – most years we have been traveling ON Christmas. It was a nice relaxing day where we could spend time with Elisa and do a few special things.
Elisa got her big Christmas gift at the beginning of the week – an open playhouse (that folds up!) with working doorbell, light, burner noises, opening shutters, letter to go in the mail box, etc. We gave it to her early since her Grandparents Rood had contributed to the gift and we wanted to make sure she had time to get used to playing with it before they arrive this Sunday …but she didn’t need any time to warm up to it! She loves the mail slot, doorbell and light (and sometimes looks like an engineer trying to analyze the light as it turns on and off as she flips the switch). What was unexpected is that she already understands the idea of pretending in the kitchen – using the faucet to fill the water glass and then drinking or putting dishes on the burners. It is clear that there is much more going on her head than she can communicate!
This morning we took out the nativity scene (that hasn’t been out this Christmas since it is ceramic) and took out the pieces and used them to tell the Christmas story with Elisa. She kissed both Mary and baby Jesus. After putting it away immediately, we opened some presents she had been sent. She enjoyed the guitar that plays songs and went back to it intermittently throughout the day. She also got a cute coat for when the weather is a little more mild and three books, which we read during the day.
She then took a nice long nap (mommy and daddy’s Christmas present), enjoyed playing in the afternoon, had another short nap, and a yummy special dinner that daddy cooked. We ended the day with a Veggietale.
We have been blessed to enjoy the earthly family God has put us in as we remember the heavenly family that we have been invited to join, with Jesus as our older brother born so many years ago!
We have been in North Myrtle Beach, SC with all of Andrew’s family for Thanksgiving. We drove down leaving after Kristin’s Monday afternoon class and staying overnight. Poor Elisa – we drove late enough both nights that she was asleep for the night in her carseat both nights and just waking her up to take her in meant that she took a long time to get back to sleep! But she so desperately wanted to be asleep that she would climb out of Mommy and Daddy’s arms and walk to the crib even though she would just lie there.
Elisa has enjoyed being with all her cousins – 10 of them ranging in age from 2 year old triplets to two 12 year old cousins! In return, all of her older cousins (all male) have been very sweet and nurturing, playing peekaboo, hiding under pillows, reading to her, and holding her. They have had fun playing with each other’s toys – trains, stuffed animals, books. Elisa’s family photograph book has been quite popular with all the younger set.
Since the beach is just past the buildings across the street, we have walked over a couple times. It is late November, so the wet breeze has kept it pretty cool, but the sun was out Friday afternoon and Elisa got to go wading. Note the nice late fall clothing… She was very excited, putting out her foot to reach the incoming waves and running in place to get good splashing. Daddy was making sure she didn’t get knocked over by the waves and let go after she was more sure of herself…so of course, she took a couple of dives. She had no fear in the process, but the velvety sweatsuit and fleece coat were soaked, so we took off for a warm bath.
Elisa did enjoy her couple baths in our jacuzzi bath (we had the master suite since Elisa shared out room) with the jets. The first time, Andrew had bubble bath in and the jacuzzi supersized the bath. Only Elisa’s head showed when she was sitting, but it was great fun for her. Once again her fearlessness came through since she (accidentally) dove in headfirst right before the end and Daddy rescued her (and got quite wet) – but Elisa didn’t mind.
Elisa has also tried a number of different foods she didn’t get at home. On her own volition she asked for cucumbers and olives – and finished the cucumber and ate most of a second olive. She enjoyed daddy’s cranberry juice on the way down and some of his fried okra (a different meal!) The first attempt at french toast didn’t take, but she did enjoy two small bites of a Krispy Kreme donut.
The whole family went to Brookgreen gardens Friday morning, a sculpture garden and zoo of local animals. Elisa enjoyed her stroller, petting and taking pictures with the different animal sculptures. She also enjoyed watching the different animals, being very patient with her parents. She pointed up at the birds and said “bir.” At one point we were trying to point out a pair of otters basking in the sun and she kept pointing in a different direction, only for us to realize she had found an otter we had missed!
She has picked up a number of new words. She has asked us to pray – “way” (and bows her head!), fixated on a “ba” (bath) when we said it was time, and repeated fan - “an” – after mommy when looking at the bedroom fan. She continues to get closer to “ma” and “da” – fully able to make the sounds, but it is unclear when she means it. As we started on the trip, she had also picked up the sign language for “please” and uses it with great earnestness – we assume she picked this up from one of the other kids she is babysat with. She has also picked up and concatenated up and down – daddy had been giving her rides on his recliner footrest up and down and now she says “up-down” when going up and down stairs or wanting up and down from her highchair.
Another interesting development is that Elisa is starting to request her diaper to be changed. Before we left, she had shown some interest in her diapers, once or twice pulling out a diaper, spreading it out and sitting on it. The day before we left she pulled the diaper up around herself. While here there have been a number of times that she has gone to our closed bedroom door and asked to have her diaper changed by getting out a diaper and lying down. This is a little scary for parents who really don’t want to think about potty training until summer break!
The major snafu of the trip was that Andrew broke his glasses Sabbath morning and we planned to leave that afternoon for home. So Andrew and his dad got to bond over finding a 1-hour glasses place on a Sabbath morning. And of course, early next week the glasses Andrew had ordered at home should come in… But this way he has a back-up pair!
We are very thankful for our time with family, especially since people are from so many places, headed to a different set of places and who knows when we will have the chance to all be in the same place again and how much kids will have grown by then!
Well, it’s been almost a month, but Elisa is 15 months old! When the doctor’s appointment finally came, she weighed in at 24.2 lb, was 30 in. long and had a head circumference of 18 in. And she got 4 shots… We had actually been to the doctor 2 weeks previously (just before she was 15 months old) to see if she had an ear infection (nope) and she had stood on the scale herself! She waved and said “bye” to the doctor after he had checked her ears and he was impressed that she did this spontaneously – after he had been concerned/surprised at 12 months when we weren’t sure she had any words yet!
Elisa has a lot of teeth at this point: 7 of 8 front teeth and all 4 molars (although one or two may not be fully through). She is using the molars well and chomping on apples and carrots. She “brushes her teeth” every morning while mommy dries her hair and brushes her teeth – usually biting the brush. Then mommy helps! She enjoys closing things - dishwashers, trash cans, the refrigerator, doors to bedrooms, etc. Of course, she frequently traps herself inside rooms, so she has learned to knock (as well as cry) when she finds herself trapped. She frequently picks her shoes and almost always pick a matching pair.
She is doing a good job going down stairs expeditiously on her stomach – somewhere between a slide and crawling. We had kept the gate at the top of the stairs so she can run around upstairs without slipping down, but last weekend she turned a laundry basket upside down and climbed on top of it just a foot or so from the gate…and apparently the presence of the gate becomes more dangerous than its absence, so the gate has been removed.
Elisa enjoys reading books and recently has picked a favorite to read over and over for a day or two – lately Good Night Gorilla, The Wheels on the Bus and The Itsy Bitsy Spider. She particularly likes books with songs – and regularly dances as we sing the Itsy Bitsy Spider to start out that book. She will get a big smile and stand up (rather than sit on our laps) and shake her hands while holding them out in front of her to try to imitate the spider.
We have been fighting the battle of not having her stand on chairs – she likes to stand in both her rocking chair and the new solid wood children’s chair that she was given by Ruth Bottoms, a woman in our church. It is almost a game, with her almost sitting down and then standing back up. She is trying to be compliant, but somehow doesn’t seem to understand this instruction.
She has 5 words – bye, hi, ki (kitty), dog, and uh-oh. (Uh-oh is the most popular of the five!) She knows many more words than she can say. When asked if she wants to go upstairs or downstairs, she will head for the stairs and start. She also knows where to go to have a bath. She will respond if asked if she wants to play the piano or have music, either heading for the piano or the stereo. She started climbing up on the piano stool and has learned to play with more than the volume, so that means the music often ends pretty quickly! However, she still loves to dance and continues to get more moves!
She is starting to come when asked (but not always) and responds to a number of requests: bringing her shoes, socks, moose, finding her sippy cup where she dropped it, etc. She and Ink are getting along a little better. Ink will frequently sit still while she pets (and pats) him and will even purr at times. Of course, she hasn’t figured out that Ink isn’t always in the mood, so there have been a couple minor scratches and Ink enjoys escaping down the cat door to the basement. Elisa also enjoys throwing things through the cat door – papers, toys, anything that fits!
Recently, Elisa starting holding our hands to pray for meals. She will hold out her hands as we sit down to eat and after we hold her hands she bows her head – briefly! It makes us feel like we are doing something right that she seems to have picked up this habit – and very humbled that we can be reminded by our 15 month old of how great our God is and how many reasons we have to be thankful to Him!
Elisa and Mommy have enjoyed the last two days of Mommy’s break while Daddy was in Wisconsin for meetings. We’ve had more time together, with Mommy only having one student teacher observation. So we have tried to clean a little in Elisa’s room – but that didn’t work so well since Elisa wanted to play with the clothes that Mommy was trying to pack up and put away. We have played piano and danced to music and climbed on chairs and taken baths. And Mommy has had more chance to take pictures of all of it!
We took a trip to Rochester, NY in order to get a minor safety recall on Mommy’s car fixed. Before we left home, we played in the 2 inches of snow on the ground (in mid-October!) for a few moments, and Elisa was decidedly ambivalent. She was happier once Mommy gave her a big chunk of snow, but still uncertain. While the car was being fixed, we went to the mall across the street. Elisa got to look at the puppies, birds, rabbits and pythons at the pet store, squealing louder than their delighted yips and stomping her feet in excitement. We also got Elisa outfitted for the winter earlier than planned, buying a snow suit (maroon, not pink!), hat and mittens. She liked the hat and mittens enough that she wandered around the house in them for a bit. We also had lunch at Friendly’s (mac and cheese and brocolli for Elisa…and she even ate off the plate without picking up the plate!) and shopped for a few things for Mommy.
We did miss Daddy, though. Elisa waved a big goodbye to Daddy Wednesday morning. Thursday afternoon Elisa started waving and smiling at Daddy’s picture on the wall. So Mommy took down the picture and let Elisa look at it and she carried it around for a while, eventually secreting it in the bottom of the end table in the living room. (Mommy didn’t find it until Elisa brought it back out later!)
Elisa is still teething on her 1st year molars and as of Thursday, the top two had started to break through. In the process, Elisa has been running a low grade fever on and off for the past week and having sudden unexpected moments of pain. So she will be happy and grinning, especially now that she has started to deliberately smile and wrinkle her eyes, and then will yell. This has a side benefit for Mommy, since Elisa has taken to bringing books to Mommy or Daddy when she isn’t feeling as well and cuddling. With teething, we have even made it through multiple stories at one sitting.
Mommy has indulged Elisa just a little while Daddy was away. Elisa has continued to get much more fluent at climbing up on the dining room chairs. So she is frequently up and down two or three times in the time it take Mommy to get breakfast (i.e. cereal and juice). Friday, Mommy allowed Elisa to eat her toast and banana while standing on a chair. Elisa also managed to get a knife from further in on the table and speared her toast so she worked a little at toast on a stick. Elisa has been working on getting more fluent with silverware, sometimes having good success with a fork and macaroni and other times (most of the time!) picking up food with the fork and then using her fingers to take the food from the fork to her mouth.
Elisa also continues to climb and clamber more. This morning, she made it onto the coffee table on her own. The other day she crawled under the chair which has cross bars about 8 inches off the ground. Her dancing has become much more varied, including stomping her feet one after another, swaying from side to side (even in a stroller in the mall to background music), waving arms in the air from side to side and “singing” as well as the regular bending at the knees. Despite the fussiness with teething, she is a very happy girl – and she likes being happy! We enjoy her playful and cheerful spirit!
We continue to be amazed how quickly Elisa changes! She is now 14 months and it was just 6-7 weeks ago she was introduced to milk and it seems like ages ago! Since then she has also learned to drink from a straw, which leads to better sippy cups and less spilled milk. Elisa has no new teeth, but the gums are swelling with molars coming and as a result have been constantly drooling for more than a week.
This week she has taken her climbing skills to new levels. For a week or two, she has enjoyed getting up on the little two-shelf shoe rack and this week she has mastered climbing onto a dining room chair by using the rungs on the chair. (At first she was stepping up on a little box.) The table is no longer a safe place to leave anything because she wants to climb from the chair to the table!
Elisa is also getting better at putting objects in their places, like the pieces for her fridge farm and the alphabet tiles in her Croc. In another sense, she is definitely learning to pick up (though not always doing it.) She has a bin for her bath toys that goes under the towel stand in the bathroom which she has been taking out and dumping (on the floor, into the bathtub, in the hall, etc.) One morning this week, having dumped it out, mommy asked her to put the toys away and modeled with two of them. At that point, she picked up every other toy to put it away and then carried the bin to its place in the bathroom.
Elisa has also gained a couple new words. She clearly started saying “ki” for kitty by mid-September. “Dog” is her current favorite. We taught her this since she was applying “ki” to the neighbor dog and now she is applying “dog” to cats and bears and all sorts of animals. Today she came home and said “uh-oh” a couple times when she had dropped something – a word I’m sure she learned from a 17-month old girl she spends half her days with!
What is most surprising is the amount of understanding she has even though she has few words. Early on, she would bring us our shoes or her coat to hint that she wanted to go outside. Recently, she has clearly caught on to words like “piano,” “music,” “bath” and “outside,” knowing certain places in the house associated with these words. Most surprising are the times that she will respond to complex commands. Last weekend, Andrew wadded up a plastic bag with a hole and asked her to throw it away, noting that she was allowed to throw it away since we normally discourage use of the trash (since desirable things tend to be added…). She took the bag, deliberately set off the 8 feet to the trash can, opened the lid and put the bag inside and, when Andrew requested it, she shut the lid of the trash can rather than continue to play in it.
While being with Elisa is a joy (who doesn’t love a little girl who loves hats and smiles all the time!), it can also be very fun to hear what others’ experience with Elisa! This week I’ve heard a few different stories about Elisa that give a good snapshot of her weekly experiences away from her parents. [Unfortunately, since we weren't there, we don't have pictures of that and you have to put up with these pictures of Elisa in a hat she got from her cousins and her green monkey pajamas!]
One of the other faculty members has a daughter named Elise Joy who is a month older than Elisa (we didn’t know about the other’s names until months after they were born!) She goes by Ellie and sees Elisa at playgroup and bible study. Apparently, every time she sees Elisa she says her name and runs to her. She has gone to the nursery during church services and asked to see Elisa only to find Elisa wasn’t there. The faculty member told me today that he hears about Elisa all the time! It is nice to know Elisa is well-liked by some of her peers!
Last week, I came to find Elisa with a towel knotted around her shoulders as a cape. Having seen Eli with this same setup earlier, it was clear where the influence came from. Eli likes pretending that he is an “evil pharoah that fights for righteousness” - I love the consistency of children! This week Eli read a book about colors to Elisa. He first asked for Elisa to sit on his lap, but quickly switched his request to have her sit beside him when she was placed on his lap. Then he read to her “R-E-D, red…” Apparently Elisa is absorbing early ideas of alphabet because she points to the letters on Emily’s sweatpants and pretends to read them!
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