Learning Explosion

Learning Explosion

Clara is in the midst of a definite learning/development explosion.  Within the past few weeks she has starting learning like crazy!  Here are a few examples of the things we're seeing her do.

• Blowing kisses (...we never taught her that... ?)
• Doing the Itsy Bitsy Spider actions 
• Patting a back, high fiving, knuckles, kissing, hugging on command.
• Dancing on command or when music plays (her favorite move is to "worship" by sticking her arms up in the air--so cute!  I did that once day and now she's all about it.)
• Understanding a lot of what we say to her, including "wait," "no," "come here," "bring me that ___," "sit," etc.
• Knowing her boundaries: she no longer tries to stand in the bath, get breakable dishes out of the cabinets (although she knows exactly where the mixing bowls that she IS allowed to play with are located), pull the books of the bookshelf, play in the trash, etc.  The boundaries we've emphasized with her, she respects.  So encouraging!
• Identifying her belly, hair, nose, eye, ear, and toes, although she gets pretty insistent that her "eye" is located on the side of her head at times. 
• Playing games with us (pat-a-cake, break the pickle)
• Understanding her surroundings.  Her eyes show that she is with-it. She finds ways to communicate what she wants most of the times, but also reverts back to her much-loved whining tactic at times.
• Signing: "more, all done, please, food, help, up"
• Talking: She says "no, mom, dad, eye, more, yeah, hi, up"
• Babbling continuously throughout the day.  There's no doubt at this point that she's going to be a talker.
• Carrying her baby doll around burping it, an outflow of her recent exposure to baby Anna and Grandma's persistent and vigorous (and effective!) newborn burping techniques
• Going up and down stairs by herself successfully, sitting and sliding down a slide, and crawling through tunnels.
• Identifying some of her animals correctly

Melts my heart.

Busy talkin' and rockin'.

Not sure about this one.

It's so fun!  We can pretty much "teach" her anything we want to now, because she is picking it up so fast.  I am having the best time with her.  Kids are awesome.