happy meals

 Dulcie and I found this happy face in the lid of our lunchtime houmous today.  He needs his fringe cut, mind you.  (Let me help with that - yum yum yum!)  We ate our houmous with breadsticks, oatcakes and carrot sticks and both licked our bowls clean, having a lovely chat while we were at it.

After the houmous et al, we shared the world's juiciest orange.  Mmm, delicious, as you can see from the way Dulcie was ramming it into her mouth!  I missed out on half of my share by pausing to take these pictures.

Since my mum was here last week to cover my jury duty, it felt like ages since Dulcie and I had a whole day together, just the two of us.  It must have been, ooh, ten days?!  I really enjoyed hanging out today.

Dulcie is such a bundle of fun at the moment, a total delight to be around.  Her speech is coming on at a great rate of knots.  Her main catchphrases at the moment are, "Quite easy," whenever she's doing something a bit tricky, "What's that, Mummy?" ALL THE TIME and, "No, Daddy! That's Dulcie's!"  She's really interested in using terms of address all of a sudden, so she'll ask the same question repeatedly to different people  ("What's that, Mummy? What's that, Daddy? What's that, Granny?") to see who will answer each time.  She's been working on her manners too and says please, thank you, excuse me and sorry without too much prompting.  Her vocabulary seems to double almost daily and she picks up words and expressions so quickly, adopting them into regular use after hearing them just once or twice.  She's also using different words for the same thing, so one day she'll say, "What's that noise?" and then the next she'll say, "What's that sound?" in the same situation.  Today everything has been enormous rather than big or giant.

She's singing a lot too, quite often songs we don't know that she's learned at nursery.  She used to get frustrated when we couldn't sing them, but now she tries to teach them to us.  We have to give the tunes our best guess really, but she's always very encouraging of our efforts!  She's really into counting and colours these days.  She can't do either perfectly, but is pretty good at both and has definitely grasped the idea of how numbers work.  This morning we were chatting about gold and silver (for the first time as far as I'm aware) and then, when we got caught in a snow storm this afternoon, she pointed at the newly sparkly pavement and exclaimed, "It's silver, Mummy!"  So cute and clever.

The way she plays is changing too and she's getting a bit better at entertaining herself long enough for me to chop some vegetables or tidy up after lunch, which makes life so much easier.  We went to the park this afternoon and she spent ages pretending to make me food in the imaginary kitchen of the tiny wooden hut.  At first she looked at me like I was crazy when I was stirring my imaginary tea with the imaginary spoon ("Where's the cup, Mummy?") but she soon started joining in, pouring me bowls of soup and hot chocolates to keep warm. She kept opening the imaginary fridge to eat imaginary jelly after imaginary jelly and laughing like a loon while she did it.  She's really much more imaginative in everything she does, spending ages creating little scenarios with all her cuddly toys.

She's still loving Peppa Pig (I think she'd win Mastermind against adults if she could have that as her specialist subject!) but she's less worryingly obsessed and will go off to do something more creative after a couple of episodes.  Play dough, pens and stickers kept us entertained for ages today.  She's also branching out into other TV shows and is more able to follow slightly longer stories.  She's been enjoying Tinga Tinga Tales just lately, which I'm quite excited about as it's exactly the sort of show I would have loved when I was wee, though not as wee as Dulcie admittedly.  Books are still a major interest for her.  We've had loads of good ones lately, but I'll try to share them in a separate post.

All in all, I am absolutely besotted and amazed by her.  One of the best things about having a child is that feeling of having an incredible crush on them, but a crush that not only lasts but actually intensifies all the time.  Whenever I think I couldn't love Dulcie any more, I do.  She's the best :)