Girl Can Talk

Most of Claire's conversations still sound like this one today: "Baby Davis. Crying. Gracie. Infinity and beyond!" It is sort of a loose stream of consciousness monologue. In this case, Clair is noting Baby Davis' common practice of crying, something which she sometimes imitates as "Waaaa! Waaaa!" Caire goes on to notate her other two main weekday companions, Grace of course, and Reese doing Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story.

But Claire is occasionally involving us in real conversations lately. She had this discussion with her Mom while getting ready for her bath last night.

Claire: Mommy, do it!
Kit: Do what?
Claire: Toby!
Kit: Who's Toby?
Claire: I dunno!

And then she giggles and storms down the hall, returning a minute later to reiterate, "Toby! Toby!" Kit and I, by the way, have no idea who Toby is, but we were rolling on the floor laughing after this exchange. (Editor's note: We later discovered that Toby is a blond four year old boy in Reese's class who Claire thinks is especially funny.)

Claire is also forming more substantial sentences. This week when I was picking her up from Grace, Claire carried a book over to Baby Davis and proclaimed, "I'll read it to Baby Davis" rather than just something like, "Read baby Davis." Another example is if I walk out of the room, she'll sometimes say, "Daddy's coming back." And today (Sunday), Claire was looking at a picture of herself with Reese and Grace and announced, "I'll see Gracie tomorrow." She may actually understand the idea of tomorrow and the basic schedule of two days at home and then back to Grace. On the other hand, she seems to invoke "tomorrow" to mean more or less the same thing as "later", but a little stronger, like "more later".

Claire sometimes even talks about her emotions. A few weeks ago, she walked into the living room after a bad wakeup from a nap, and with her lips puckered, she quietly said, "Sad" and then walked away. Yesterday in the car she was having a small fit because we took her drink away from her, and she said, "I'm crying." And after a brief struggle this morning over changing out of her pajamas and into real clothes, she actually said, "I'm sorry. It's okay." The funny thing is that when she says something like this, that she is sad or crying or sorry, she almost always calms down immediately. It is almost like she is soothing herself. Hey, whatever works!