Pigtails & Sprinklers

Over the past weekend, the weather got quite hot here and uncomfortably humid.  The weekend ended with the air conditioner being turned on.  And that was mostly because my poor girl is a profuse sweat hog.  By the mid afternoon on Sunday, she was actually dripping sweat from her forehead while playing in the house.  We decided that a cool bath in the middle of the afternoon might be the ticket.  Within an hour of the cool bath, her hair started dampening again.  When I touched her head, my hand came away wet.  That was the final straw on putting-up-with-the-heat and the air conditioner was switched on.

But before cool air invaded our home on Sunday, Saturday, we threw in pigtails and had our first go-round in the sprinkler.  The water was ice cold and she wasn't too sure about running through the sprinkler.  But she was fine standing stationary in the spray and trying to reach her hands into the middle of the water.

We are now entering in the most adorable phase with Finorah.  She doesn't say many words at 16 months.  In fact, you can count on one hand the number of words she will spontaneously say "da" and "ball" being her top two choices.  But she is beginning to imitate words that have been said to her.  With most two syllable or two word phrases with the exception of "apple", she doesn't quite say the correct contestants, such as "all done".  But I have a feeling that within the next month, we may have a vocabulary explosion.

And the other thing that she has begun lately, which slays me every time -- she will speak in sentences complete with inflection.  Of course, she doesn't make one lick of sense, but I still carry on that conversation.  I'll ask her to sit down in the bath-tub and then looking me square in the eye, out comes her complete response to me as to why she doesn't really have to sit down.  I'll ask her about what she ate for breakfast at daycare and out comes her own way of saying french toast and fruit.  Every single time that she talks to me and always looking directly at me, I can't help but giggle because she is just so gosh darn cute.

We are leaving for Ireland next week (all three of us) and we had a friend stop over to meet the dogs as he will be taking care of them while we are gone.  And something that he said totally opened my eyes to my own child.  "She doesn't look like a baby anymore -- she has a little girl face."  (insert sad face)  It was then that I recognized that my girl isn't a baby at all, that she is growing into a little girl.  It makes me both incredibly sad that the baby phase is over forever and also very excited that we have a whole new stage to look forward to.