The World of Pooh

I have fond memories of my childhood with the stories from the book "The World of Pooh" and I have been looking forward to when Madelyn is old enough to enjoy it with me.

I didn't expect her to latch onto it so early, but about a week ago she brought us the book at bedtime and said "Pooh!"  To humor her I started reading the first story, figuring that a book with few pictures and many words was only going to last a minute or two.  To my surprise she wanted to hear the whole story.  She was restless, and she wanted to hold a different book, but when given the option to stop reading she wanted me to keep going.

So, for the last week it has become a bedtime pattern.  I read a Pooh story while she is restless and moving around and looking at other things and then usually we read one or two of her other books.  I don't think she is really following the story completely, but she likes to hear them and it is a nice change from "Goodnight Moon."

Tonight however Madelyn wanted to lay on the bed between Justin and I and she was very quiet while we were reading.  When I finished the story we looked at her and she had fallen asleep.  I don't think she has fallen asleep while we were reading stories for at least a year.  Sometimes you just melt...

And so the Pooh stories will live on for at least one more generation :)

It's Here!

I posted a few months that Madelyn did a photo shoot for a Target add, which came out today, check out page 17!  We appreciate our neighbor dropping off a copy of the add for us yesterday - it is a lot of fun to see the end product :)



Target Weekly Add - December 18, 2011



Photo Card

Scalloped Ribbon Christmas

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Snapshots of This Fall

We finally downloaded a bunch of pictures to the computer so I thought I would share them :)

getting ready for her first overseas flight!

No one told me I was going to be on the plane for this long...

playing in the leaves :)

Madelyn couldn't let me read a story with a different child in my lap without including her too...

At the Como Conservatory with Uncle Aaron

Thanks Aunt Lauren for the awesome t-shirt!

"Bye"

It often seems that Madelyn's receptive verbal skills are increasing rapidly but her expressive verbal skills are progressing much more slowly.  I have to remind myself not to be frustrated when my 20 month old isn't putting together sentences...after all, she is only 20 months old.

For a while it seemed that she wasn't really gaining any new words, but over the last couple of weeks she has been incorporating many more words into her vocabulary.  For instance, she could say "up" and "down" before, but now she is using them in context to help us understand what she wants.  She also has added a couple more names to her vocabulary of people "Wa-Ba" for Robin, and "Ro-Ro" for Ronan, two babysitters who she looks forward to playing with.   We had cheeseburger pie for dinner tonight and Madelyn was very proud of herself when she managed "pie."  I am not sure if she was expecting a different kind of pie for dinner, but she seemed to be happy enough when she found out what it was.

The new word that has been the most fun for me is "bye," because she says it to me every morning now when I am leaving for work.  It's very clear and usually accompanied by a wave and if I'm lucky a kiss blown my way as well.  Tonight, when Madelyn was skyping with her Mommom she demonstrated her thorough knowledge of the word.  When Justin asked Madelyn to say goodbye she walked over to the computer, looked directly in the camera, said "bye!" and closed the computer.  At least we know she understands the concept.

Listening

Last Christmas Madelyn's Mommom and Poppop gave her recordable storybooks from Hallmark that they had recorded for her.  It was a way for her to have them read her stories whenever she wanted to hear them, and to not have to wait until she saw them or until we could work out a time to skype.  

You would think that these are pretty simple straightforward technology (which they actually are). However, Justin and I could not get them to work well and so Madelyn only listened to them off and on.  It took my mom to figure out how they work (and we give her a hard time about technology...) - the pages are triggered by light.  So when we were trying to read them in Madelyn's room dimly lit for bedtime it is no wonder that they didn't work well.  Since my mom figured them out and showed Madelyn how to "read" them herself, she listens to them almost every day.  She asks for them not by the story, but by who recorded it.  "The Very First Christmas" is Mommom and "Frosty the Snowman" is Poppop.

She also has a favorite page...it's the last page of "Frosty" where Poppop reads "thumpty thump thump, thumpty thump thump..."  it is an excellent rendition :)

 

   

Thanks Mommom and Poppop!