This Kid Just Amazes Me

Lilah is a really smart kid.  I know every parent says that, but this kid is something else!  She can sing the whole A,B, C song. This morning, she brought me letters from the fridge and correctly identified every one she brought me: F, W, O, M.  Yep, you saw that right.  She can identify both an M and a W correctly, but she will also turn each one upside down and tell you that it's upside down and looks like the other letter, but it isn't. She won't even be two until next month!   Then, I asked her to put her puzzles together.  She has three wooden puzzles that she got for Christmas.  One is all bugs, another all animals, and the third is a combination of bugs, animals, and people.  Both the bug puzzle and the combination puzzle have caterpillar on them.  This morning, she took the caterpillar out of one of the puzzles and said, "That's a caterpillar!"

"You're right!" I said  She picked up the caterpillar from the other puzzle and said,

"It's like this one."   She lined them up against each other to prove to herself that they were the same shape. It's just a small thing, but it really amazes me every time she figures something new out on her own.
For instance, last night my mom brought me a whole big box of Meyer lemons sent to us by our friend Barbara in California.  I gave her a lemon to smell, and she pointed at one end and said, "It's the lemon's tail!"  We giggled at first, but then my mom asked her,
"Well, if that's the tail, what's the other end?"  She thought about it for a few seconds.
"Hmmmmm.....The nose!"  That girl's a thinker!

Toddler dropping the F bomb

Yes, this really happened.  My lovely little Lilah (that beautiful little girl) looked me in the face and said that word.  She said it several times, actually, because I couldn't understand her at first.  She had some ink on her hand, and she was holding it out to me asking "whadafrogusat?"  I didn't understand her, of course, and she kept saying it over and over, a little clearer each time until she slowly and distinctly said, looking into my eyes, "What the f#@& is that!" Hmm. Not good.  I told her, that wasn't a good word to say and that what she meant to say is "What is that?"  She repeated her question without the expletive, I explained that it was just ink, cleaned it off, and that was it. That still leaves me with the question of what to do.  I’m not going to say I don’t know where she heard it.  Her daddy has quite the potty mouth, and I’ve been known to let go of my tongue from time to time.  We’re working on it. My husband has been trying pretty hard, but, apparently, she still hears words she shouldn't  occasionally.  We tried the swear jar, but who has cash or coins on hand these days?  It's not nearly as effective when you're keeping track of the toll in your head.  I guess all we can do is keep working on ourselves.  
Have any of you had a problem with children picking up on swearing?  Do you have suggestions for helping parents remember not to swear?  Was my response to her enough?  We haven't had a repeat offense yet, but I don't know.

Why Rainbow Coalition?

Photo by No Blondes! Photography

Like anyone you meet, I have a very colorful family, but that isn't why I chose that name for my blog...well not exactly. I have a lovely one month old daughter, Michaela.  My little brother, Casey, saw the pictures of her from the hospital, and he said, "Your family pictures are going to look like a meeting of the Rainbow Coalition."  That's just his type of humor.  Let me explain  I'm biracial (Caucasian and African American...really Jamaican American, but more on that some other day). My husband, Alfred, is a Hispanic Caucasian.  We both have dark hair. My eyes are brown and his are hazel. When our first beautiful daughter, Lilah, was born, we could see a little bit of all of her many backgrounds in her appearance.  She was definitely a mix with dark hair, light brown skin, brown eyes, you know gorgeous in a Princess Jasmine sort of way.  When my second daughter, Michaela, was born, she was also beautiful, but as different from her sister as could be.  She had blue/gray eyes, light skin and light hair. She's Aurora to Lilah's Jasmine.  Casey isn't the only one who has remarked on how different we all look from each other, but I liked the implication that we all somehow fit despite the differences in appearance.  That's how I think of my little family now, as my own little rainbow coalition.

Kids say (and do) the darnedest things

My daughter, Lilah, is a very precocious little girl.  I've lost track of all the words she has learned because she picks them up so quickly.  She's a bit of a mimic.  She copies new words she hears until she learns to use them correctly.  Her younger sister is only 2 months old, so I'm still breastfeeding her.  To be more accurate, I'm pumping and feeding her breast milk through a bottle (I don't like her latching.; It hurts. Don't judge me.). Anyway, that means that every 3-4 hours I have to sit down and hook myself up to my pump for 10 minutes, and apparently, my big girl has been watching me because a couple of weeks ago my husband snapped this picture

What you see in her hands are the two microphones attached to a karaoke machine that her twin cousins received for Christmas.  In the middle of the living room at my parents house, my little girl unzipped her footie pajamas down to her belly button, put the two microphones to her chest and declared, "I'm pumping! I'm pumping the baby milk from the nipples." It was just hysterical.  Of course, when her cousins saw her pumping, they wanted to do it too, so everybody started taking turns at the "pump."  My poor father was completely mortified.