Audrey's Butterflies
On Saturday, we went to Kidspace with Gramma & Papa. Audrey had a great time exploring the many hands-on science activities. Her favorite (according to her) was riding a bike (tricycle - first time!) and looking at bugs ("ew!"). She also played with different physics experiments, climbed several fun structures, pretended to drive an archaeological dig jeep, and played instruments with water!
At the end of our visit, Audrey picked out a gift at the gift store. She chose a tube of butterflies. It comes with 8 plastic butterflies. She LOVES these butterflies! In fact, she named all of them! This was really cute. She started by naming two of them - the red one was "Hopi Sahra" and the blue one was "Shadow Bites." Jeff & I got such a kick out of this! Now, when we ask her to get "Hopi Sahra," she does indeed bring us the red one!
I decided to get serious about naming these butterflies with Audrey. We sat down with a pad of paper and a pen and I asked her one by one to tell me what these butterflies were named. She really got excited about that, bringing each individual butterfly to me and telling me some crazy little name which I then wrote down like so:
blue & black = Shadowbites
red = Hopisahra
yellow = Fredobe
brown & white = Toma-Ann-Pahdo
aqua = Applepanos
brown & green = Hemy-in-Topi
white = Salmee-Ann
green & black = Kimmy-in-Toma
Now, what was really interesting was after I did all that, Audrey recreated the scene on her own! She got her butterflies one by one and used the same pad of paper and pen to rewrite the names herself! This is what her paper looked like:
I was so impressed with how closely this resembled real writing. Obviously it's just scribble scrabbles but those scribble scrabbles fall on the lines as if she were really writing a word. Pretty neat!
These kinds of nonsense words have been very typical of Audrey lately. She has been babbling "nonsense" a lot lately. She'll get really animated about something and go on and on and on about it! It's really cute! Jeff & I figure this is Audrey trying really hard to hold a longer conversation but not quite having all the vocabulary to go about doing that yet so it all comes out as jibberish.
Audrey can certainly form complete sentences now, it just takes her a little longer to think about it and get it out in the right order. It's really fun to watch her thinking. Currently, she loves telling us about the movie "The Lorax," which is certainly her new favorite. Here is what our conversations sound like:
Audrey: "Audrey watch the Lorax!"
Me: "Yes you do! Who is in the Lorax?"
A: "Audrey!"
M: "That's right! There is an Audrey in that movie! What color is her hair?"
A: "Hair yellow!"
M: "What else happens in the Lorax?"
A: "Boy has uh-oh."
M: "What is the boy's uh-oh?"
A: "Uh-oh on bike. Cool bike has one wheel. Boy wears cool glasses."
M: "What else happens?"
A: "Man cut all the trees."
M: "How does that make the animals feel?"
A: "Animals cry. Animals go away."
Anyway, it's really fun talking to a little human about their world :)
By the way, I haven't updated on Audrey's growth for a while. Jeff took her to her last doctor appointment on June 3rd. Her height is 2 feet, 10 3/4 inches and her weight is 28 pounds, 14.7 ounces. The doctor was very pleased with her growth. She is still high on the charts. I wonder what age it is when you double the height and that is how tall the child will be when they are full grown? I'll have to look that up...