A few photos and a bit of news

A little stark naked water play is just the ticket on a hot day!

Yikes! Looking more like 3 1/2 than 1 1/2...

Our little narcissist watches videos of herself on her blog.

It's always a good idea to practice proper reading safety.


And now, the news. Here's what we're seeing (and hearing) from Gwendolyn these days:

• Water, water everywhere: No matter what the source, water is clearly the most interesting thing right now in Gwendolyn's world of play. Exploring the water park, wading in the pool at home or at Maple Grove, even just washing hands in the sink: it's all good as long as H2O is involved. And running water out of a faucet is absolutely mesmerizing to her.

• Slip sliding away: Close behind water in the popularity index are playground slides. Big or little -- Gwendolyn is game to try them. We're now up to slides of about 7 feet high which she can slide down on her own. And slide she does, over and over and over and over and...

• "I want": Not surprisingly for a nearly two year old, these two words are heard many times a day at the Ronaghan household. A variant is "want this one," which can be difficult for Mama or Daddy to decipher if the object being pointed to is among a whole bunch of stuff. (We're not quite at the stage where we can describe what we want looks like, only that we want it, and now.)

• Gwendolyn-ese to the max: Our little talker now regularly reels off long sentences of very inventive language, none of which could fairly be described as English. Maybe she's creating her own language, having found what we've shown her so far as totally inadequate to express what she sees and hears and feels in her world. At any rate, it's darn entertaining, especially when she's communicating with her growing number of stuffed animal friends. All this inventive talk has done nothing to dampen her regular English conversational skills, which continue to grow at a mind-boggling rate.
  

• Total recall: Gwendolyn loves to recount memorable events from past days, usually with startling detail: who was there, where they were sitting ("Mike sat there, Sheri sat there, and Zoey sat with Gwendolyn"), what the occasion was, and an amusing anecdote or two, such as "the fountain (at the water park) surprised me."An example: this evening Gwendolyn began to tell us about her aquarium visit which was a full three weeks ago. She told us she remembered going underwater to see the (beluga) whale baby, watching the otters play, and seeing "ducks, monkeys and parrots" in the Amazon exhibit. All Daddy and Mama could do was say, "Huh. Now where did that come from?"

• The Mayor: Gwendolyn's introvert-leaning parents are amazed at the super-extrovert child they have on their hands. She often walks right up to other kids and parents at the park to say hello and initiate a conversation about whatever is going on in her world at the moment. She's also not afraid to invite herself into other children's play activities. With respect to the latter, if her advances are not taken kindly, she doesn't get too upset. She generally steps back, evaluates the situation with a look on her face that suggests she's thinking "what's up with you?" and moves on.

Until next post...