An old funny I forgot to mention happened when we were visiting Grandma Pack last May. Esther was doing something inappropriate with her spoon, so I threatened to take it away. She frowned at me and said, "You have YOUR OWN!"
One day Esther told me, "Daddy go to work. I not go to work. I go to work five. [i.e., I'll go to work when I'm five years old.]" I've told her that she'll be big enough to go to school when she's five, so I think she thinks that's the age of being all grown up! (Another time when we were discussing Tim's work I told her that I don't go to work because my work is to take care of her. She gave me a funny look and reminded me, "Daddy takes care of me too!")
For a while, she was very into role-playing. She would stand in the corner outside our door where we put the trash before taking it out and proclaim, "I'm a garbage!" Or, belly-flopping onto our bed, "I'm a dolphin!" Tim's favorite was, "I'm a thunderstorm!" (said as she pummeled him and made thundering noises). Her favorite was, "I'm a frozen blueberry"--I pretended to shiver because she was making me so cold, which she thought was hilarious, so she played at being a frozen blueberry several times thereafter.
One day we happened to glance out the window and saw a man in our swimming pool area (at this point the pool was covered over for the season and the area hadn't been used for a while). So we watched him for a while, speculating on what "the guy" might be doing, and why. In the middle of the conversation, Esther announced, "I'm not a guy. I'm a woman!" Then last night Tim was trying on a suit and Esther asked him about it, so he explained that this was fancy clothes for a man. She asked, "Are you a man?"
The other day Esther was playing around with a flashlight. She instructed me to open my mouth and say "Ah," explaining, "I wanna look at your lungs."
I have been working with Esther on not demanding things in a whiny voice. So when she whines for something, I will tell her, "I might give it to you if you ask in a nice voice." She doesn't entirely grasp the point of this exercise...her usual response is to say (in a much more pleasant tone), "nice voice!" She also, when instructed to ask for permission before doing something, will say, "mission?"
I've mentioned before that Esther tends to associate words based on sound. Recently in the grocery store she asked me if I needed to buy "those kneepads"--meaning Depends, which she thought were sanitary napkins, aka pads! And last night when Tim told her that he loved her, she replied, "I love you, too! Three, four, five, six, seven!"
Last week Esther wanted a turn at saying good-night prayers, but she wasn't quite sure how to get started. I asked her, "What do you want to tell God thank-you for?" Thus encouraged, she launched into something along the lines of the following: "Dear God, thank you for people, and Sunrise [the assisted living center we visit], and kids, and stuff, and people, and Ji Ayi [a family friend], and Sunrise, and stuff, and toys, and...NOSES [touching mine], and people, and stuff...Jesus, AMEN!"
No comments:
Post a Comment