just pretend

About a week ago Sophie and I got out of our before-bedtime bath, and the water wouldn't drain. We've always had a slow-draining tub, but this was the worst I'd ever seen it. The next morning I discovered the missing cap to an empty soap bottle (Sophie's favorite bath toys are empty soap bottles, old plastic cups, measuring cups, etc.). Uh oh.

Yesterday Grandpa saved the day - he had to crawl under the house, crawl back out to go buy different sized pipe wrenches, crawl back under the house, take all the pipes apart and pull out all the nasty gunk that had accumulated over who knows how many years... and pry out the bottle cap from where it was wedged exactly in the middle of a curved pipe.

Now our bathtub drains better than it ever has before, and Sophie and I got to have our before-bedtime bath again. We always have fun in the bath, but now she plays with me. She pretends to drink from her cup, says Mmmmm and offers it to me; I pretend to drink from the cup and she is so pleased with herself.

Oh... I remember when she was just a little blob that couldn't hold her own head up!




Now she says Hello and cheese and fish and today she said cracker. She also says Ah-boom? when she wants a bite of something.

She pushes a button on the phone to make it ring, and then as quick as she can puts it up to her ear and shouts HELLO! She says Hello! to all the people she sees in stores, and she also says Hello to me when she wants to give me a kiss. Today I held up the phone so Great-Grandpa could say hi to her, and she said hello right back, and then she started chatting to him in her own language. She's the first great-grandchild for my dad's parents and for my mom's parents, and she's my great-grandma's first great-great-grandchild. She has three sets of grandparents. I'm sure she'll learn how to play it up soon. She already shows off all her tricks for people who stop by.

She waves bye-bye and blows kisses. She has 13 teeth and is still working on more (she started out September with only eight teeth).

Her favorite things are to pretend to be a dog (this morning she stuck her head in the dog's water dish - uck), to hide from me in closets and in corners behind doors, to pick up things off the floor and throw them away in the garbage (or throw articles of clothing she doesn't want to wear in the garbage, like her socks that I found in the compost pail), to take all the pots and pans out of the oven drawer and then climb into it, to steal my knitting, and to take all of her clothes off and run squealing through the house.

And she likes to play pretend.