SLOOOOWWW DOWN!

Well, yet another month has passed in the Buscher household. I wish time would slow down. Zoe's now 21 months old and about to be big sister! It just amazes me that just a month can be enough time for a little girl to appear out of a baby's body. Really, over the last 2 months, I've seen so much maturity in Zoe...not that a 21 month old is really mature...rather maturity in the way she loves to learn, listens to us, reasons through her thoughts, etc.

We're still struggling with the whining, but having taken the advice of many who have traveled this road before us, we decided to continue what we were doing by saying something like, "Mommy doesn't listen to girls who whine." but then to actually just ignore the behavior after a verbal correction until she used an appropriate tone. She wasn't too fond of being ignored, so she learned to use her "big girl words" pretty quickly once she knew she wasn't getting attention from us. Pretty much all I have to do now is give her a certain look and she will change her tone.

So among the other "news" for the month are the following:

1. She now finally knows her colors. How a child learns how to count to ten and all her ABC's before she learns her colors is beyond me, but she finally learned them. For the longest, everything was red...then it was blue. Who knows??

2. She also knows her last name. Someone in the store asked her tonight what her name was (a friend of mine who I hadn't seen in about a year), and Zoe giggled and said, "Zoe Buscher". Not sure why her name is funny, but she thought so. Occasionally we'll ask her and she'll even throw her middle name in there with it, although she pronounces it "Gace" instead of Grace. So sweet.

3. She is still all about learning new words and phrases. One of her favorites is to just come up to you and say, "I love you". She also loves the new phrase "tada" when she thinks she did something good. She's speaking in sentences of about 4-5 words now and will actually carry on a small conversation with you. But with that comes the frustration of completely understanding her. She has a pretty clear vocabulary, but there are times when you just have no idea. If she doesn't like the natural parental head nod followed by "really?", we usually are able to avoid the tantrum that follows by just asking her to show us what she's talking about. She'll go and point to whatever it is, and usually what she was trying to say clicks and we're able to appropriately respond. It's neat to watch her language develop over the course of time.

Here are some pictures taken today. She was being a little stink and didn't want her picture taken today for some reason. Normally she's all about posing for the camera, but not today...so I didn't get very many really good ones.