What's new with Li'l G.

As promised, here's a summary of what we're seeing from our little one these days:

Imagine that!: Gwendolyn's imagination is really starting to kick into gear, and we're seeing evidence of it in some of the games she enjoys playing. Hand puppets and stuffed animals are now often engaged as play participants (today it was "Woolly Woof Woof turn pages!") and she's beginning to use props in pretend activities -- using a toy teapot to pretend to water plants, for example.

Can you understand Gwendolyn-ese?: Speaking of a burgeoning imagination, Gwendolyn seems to be creating words of her own, and stringing them together in phrases and sentences that she recites with gusto -- often with body gestures and usually when watching herself in the mirror. A favourite word: "shash!" which is accompanied by a karate-like chop of the hand.

Shape recognition: Gwendolyn loves to play with her shape sorting toys, and is getting more and more adept at recognizing different shapes. Her current favourites: the parallelogram, trapezoid and quatrefoil. As regular readers of this blog might expect by now, she can pronounce these names as well. (Parallelogram?!? Yup -- she nails it.)

Reciting: As you saw in the recent "no more monkeys" video, reading and singing to Gwendolyn now involves giving her the opportunity to "fill in the blanks" -- leaving key words and phrases from books and songs for her to recite back to us. Depending on familiarity of the material, we can sometimes sit back and listen as she recites a whole verse or page -- or nearly a whole song! Besides the "monkeys" song, other favourites include "Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star" (very cute when she sometimes sings it quietly to herself as she's falling asleep), a Mother Goose Rhyme called "Wee Willie Winkie" and the "do-re-mi" song from The Sound of Music.

"Actually...": I guess she's heard Mama or Daddy say it a few times in conversation with her, and now Gwendolyn often uses this word when she's puzzling through something, as in "green crayon... actually, blue crayon" or "p... actually, d" when she's working on her letter puzzle.

"Go FAST": Forget walking -- now running is the preferred way to get around! Not surprisingly, this new tendency led to her first scraped knee over the weekend.

As always, we've probably missed something fun to report. Stay tuned...