Mini Me

Chiara has gotten into a mimicking stage. I try to be a loving, patient Mommy, but apparently I have a few unsavory behaviors. More than I already knew about, I mean. Obviously.

Examples:

I will call her name from another room, asking her to come over to me for a minute. She comes toddling over to me yelling (not quite yelling, but not speaking quietly either), "What? WHAT?"

When she gets frustrated with me (usually for not giving her something she wants) she will do one of two things. Clap her hands at me with her angry eyes in her face, or slap the nearest surface (usually a table top, but once she settled for the carpet since nothing else was nearby) and point her finger at me.

A quick word in my defense: I clap or make a loud noise instead of yelling to get her attention. Seeing her do it has taught me that it's not necessarily a decent alternative. Lesson learned.

***

Eldon has a game on his phone called Angry Birds that Chiara loves. We were in the waiting area for the dentist the other day (her first experience, which ended up being a complete waste of my time) and a grown man was playing it on his phone with the volume at full blast. Chiara recognized the theme music - she'd only heard it once, maybe twice - and kept looking over there, then telling me, "My tee*. My tee!" 

*Tee = bird ... named after the sound they make

I told her it wasn't her bird, that she could play later on Daddy's phone. But she kept looking at that stranger like he was definitely not her favorite person. My heck. 

I don't know why we've allowed her to play a game on his phone. It's so not okay with me. She's going to become obsessed with video games - like almost every other kid on the planet - and grow up without learning how to having intelligent face-to-face conversations - like so many teenagers on the planet. I'm putting and end to this ...

I'm going to tell her the tees died.

***

Last Saturday Eldon and I took Chiara to Toys R Us just to walk around. We followed her for almost 2 hours, letting her play with anything and everything she wanted. It was the most fun we've had in a long time. Eldon and I haven't stopped talking about how much joy we get from our daughter's joy. 

Every time she turned a corner and found something she liked she would gasp and run over, rubbing it with her hands or doing a little dance in front of it. Eldon and I were just dying with laughter. She clanged the little xylophones and tickled the interactive baby dolls (they have babies that wet their diapers ... did you know that?) and tried to push down the heads of the dolls that played hide-and-seek. 

What did we care? Go for it, Babes! Knock yourself out. :)

We bought her some more plastic fruit (which we play with every day) to put in her new little grocery cart I bought at Walmart. She puts her babies in the front and pushes them around our apartment all day long. She puts her babies down for naps, covers them with blankets in her bed, kisses them when they "wake up" and finds them bottles of water to drink. Those are the moments I cling to when I start feeling like a crummy mom ... because she learned all that sweet stuff from me too.

P.S. Don't you hate our Taco-Bell-inspired couch? Ugly ugly UGLY. It's not coming to Oregon with us. :)