new routines

Emma's sleeping late today! I think I told you all I can't "blog" when she's around anymore. Even if she seems distracted somewhere else in the house, she hears the keyboard and the computer sounds and she comes running. She is taking after her father in regard to the irresistable lure of the computer.

She is also taking after both of us - more times than not in the day she's got a book (or two) in her hands. It's been fun to watch her changing awareness of books and how she interacts with them. At first she gnawed on them and just liked to hold and pat them. Then she learned how to turn and rifle the pages. Then a couple things happened together, I think. As she became mobile she liked to carry books around from one place to another. And she noticed that a grownup would say things when they turned the pages, and sometimes those things were funny. Then she started really noticing the pictures, and eventually recognizing things - like cats. And she'll make her high-pitched "awwww" cat-recognition sound. I showed her how to "pet" the picture of the cat. Spontaneously, she started laying her head down on the page when there's a cat. She'll make a barking sound for dogs sometimes, or point at the window toward the neighbor dog. She has occasionally quacked or moo'ed, and once she "sang" "LaLaLa" for the 3 singing pigs. There's a Dumbo book that has a picture of snoring clowns in it, and she now seeks out that page specifically and tries to mimic my snoring sound. She stares at my mouth but of course can't see the mechanics of the gutteral part of the snoring sound. And now in the last month or two she brings books to you and expects you to hold her in your lap and read them. She wants to turn the pages most of the time, and doesn't yet care if a page gets skipped. With bigger books with paper pages it's kind of a dip-in-at-random approach, whereas board books usually go in order. The pace she accepts for getting through a book is gradually slowing down. I have abridged all her books down to one or two words per page because she has been such a speed reader. One of her favorite lengthier books is The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales. Of course the humor in that book won't be fully appreciated for years and years, but she has been fascinated with it ever since she first saw this book. Her favorite part is the little red hen on the back cover, saying "blah blah blah blah" forever. She watches my mouth when I read that too, and laughs. Yesterday she said blah blah while she looked at the back of another book, but she sounded very tentative about it. The other thing that's neat is that E can enjoy a thick, picture-less adult book almost as much. She doesn't care about it being read to her, but she likes carrying it and turning the pages, and she looks at the covers a lot. She's always been more gentle with books than most other babies. I could count on one hand the books that have gotten torn, and I think it's always been an accident. She likes reading greeting cards just as much as books, and enjoys magazines too. Yesterday she brought me a dvd case to read!