Dear Sabine: January 28, 2011

Dear Sabine,

You are something else these days.  You still won't talk much around people who aren't in your immediate circle, yet at home you won't shut up.  You long ago had the phase where you picked up a new word each day.  Now you're repeating everything you hear, and as soon as you've heard a word once, that's all it takes for it to become part of your vocabulary.

A while back, maybe six months ago or so, we joked about you having a few catch phrases so that if you were once of those dolls who had a pull cord, you'd go through a cycle of about four or five phrases each time the string was pulled.  You said, "Red, stop!  Green, bo!"; When you pulled your shirt over your head you'd says, "I con't seeeee."  If you were eating something and one of the dogs came near you, you claimed that, "A puppy tried a eat my ood."

These days one of my favorite things to get you to say is "Hallo Thomas" in a British accent.  And since you're repeating a lot of things you hear us say, you've taken to using the exclamation, "Oh my od!" replacing God with od.  You love learning different signs (ASL) from me.  Currently turtle is your favorite, as well as the 'I love you' sign.  You love telling all your people that you love them as you sign it.

You're starting to really enjoy coloring in your coloring book.  You love naming the different colors and pointing them out as you see them in the world.  Right now you get very excited about green, and then go on to list "red and orange and white and black," as your favorite colors.  You like to point out when you see ABC's anywhere, and you're beginning to recognize numbers too.

You act like such a little mommy sometimes, going upstairs to 'check on Jeje' if he's been up there for too long without hearing from him.  If I tell Jacob to do something, you'll follow him around repeating what I said for him to do until he does it.  And you always make sure each of the animals has been fed or let out.

You have a deep need to make sense of things, to know why, to know the process of things.  You always want to know what each and every noise was; of passing cars, of any knocking noise that you hear.  Many things in your world are categorized into 'baby' or 'big'.  You have a baby (pinky) finger, there are baby (small) puppies (dogs).  Basically anything small is baby and anything not small is big.

Your favorite foods are still orange juice and yogurt.  You pretend a lot now, talking to yourself when you line up the Bob the Builder machines.  Lining those machines up is the activity you engage in the most.  And of course you love watching Bob videos.  You still carry Little Baby around, but just in the last couple weeks I've realized that you're asking for her a little less when she's missing.  Three or so days will go by before finding her becomes critical.  

In June you'll turn three; you're looking forward to being able to chew gum and recently you announced you want to ride a horse, so we've told you for your birthday you can ride a horse.  You're also looking forward to becoming a big sister in July.  I know you'll be an awesome helper and a great big sister.  I hope you'll always be my little girl though.

Love,

Mommy