Zoo Talk...Still

It's been a month since our trip to the Zoo, but Leah still remembers what we saw and still talks about the animals all the time. We're looking forward to taking her to the circus next week and seeing more elephants!

Singing, Singing

Here's Leah singing at the dinner table. Can you decipher what the words are? Because we sure can't...

All about imitating

Leah is quite good at imitating. She is very perceptive. Things that we say and that she hears, although she may not indicate that she's learned it, sometimes re-surface in her memory much later.

For example, she really likes Finding Nemo. She knows the chanting from the fish-tank initiation scene. Little did we know that she has the entire scene committed to memory. One day I did the chant and she responded with "Sharkbate, Ha Ha!" which is the next line! We never taught her that! She also likes to speak "whale" and gets a good laugh when we speak whale back. It took us a few times to figure out what she was saying, but then it was like a light-bulb turning on, and she was thrilled! She is always anxious to watch her favorite movies and excitedly waits to sing and dance along.

She can count to 10 but usually skips 5 and can do the alphabet in pieces with 9 coming after H. She's learning the song and I think that has helped. Somehow she picked up "No Way!" and says it all the time. She also "prays" while we are blessing the food, and we hear her saying all sorts of words that are just identifying the things around us, "Mommy, Daddy, water, Ophie, Dinosaur" etc. She encourages herself while she works a wooden puzzle by saying "turn it, turn it, good girl" and says "careful" as she goes down the stairs by herself.

Yesterday, Leah was "coloring" while I was reading and after a while I looked up to see what she was doing. She had torn a page out of her coloring book and was ripping it to shreds while saying "Sing songs, ...treats". After a puzzled moment, we realized she was recreating a scene from Mary Poppins where Mr. Banks tears up a peice of paper in the fireplace while grumbling about what the children wanted in their nanny. See for yourself:

What a copycat! (We may need to get some more coloring books)

Fairy again

Mommy is proud of her work and of Leah for not destroying her costume today. Leah even liked to wear the headband, which was a surprise!

Interestingly enough, we got more compliments on last year's monkey costume that a neighbor kid was wearing than on the delicate and frilly costume Leah was wearing. I personally think Leah had the best costume and was the cutest two year old and should have won the costume contest--for what it's worth.

Consequences

Leah doesn't really understand the concept of consequences. In the two hotels we stayed in last week, her favorite amenity in each was the closet door, which she could close on herself and which provided a terrific bite-sized place to hide. However, just every about closet door provides a method for pinching fingers somehow. We experienced pinched fingers over and over and over again. You'd think that sliding the door on fingers or getting them pinched in the hinges would compel her to no longer play with the closet door, but in reality this consequence did not in the least deter our little one from continuing said activity. It is obviously an immediate and guaranteed consequence for a specific activity, and she continually brings it upon herself. Aren't kids supposed to learn that if they touch the hot stove and get burned they never try it again? I really do believe that if my little Leah were to ever touch the hot stove, she would probably still do it again! (I hope never to find out.)

Here's another example. The time out. When I ask her to do something and she simply ignores me, I warn her of a coming time out. I count (very slowly, too) one, two, three. On occasion, she jumps into action at two and does what I've asked her to do or cease doing (stop throwing things in the toilet, come here, don't hit, etc). But more often than not, she earns herself a timeout, which right now consists of being strong-armed on my lap for about a minute and a half. She thinks this activity is miserable, but continues to earn herself time-outs on a regular basis.

Other behaviors such as touching the computer or stereo or putting things in a socket earn her a slap on the hand, which makes her cry. So why does she continue to do it again and again and again? Didn't she learn?

When the misbehavior is a dangerous one, such as running out into the street, there is no grace period and I run after her and give her an on-the-spot spanking. Yes, I spank my child. (She wears a diaper, okay!) Sometimes she cries, but sometimes she laughs! Then I put her back down and she pulls free of my tight hand-hold and runs straight back into the street. I don't understand.

Lately she's been really clumsy, standing on things and falling off of them and biting her lip on the way down. This has happened twice in two days. Once she gets over the trauma aspect of an actual blood injury, she is usually really cuddly and pouty, which is really sweet. But it still doesn't explain why she continues to do the very same activities that get her hurt or in trouble!

Cuddly, pouty Leah after she bit her lip:

So this makes me wonder: If she doesn't understand the consequences of misbehaving or getting hurt, does she understand the consequences of positive behavior? She gets candy when she tells me she went poopy and when she sits on the potty. Does she get it? She gets cheering and a round of applause and attention when she succeeds at an activity or does something cute. Does she get it? Am I to conclude that since she does cute things more often than mischeivous things she already recognizes the value of positive attention and prefers it to the negative consequences of bad behavior?