Asides

When we were traveling with Clio, people kept saying what a happy kid she was (did they miss the tantrum-like behavior when she got manically over-tired?) She IS a happy kid, but in those situations, I begin to wonder if "happy" is another euphamism, like "cute."

Other asides:
Clio is totally into the magnets on our refrigerator. She likes to be picked up so she can pull them off of the freezer. She also likes to crawl around with them, and occasionally thinks its cool if she manages to reattach them to the fridge.

She is also really into pointing. Have I mentioned this? She has a very strong point, where her shoulder comes up to her ear and her arm is firm and straight, but Dave thinks her aim is often off. (Truth be told, we don't always know what she's pointing at, and what her intention is. Is it directional, like Take me over there? Or questioning, What is that thing?)

Lastly, I am recently fascinated by the noises she is making. While actual words seem no closer, her babble has become more and more sentence-like, and I frequently repeat it back to her. In so doing, I've noticed that there are lots of noises I can't mimic. My theory, which Dave completely discounts, is that this is evidence of the extra phonemes she has. I learned in a long-ago linguistics class that babies are born with the phonemes needed to speak in any language, but gradually, without use, they are lost to us, and eventually we have just the set to speak our own, and related, languages. So I believe that she is making sounds right now that I literally do not have the ability to reproduce. Nature is wild!