New words and routines

Isa has a lot of new words lately - and most of them are from the Dora the Explorer videos. She now says, "A-bee-ba" all the time which means arriba; she says "aw-bay" for abre and she says "Oh man" just like one of the characters does. It's so funny to hear her talk! She also calls the blanket that she has to sleep with every night her baby.


Abigail cracks me up because she has this little routine that she follows every day when we walk home. First we stop to watch a flying cow at one of the shop windows, then we point out all the numbers of the addresses in a certain plaza, after that we have to walk under the arches and not around them. We walk another block or so and we pass a candy store - she asks me if we can buy something. I say, "No, not today." We get down to the crosswalk and she asks me when we'll get to see the green man. After crossing the street, she asks me if we're going to buy bread and depending on what we're having for lunch we do. Walking up the street she has to climb up and jump off of three different sets of steps. Then we get to another little plaza and she walks on the same strip of stones every day. Finallly we round the bend to our house and when we get to the door I lift her up to ring the buzzer whether anyone is home or not. It amazes me how she's developed this routine and how little it actually varies from day to day.

Sunday Afternoons

All the kids watching a Dora video at the café 

Creativity

Abigail coloring and arranging all her markers 

in the mornings

Here's Isa chilling a breakfast time 

A pretty common sight...

Here's Abigail drinking her usual at the café - strawberry milk. 

Friends

Abigail, Isa, Flat Stanley, and their friend Jonas.  

School pics

Here is Abigail and her friend Madeline at school with Flat Stanley. 

New Words

Today Isa blurted out two new words - apple and hot - clear as a bell. Usually her "words" sound pretty close to the appropriate pronunciation, but today she was right on. I'm impressed.

Not to be outdone by her little sister's growing vocabulary, Abigail continues to become more and more comfortable speaking Spanish. She's pretty shy with new people in public, but a Spanish friend of mine who babysat her for an hour told me that she thought Abigail's Spanish was really coming along. At this point there's still a lot of spanglish going on, but it's happening.

They both make me quite a proud mama.

Isa's latest

For a while Isa had "Mama" and "Dada" down pretty well. But lately however she's relapsed a bit. Now we're both "Daddy!"

It's awesome to see how fast she picks up new language. She now says "Baa-paa" (backpack)whenever we put in a Dora the Explorer video and tries to sing along with the intro.

The other day I started humming the Brahms lullaby - which is affectionately known as "the La-la song" in our house - while I was rocking Isa. She started to "sing" along with me. It was hilarious. She's listened to that tune every night for a year (courtesy of a pull the tail stuffed monkey) so it really isn't surprising that she can at least try to sing it :)