Saturday, December 27, 2008

Noodle Attempts to Communicate with Aliens

This afternoon, Noodle carefully took my finger, stuck it into her mouth, and bit down. HARD. So, for future reference, if this kid is all snuggly with you, and tries to take your finger, I'd advise you to maintain possession.

She's been quirky lately. Mostly this takes the form of waking up very early (say, 5:30 am on Christmas) and yelling for comfort. I fetch her, bring her to bed with me, try to help her fall back to sleep, and instead she wants to practice. Primarily her newly learned baby signs and her words. This morning, in pitch dark, she demonstrated the sign for 'help' (too complicated to explain succinctly) and says, "Hep!" Then "baby" (as if rocking a baby in her arms). Then Daddy. The sign for Daddy is to take your outspread hand and gently touch your thumb to your forehead. (It looks like a sign made up by someone making fun of people doing baby signs.) Noodle does the sign for Daddy by rubbing her hand on top of her head. Luckily she combines this with the word, "Daddy," which is kind of a tip off for the uninitiated.

Other fun things include insisting that she's hungry (she uses the sound 'Na-na') and then refusing to eat. I'm starting to suspect that she wants a pictorial menu so she can point to her selection for this meal. Instead I resort to sitting next to her and running down today's specials: "Would you like some oatmeal?" "Veggie sausages?" "A cookie?" (The answer to the last is always yes.)

Today she ate all her blueberries and then asked for more. She cleared out all the blueberries on my plate. Then on Grandma's plate, including the one Nuala could see but Grandma couldn't, by yelling, "Mo!" until we cleared up the matter. Then Daddy's plate and the fruit salad bowl. She kept insisting there were more blueberries in the house until we tipped the bowl for her to examine. "All gone!" We told her firmly. She finally accepts this with the word: "Ahk On." Which was the incomprehensible word she was practicing at 5:30 on Christmas morning.

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