some more odds and ends

Not a whole lot going on here. There's not enough fodder for a long, exciting post, but here are some snippets from the recent events at our house.



*Last weekend we were invited to dinner with some friends at their home. They had a clock above their mantle which chimed every hour. We got there just before the hour, so very soon after arriving it chimed. Rachel's head IMMEDIATELY whipped around to see what was making that sound, and then got SO excited about it. She kept wanting to hear the clock "sing" again. She stood in the middle of the living room staring up at the clock for several minutes at a time just watching it, waiting for it to "sing." An hour later, when it finally did, she was beside herself with enthusiasm, jumping up and down, squealing, and so forth. We heard it four times while we were there, and each time conjured up and equal level of glee. Our friends have since told us that whenever they hear it now they look at each other and smile, thinking of Rachel.



*Rachel likes to ask questions that she wants us to repeat back to her so she can answer them. These questions are often about colors. For example, she often says, "Mommy, what color them?" (usually meaning, "What color clothes do they have?" (A person isn't black or white in her mind unless they have on a black or white shirt. She's often pink, Daddy is often blue, and so forth--thankfully race simply doesn't register in her mind) or "Mommy, what color is my Snow White dress? These are always questions she knows the answer to, but she wants us to ask her.



*She's equally obsessed with the princesses as she is with Thomas the Train and friends. I think she'd have trouble choosing between the two if asked. Case in point: Last month while we were picking out big girl underwear at Target, she looked over the choices and told me, "I want dat one, Mommy," pointing straight at a pack of boys' Thomas the Tank Engine briefs. The princess pants we came home with were clearly her second choice.... We play the same Thomas games on the computer over and over and over. She knows them all by name and pours over the pamplet that comes in all of the packages with all of the trains' pictures on them, telling me which ones she likes (she likes them all, but some days she likes some more than others).



*When I go get her up in the morning, immediately out of her mouth is usually some strange fact from one of the princess movies. I guess she's been laying there thinking about them before I come in, so I walk in and she says, "Mommy, Pocahontas doesn't have a castle (she's never seen Pocahontas...she just knows her from a princess video from the library that she's watched endlessly)," or, "Mommy, the queen isn't very nice to Snow White." I hear these little phrases all through the day in the middle of doing something completely unrelated. At dinner: "Mommy, Sweeping Booty sweeps and pwince kisses her and she wakes up!" At bathtime: "Mommy, Cindawewwa has bootiful bwoo dwess."



*Oh, and I can't tell you how many times she's told me in the last month that she wants a beautiful blue dress like Cinderella. "And a gwass swipper on dis foot, and a gwass swipper on the udder foot and a cwown on my head." So you can guess what she's getting for her birthday....